Top Feeders to Tech and Silicon Valley

Updated June 2020

Many young coders, programmers, and designers dream of one day being welcomed into an elite Silicon Valley company where the future of the world’s technology is conceived and developed. In addition to being at the heart of American innovation, those who land jobs at prestigious tech firms enjoy high salaries and countless workplace amenities like, for example, Google’s famed free food, climbing walls, and lavish parties. In order to maximize your chances of personally enjoying these types of perks, you will want to consider undergraduate institutions that have direct pipelines to the premier companies within the technology sector.

To identify “top feeders” in the tech world, we relied on publicly available data from LinkedIn, a professional networking site featuring profiles of approximately 170 million workers across the United States. Specifically, we identified and analyzed the undergraduate backgrounds of nearly 202,000 entry-level engineering and information technology employees across eleven of the most reputable American tech companies, including Google, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon, Twitter, LinkedIn, Dropbox, Adobe, Airbnb, and Lyft. 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 two top employers for each institution. The first top employer is the tech company employing the most undergraduate alumni from a particular school. The second top employer is the tech company with the highest share of employees from that undergraduate school. For example, Carnegie Mellon's first top employer is Google, because more CMU (undergraduate) alumni work at Google than at any of the other ten tech companies. Carnegie Mellon's second top employer is LinkedIn because its graduates comprise a larger share of all employees at LinkedIn than they do at any other company in our analysis. If a school's second top employer and first top employer, we indicate the tech 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 tech firms, such as LinkedIn and Adobe, which may draw heavily from one particular institution but wouldn't otherwise make an institution's list of top employers because of its relatively small size.

Top Feeder Rankings (by total employed)

Top Feeder Rankings (adjusted for undergraduate enrollment)