I also believe the mechanism for funding the University has a significant impact on the candidate/applicant pool. As the Ohio state share of instruction has been SLASHED over the last 30 years, the Trustees would likely seek candidates that were more "politicians" who understood the need/importance of posturing for more support from the state as well as trying to build an endowment, especially as a core mission of OHIO has been to keep tuition affordable. These candidates likely worked at publics, not privates like Ivies.

Private colleges are not bound by such mechanisms, so the administrators have an entirely different mindset, and operate under entirely different funding model with much higher tuition costs.

While I wouldn't go as far as JSF on OHIO being a dead end job, it would definitely take the right person to want to be President of any public university in Ohio not called Ohio State. State share of instruction declines is not the only issue, particularly when you consider that since William Oxley Thompson and the Eagleson Bill at the turn of the twentieth century, Ohio State has always and will always have a legislated advantage on research, funding and most other benefits that could be stacked in its favor. I chuckled when reading a recent thread that lauded tOSU's efforts to make in state tuition free when they have had 120 years of financing benefits that extend to today. It's no wonder that all Ohio publics continue to see their rankings decline. If only I had taken advantage of compound interest when I graduated from college...but I digress.

While these ranking systems can attempt to fairly rank publics and privates, and across the country, you an only realistically compare publics against their peers IN STATE, and when you do that, we perform favorably.

Contrast OHIO to UMASS, for example. UMASS' ranking has increased significantly over the last decade, and it has been because their state share of instruction has been increased PLUS the University is actually able to run a deficit if necessary. In 2017, UMASS had revenues of $1.2BB and state share of $570MM, or 47.5% of it's operating budget. OHIO in 2017 had revenues of $708MM and state share of $164MM, or 23%. And OHIO is required to balance its budget. That is the recipe for all the problems that McDavis and now Nellis have been challenged with righting, like decades of deferred maintenance of buildings, delaying building a substantial endowment until the Promise Lives Campaign, stagnant wages, etc. Its takes the right person to want to fight that battle.

Do HR reps refer to WSJ rankings of schools when evaluating candidates and the schools they graduated from?

I've honestly not experienced an HR rep ever talk about the how schools are rated by newspapers/magazine ratings influence a decision to hire a candidate.

Maybe you've seen HR reps choose someone from Buffalo over Ohio because the school is ranked higher on some list, but I think that's an unfortunate way to make a hiring decision.

Now, if the particular program at the school was better known for success -- like the journalism school or an engineering school -- that's another matter.

But a wholesale ranking of a school by WSJ or US News influencing a hiring decision? Weak.

I absolutely agree about a school's reputation being a factor. I question how much a WSJ/US News ranking (outside of the very top of the list) affects that reputation.

I think the US News is pretty generally regarded as the go-to source for college rankings. The degree to which that impacts company hiring decision, I don't know. That said, I've had plenty of clients reference the list to me and I'm very confident that the US News rankings are a resource talent acquisition teams use to determine which campuses to visit.

For a school like Ohio, I think those rankings carry and outsized weight. We are a regional university with little name recognition beyond the midwest. In New York, 8 out of 10 people assume I went to Ohio State when I tell them I went to Ohio University. A strong US News ranking is a way to let companies know we exist.

This is an interesting point that I agree with from Forbes:

"Perhaps you are thinking that the Columbia alumna is worth the extra money. If so, you should remember that the cost of an item is directly proportional to its scarcity. Insisting on hiring from top schools is like insisting on buying airplane tickets when there are only a few seats left: you pay more and only find middle seats. The top 50 U.S. News colleges, in aggregate, have roughly 600,000 undergraduate students – only 3% of the 20 million undergraduate students in the U.S. And with job placement rates that often surpass 90% for the more coveted fields such as business and engineering, unless you can afford the luxury of wasting money to pay absolute top dollar, you will likely get an average student from a top school, but still pay much more than you would for top students from an average school."

I still firmly believe that hiring decisions should be based on the experience and merits of the individual and not heavily weighted on the school they attended. That's what I've experienced directly and with the hiring processes at the companies I've worked with. But I also know that some companies seem to only focus on candidates from top schools, which as this article states, may be the wrong way to approach hiring.

I have a small Civil Engineering/Land Surveying company in N.J.

When I've interviewed for entry level positions,I've never looked at college rankings.
I may give a bit more weight to graduate engineers from certain universities,especially if they are primarily engineering schools.
This is because those schools tend to have more technically "heavy" course requirements.

I do pay a lot of attention to the specific courses an applicant took in college and "how they spent their summer vacations".

Maybe you should look at the College of Business national ranking.

Good job pointing this out David. Bloomberg Business Week survey on best undergraduate business schools has OU ranked #22 in the country by employers and way above Miami who is coming in at #59. The online MBA program is ranked in the Top 15.

https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-best-undergrad-bu... /

In today's (9/25) The Post there's an article where Nellis talks about this.

One of these bizarre rankings gives weight to salaries reported by alums to a web site , payscale.com if I recall correctly. Good grief. We are supposed to take that seriously?

Meh - stick with US News for now and ignore these newbies. They are bizarre.

Just want to make sure you're not misunderstanding the point I was making about how these rankings impact employer hiring decisions.

It's not that employers think these rankings hold more weight than their own interview processes, or that they place more emphasis on these rankings than on the abilities of individuals.

It's that employers use these rankings to help inform their campus recruiting strategies.

Low rankings hurt OU students because it gives them fewer opportunities to prove their individual abilities with top companies. Companies can't recruit on every campus, and academic rankings play a big factor in where they choose to recruit.