Look at The Top 30 Schools
The data for this graphic comes from a study by College Transitions, which looks at the top feeder schools for 12 different companies with employees in Silicon Valley, including Twitter, Alphabet, DocuSign, Meta, and eight other large businesses.
Using publicly available data from LinkedIn, the study looked at more than 70,000 entry level engineers and IT employees at these 12 different companies, and identified where they received their undergraduate degree.
Here are the findings of the top 30 feeder schools across all 12 companies:
Rank (Total) Institution # Employed Top Employer
1 Carnegie Mellon University 1,356 Google
2 University of Southern California 1,252 Google
3 University of California, Berkeley 1,212 Google
4 Georgia Institute of Technology 1,094 Microsoft
5 University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign 877 Google
6 University of Washington 876 Microsoft
7 University of California, San Diego 795 Google
8 University of Waterloo 793 Google
9 University of California, Los Angeles 704 Google
10 Stanford University 661 Google
While this research is far from exhaustive, it provides a glimpse of where 12 of the largest companies in Silicon Valley source their talent, and what it takes to make it into the big leagues.
Adjusted Proportional Rankings
Next, let’s look at the ranking after being adjusted proportionally for each school’s undergraduate enrollment numbers (so smaller schools can be fairly represented in the data):
Rank (Adjusted) Institution # Employed Top Employer
1 Carnegie Mellon University 1356 Google
2 Columbia University 651 Google
3 Stanford University 661 Google
4 Massachusetts Institute of Technology 405 Google
5 California Institute of Technology 78 Google
6 Harvey Mudd College 72 Google
7 Georgia Institute of Technology 1094 Microsoft
8 University of Southern California 1252 Google
9 Rice University 235 Google
10 Harvard University 260 Google
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/cp/the-top-feeder-schools-into-silicon-valley/