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AUSTIN (KXAN) — New reporting from Forbes published last week outlines a host of college campuses employers are turning to instead of Ivy League institutions — including two in Texas.
The University of Texas at Austin and Rice University joined the rankings of new public and private school elites which are “attracting the smartest students and plaudits from employers.”
Forbes’ researchers said the evaluation came as the traditional Ivy League institutions have “faced a barrage of complaints in recent years” related to admissions policies, grade inflations at several elite schools and university officials’ responses to on-campus protests regarding the Israel-Hamas War.
For Forbes’ methodology, researchers removed the eight classic Ivy League institutions (Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Brown, Penn, Columbia, Dartmouth and Cornell) as well as the “Ivy-plus yardstick”: Stanford University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Duke University and the University of Chicago.
From there, Forbes evaluated schools with a minimum of 4,000 students to even out comparisons between smaller liberal arts schools and larger research universities. Forbes then analyzed schools with high standardized test scores and a minimum of 50% of school applicants submitting them for admission considerations.
Beyond that, researchers used an admissions rate threshold of 20% or below for private institutions and 50% or below for public schools. After receiving a final list of 42 schools, Forbes spoke with hiring manager respondents about each one to see which schools’ students rose to the top of prospective employers’ priority lists.
UT sits with an undergraduate student population just below 40,000, with a 31% acceptance rate. Over at Rice, the private Houston university has an undergraduate enrollment just over 4,200, with a 9% acceptance rate.
In the 50th percentile for SAT and ACT scores, UT’s admitted students earned an average 1370 on the SAT and a 30 for the ACT. An estimated 85% of prospective students also submitted those scores for admission considerations.
At Rice, admitted students earned an average 1540 on the SAT and 35 on the ACT, when looking at 50th percentile figures. Among its prospective students, 76% of them submitted those test scores as part of their applications.
More information on the report and its rankings is available online.