Analysing average salary, return on investment based on tuition, and the ratio of international students granted green cards and permanent residency, the ranking aims to give international students a clear understanding of the financial and career outcomes of US institutions.
“The ranking only looks at the institution’s performance: how good they are at transforming international students into green card holders sponsored by their employers,” F1 Hire CEO Andrew Chen told The PIE News.
“As the consumers of the education services, international families deserve an objective benchmark before they make expensive choices about the American educational journey,” he said.
San Jose State University, a public California State university located in the centre of Silicon Valley, ranked number one overall, followed by Carnegie Mellon, Stanford, Princeton, and Central Michigan University.
One of the biggest surprises for Chen was the large number of less famous, non-AAU universities that are consistently delivering positive career outcomes and are “worth being put in the centre of the stage for a moment”.
Of the top 25 universities, there was an almost exact split between public and private institutions.
The highest-ranking institutions include a wide range of career-oriented universities and Ivy Leage institutions, with Stanford and Princeton in the top five largely due to their graduates’ high salaries, ranking second and first respectively for this metric.
To qualify for the ranking – which reflects universities’ career outcomes rather than scientific research – institutions must have recorded over 500 international students in 2023.
Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), a private research university in Pennsylvania, ranked second overall, coming fourth in the salary rank and second in the PERM ranking.
Central Michigan University – another CMU – stood out for achieving fifth place in the F1 ranking while not appearing in the US News university ranking top 200. Central Michigan came in at number two for its ratio of graduates obtaining green cards and is the second state university to make the top five.
The higher-than-average salary levels of Ivy League institutions were the largest factor driving their success in the rankings, with Brown University (ranked 84th) the only Ivy League school not to make the top 25.
“Regarding overall outcome performance, some of the finest (and most famous) American universities are doing darn well!” said Chen, noting the importance of ‘branding’ driving student decision making.
“It should be a given that those ivies and AAUs should consistently perform better in all aspects, but many other lavishly expensive choices did not deliver satisfactory career outcomes,” added Chen.
California stood out as the state with the most highly ranked institutions, home to eight of the top 25 universities including three California state universities, two University of California (UC) universities and three private universities.
International families deserve an objective benchmark before they make expensive choices about the American educational journey
Andrew Chen, F1 Hire
“When career outcomes are the main priority of some international students, the F1 Hire Career Outcome University Ranking is more useful than other rankings based on admission selectivity, the number of research achievements, and reputation surveys.”
“Some universities self-published graduate average salaries based on self-reporting surveys of their alumni, but the results were difficult to verify and, therefore, hard to compare across institutions,” said Chen.
In comparison, when a company sponsors a PERM application for their international staff, they must provide detailed data to USCIS and the Department of Labour, which the ranking analysed.
With all the data coming from verified government sources, Chen stressed the objectivity of the ranking, intended as an outcome-based consumer guidance for prospective international students.
F1 Hire launched last year to simplify the job search process for international students in the US, providing job seekers with company visa sponsorship information in a bid to empower users and enhance their chances of securing relevant job opportunities.
As income from tuition fees becomes an increasingly important source of funding for many American universities, holding institutions to account through career outcome analysis was deemed more important than ever.
While the findings are primarily intended to guide international students, domestic students can also benefit from the data, in particular the extensive salary information relating to university alumni and companies.
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