The QS Intelligence Unit is proud to announce the future release of a new ranking focusing on employability outcomes for the graduates.
Leonardo Silveira, in charge of the project in London, told Tamara Sredojevic about the QS Graduate Employability Rankings:
What is the QS Graduate Employability Rankings?
The QS Graduate Employability Rankings comes from an extensive research project which has been running since October 2014. This project has aimed to design a new approach and methodology on employability in university rankings.
Following the research project, we are going to launch a first edition this November at the 11th QS-APPLE in Melbourne. As a pilot initiative, this new rankings will not at first alter the other QS University Rankings results.
What initiated the QS Graduate Employability Rankings?
So far, employability has been approached in the most prominent rankings solely by using employer reputation data. But it has also always been one of the main differentiators of the QS University Rankings.
Thereby, after dealing with this subject for many years, we realized there was a huge demand both from students and universities to get in-depth information on employability outcomes after graduation. This is why we decided to create a whole new ranking dedicated to employability.
Who is your audience?
The main audience will be students of course, we want to make it easier for them to decide which university to choose according to employability outcomes. But universities and employers must be consulted in order to ensure the data is up to date and consistent with the reality of the market.
This new ranking will also enable us to push the discussion beyond what has already been done, and analyse the complex layers of the subject for graduates.
Which indicators are you looking into?
First of all, we are still collecting data from the universities until September 21st. It is very important for us to have as much data as we can, even partial data. Our priorities this year are the following indicators: graduate employment rate, employers on campus presence and number of partnerships with companies and organizations.
The methodology of the QS Graduate Employability Rankings will include other sources, such as the QS Global Employer Reputation Survey’s data, which has been running for over 20 years. This survey is a compilation of employers’ opinion on the universities that provide the best graduates on a global scale.
Another aspect considered will be the extensive mapping of education background for highly employable people around the world. We have been able to map over 30.000 people so far and we are still collecting more. The aim is to identify the universities who provide young and senior leaders to different sectors, e.g CEO, entrepreneurs, highly influential government people…
We will also be looking at governments’ reports on employability, average employment rates by country to balance the results.
Finally, we will cross-reference the data with external partners such as Scopus data by Elsevier.
For more information on the QS Graduate Employability Rankings methodology, please visit this page.
