Why LinkedIn data is a flawed way to rank career outcomes

I think career placement rankings are a genuinely good idea, but using LinkedIn as the primary or only data source creates some pretty obvious problems.

LinkedIn data naturally favors schools with heavily pre-professional student bodies, where a large percentage of graduates immediately enter corporate fields and actively maintain LinkedIn profiles. It is much less reliable for schools like Swarthmore or UChicago, which send a huge number of students into graduate school, medical school, law school, research, and academia. Those are paths where LinkedIn may be less important or where career outcomes take longer to show up in a conventional job placement dataset.

This is especially true for students in fields like physics, mathematics, computer science, and the natural sciences. Many of them go directly into top PhD programs and later have highly successful careers in academia, research, or industry. A LinkedIn-based ranking may either miss those outcomes entirely or undervalue them compared with someone who immediately takes a recognizable corporate job.

For example, in my graduating class, I have three close friends from my roughly 70-person major who are heading to MIT, Harvard, and Columbia for engineering PhDs, and we do not even technically have an engineering major. None of them have even activated a LinkedIn profile yet.

So while I like the idea of measuring career outcomes, relying on a largely pre-professional platform where many students either do not have accounts or do not actively update them does not seem like a sound way to compare institutions. LinkedIn can be one useful data source, but it should probably be combined with graduate school placement, professional school placement, academic outcomes, government data, and direct institutional reporting.

If you are a high schooler with any aspirations to enter academia or a similar graduate profession, I hope you take those rankings with a grain of salt.

Just my thoughts.