Rankings revealed: QS Graduate Employability Rankings 2022

Read on to discover which institutions are currently producing the most employable graduates. 

This year’s QS Graduate Employability Rankings are now live, with Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) receiving a perfect score of 100 and retaining the top spot. 

MIT was followed by Stanford University in second, also maintaining its position from the previous ranking in 2020, and which received perfect scores in ‘Employer reputation’ and ‘Alumni outcomes’.  

The employer reputation metric is based on over 50,000 responses to the QS Employer Survey and asks employers to identify those institutions from which they source the most competent, innovative and effective graduates. 

The Alumni outcome metric analyses the educational histories of the world’s most innovative, creative, wealthy, entrepreneurial and/or philanthropic individuals to establish which universities are producing world-changing individuals. 

University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and the University of Sydney ranked third and fourth respectively. 

Harvard University came in fifth place overall but ranked first in ‘Employer reputation’ and ‘Alumni outcomes’.  

However, the institution’s ‘Employer-Student connections’ score, the number of individual employers who have been actively present on a university’s campus over the past twelve months, was 76.6; putting the institution in 96th place for this indicator.  

In sixth position for the 2022 rankings was Tsinghua University, again holding onto this spot from the previous rankings in 2020.  

The institution received a total score of 96.9 and ranked fourth for ‘Partnerships with employers’; an indicator that considers the extent to which institutions are collaborating with businesses and offering work-placement schemes. 

The University of Oxford – an institution that ranked second in the QS World University Rankings 2022 – moved up the employability rankings by three positions, from 10th in 2020 to seventh in this year’s rankings.  

While the university received perfect scores in ‘Employer reputation’ and ‘Alumni outcomes’, it received a score of 64.5, ranking 189th, for ‘Graduate employment rate’; a location-adjusted measure that captures the essence of employability: whether universities consistently get their alumni into jobs, relative to local economic conditions. 

The University of Melbourne ranked eighth this year, a one-rank drop from the previous ranking, and Cornell University ranked ninth, which was an improvement of three positions from 12th in 2020. 

Finally, in 10th position this year is The University of Hong Kong, which received nearly perfect scores in ‘Graduate employment rate’ (99.8) but fell slightly short in ‘Employer reputation’ (79.5).  

The top 10 universities in the QS Graduate Employability Rankings 2022 are:  

1. Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) 
2. Stanford University  
3. University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA)  
4. The University of Sydney  
5. Harvard University  
6. Tsinghua University 
7. The University of Oxford 
8. The University of Melbourne 
9. Cornell University  
10. The University of Hong Kong  

For a full list of this year’s Employability rankings please click here.