Pitt was named one of the 20 “New Ivies” last week by Forbes Magazine, in its second year of producing the list.
The New Ivies include 10 public universities and 10 private “that are attracting the best and the brightest, and graduating students that are outpacing most Ivy Leaguers in the eyes of employers,” according to Forbes.
Pitt was one of four new public schools in this year’s list, along with Purdue, the U.S. Military Academy at West Point and William & Mary in Virginia. Carnegie Mellon University was on the private schools’ list for the second year, while Tufts and Washington University in St. Louis were newcomers.
The list was selected from all degree-granting, four-year public and private, not-for-profit colleges in the United States, minus the traditional Ivy schools —Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, Penn, Princeton and Yale — and the four “Ivy plus” colleges — Stanford, MIT, Duke and the University of Chicago. The University of California system does not report test scores, so its two marquee schools — UCLA and Berkeley — were not included in the list.
The public schools had to have more than 4,000 students, admit fewer than 50% of applicants and have a median SAT of 1410 and a median ACT of 32. Private schools had to enroll at least 3,500 students, admit fewer than 20% of applicants and have a median SAT of 1530 and a median ACT of 34.
The schools that met all three criteria were put in front of executive-level employers in a survey to subscribers to Forbes’ C-suite newsletters.
“I believe Ivy League candidates are over valued, and they frequently have a higher than real opinion of themselves,” one respondent wrote. Entry-level job candidates should be “eager to learn, have no ego or be ‘stuck-up’ because of the school they attended,” said another.
About a third of Forbes survey respondents say they are more likely to hire graduates from non-Ivy private colleges than they were five years ago, and 38% say the same of public college graduates. Only 6% say they are more likely to hire from the Ivy League.
“The gap between graduates from Ivies and other public/private universities is shrinking,” said one vice president at a company with more than 5,000 employees. “Public university students seem to exhibit more empathy than others, and passion to innovate and take up steep learning curves to master skills required in current situations is more important.”
The other public schools on the list are: Georgia Tech, University of Texas at Austin,
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, University of Michigan, University of North Carolina and University of Virginia.
The private schools also include: Emory, Georgetown, Johns Hopkins, Northwestern, Rice, Notre Dame and Vanderbilt.