Top Feeders to Engineering

No matter your intended area of study within the broader field of engineering (electrical, civil, mechanical, biomedical, etc.), many future engineers aspire to someday gain employment at one of the world’s premier firms.

One way to maximize your chances of achieving this goal is to attend an undergraduate institution with a proven track record of placing engineering graduates at the leading companies in this competitive sector. While the schools that sit atop most college ranking systems are, as you would expect, well-represented in this regard, there are also many more accessible universities that have sizable alumni networks and strong pipelines into the most coveted corporate destinations for engineers of all stripes.

To identify “top feeder” institutions in the engineering field, we relied on publicly available data from LinkedIn, a professional networking site featuring profiles of approximately 175 million workers across the United States. Specifically, we identified and analyzed the undergraduate backgrounds of more than 61,000 entry-level engineers (with 0 to 5 years of work experience) across the 12 companies most frequently cited by engineering majors as the “most desirable to work for.” They include Amazon, Apple, Disney, Northrup Grumman, Google, Lockheed Martin, Microsoft, NASA, SpaceX, and Tesla. We then constructed two lists. The first list looks at the raw number of alumni employed by this select group. The second list looks at the top 30 producers when adjusted for undergraduate enrollment, which allows us to highlight schools that may be smaller in size, but that still send a significant number of graduates directly to these prestigious companies.

Finally, we identified the two top employers for each “feeder” institution. The first top employer is the company employing the most undergraduate alumni from a particular school. The second top employer is the company with the highest share of employees from that undergraduate school. For example, USC’s first top employer is Amazon, because more USC (undergraduate) alumni work at Amazon than at any of the other highlighted companies. USC’s second top employer is Apple because its graduates comprise a larger share of all employees at Apple than they do at any other company in our analysis. If a school’s first and second top employer are the same, we indicate the company with the second highest share of employees instead. Measuring both total graduates employed and the institutional share of a company’s employees allows us to identify schools offering the best pipelines to smaller yet highly prestigious companies, such as SpaceX and NASA, which may draw heavily from one particular institution but wouldn’t otherwise make an institution’s list of top employers because of their relatively small size.

Updated July 2022