Amid the recent proliferation of college ranking lists and services, many students are concerned… Amid the recent proliferation of college ranking lists and services, many students are concerned about how much a college’s rank matters. In particular, a student researching this type of information might want to know: How much will my college’s rank affect my employment prospects?

Whether a school’s post-graduation employment rate is attributable to the school’s respective reputation or to the viability of their average candidate is a difficult problem to investigate.

According to Brian Heddleston of Pitt’s Office of Student Employment and Placement Assistance, a job candidate’s individual achievements are ultimately more important than where he went to school.

“The employers that I have asked said that they never even thought about [ranking] … They base it more on past success,” Heddleston said.

Employers usually end up looking for job candidates in the areas where job openings arise, Heddleston said. But they also like to recruit candidates from schools at which they have found successful employees before. Rather than trusting rankings services to tell them where the best students are, employers would rather rely on former experience.

Even so, rankings have established themselves as an important component of students’ decisions about where to apply for, and eventually attend, college.

BJ Ore, senior associate director of Pitt’s Office of Admissions and Financial Aid, said rankings are useful because they are conducted by third parties who can gather and compare data about a variety of institutions. Students can then consult rankings providers to find a more objective measure of a school’s success, rather than relying merely on the boasts of the school’s admissions officers.

Yet not all ranking systems are created equal, she said, and each should be taken with a grain of salt.

“There are rankings that we at Pitt are wary of using because of their methodologies,” Ore said.

Those methodologies can have a large bearing on how schools line up when compared with other institutions.

Every ranking system applies a unique set of criteria to rate its subjects, and each criterion is given a certain amount of weight. Those weights, added up, determine a school’s final score. Depending on the criteria and weights that the agency applies, rankings can vary dramatically and might not line up with a particular student’s interests. The more general the ranking, the more likely that particular danger becomes.

Some ranking agencies have turned to providing more specialized rankings lists that investigate narrow aspects of each school, rather than providing a general raw score. Jeanne Krier, publicist for The Princeton Review, hopes that this approach will be more useful in advising students on prospective schools.

“Unlike U.S. News & World Report, The Princeton Review doesn’t assign schools a general score. Instead, we rate schools on many different categories,” Krier said.

The Princeton Review’s categories range from “Academics and Administration” to “Extracurricular” to “Social Scene,” and are based on surveys distributed to students. The company then publishes top-20 lists for each category. That way, prospective students can potentially gather a more intimate understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of a given school.

Pitt appears on two of those lists — ranking No. 8 in “Happiest Students” and No. 11 in “Best Quality of Life.”