I’ve noted in past postings about rankings that I’m somewhat sceptical about their meaning or importance, especially for undergraduate admissions.  But QS recently released a ranking that might be a bit more applicable, their new “Graduate Employability Ranking” for universities.  Prospective students and parents are usually quite interested about what employment prospects a degree will lead towards, so perhaps this is useful in some way.  According to this ranking, Waterloo is #25 in  the world, just a bit below Michigan and Chicago, and a bit ahead of Caltech and Georgia Tech, for example.

Looking at the methodology, we see that it is substantially based on an employer reputation survey, but there are other factors such as “partnerships with employers” and “alumni outcomes”.  It’s not clear exactly what these mean, but they seem like promising quantitative indicators.

Focusing on Canada, the rankings are:  Waterloo (25), McGill (36), UBC (48), Alberta (81-90), McMaster, Montreal & Queen’s (101-150), Calgary (151-200).  Conspicuous by its absence is Toronto (and some others), which I presume means that they chose not to participate for some reason.  The other thing to keep in mind is that these are overall rankings, not specific to any one discipline like engineering.  Different schools have different mixes of discipline enrolments, so it’s difficult to know how this may affect the rankings.

So, for what it’s worth, another university ranking to look at.