Global business leaders reveal which universities they like to hire graduates from

This month, Times Higher Education published the 2017 Global University Employability Ranking.

The research behind the ranking is carried out by French HR company Emerging, and its methodology is pretty straightforward: go to 22 countries and ask 2,500 management-level recruiters and 3,500 managing directors which universities produce the best graduates in terms of employability.

THE then crunched the data to produce an overall global ranking, along with individual rankings for seven different countries.

The overall top 10 produces some familiar names (which is to be expected).

The likes of Caltech, Harvard, Columbia, MIT, Cambridge, Stanford and Yale will always perform well when you ask people to name top institutions. They have such powerful global brands.

I'll now look at some trends identified in this year's rankings, but if you want to explore the full ranking results (and the regional rankings for the US, UK, France, Germany, Canada, Australia and the Netherlands) you'll find them here.

One name that you might have expected to see in the top 10 is the University of Oxford. After all, the UK institution was recently named the best university in the world by THE.

The absence of Oxford from the upper echelons is not the only cause for concern for the UK. In fact, every single one of its institutions fell down the ranking compared to last year.

Just 10 UK universities made it onto the list at all (down from 13 four years ago) with the University of Nottingham the latest to drop out.

Speaking to THE, Laurent Dupasquier, associate director of Emerging, said that the decline of the UK reflected the rise of Asian universities, and highlighted structural factors including one of the UK's traditional weaknesses: forging effective links with companies.

The fact that many other countries are now teaching courses in English (the language of business for many firms) was also impacting the UK's position, he said, adding that the UK's decision to leave the European Union might also be to blame for its poor performance.

“It is obvious that Brexit has huge implications for the higher education system in the UK,” Mr Dupasquier said. “As well as the draw of learning the language, the UK was [in the past] an open and welcoming place to go [for students]. Whether this is still the case has been put into doubt by Brexit.”

Elsewhere, the US continued its domination of the Global Employability Ranking top 10, although some big names (including Yale, Princeton and MIT) did slip down slightly. Germany and France, meanwhile, saw most of their institutions hold their position or rise; and in Asia, China, South Korea, Taiwan and Hong Kong all saw their universities making gains.

How do global companies choose which universities to hire from?

The employability survey also asked global recruiters to identify exactly why they believed the graduates of certain universities were more employable than others. Here's what they said.

As you can see, employers generally believe that universities fall short of their expectations when it comes to forming links with companies, working across disciplines, and for the quality of both their teaching and their research facilities.

However, what is perhaps most striking this graph shows is that while employers are crying out for "ready-to-work graduates", they do not generally believe that their country's institutions are providing them.

This for me is a thorny issue. While certain courses, and even certain institutions, are clearly geared towards preparing students for the world of work, universities should not be there purely to churn out ready-made workers.

In fact, surely it is incumbent on companies - at least to some extent - to take new graduates and help them to develop into the employees that they seek? Even graduates from technical and vocational courses will rely on their first employers to assist them in honing their skills.

Unless they come from Caltech, Harvard or Columbia of course. In which case, employers seem more than happy with their graduates' abilities.

You can get more detailed analysis of the 2017 Global Employability Ranking here.