The Best Places to Launch a Career

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The ranking is based on three separate surveys: a BusinessWeek poll of career-services directors at U.S. colleges; a survey of 40,000 U.S. college students conducted by Universum USA, a Philadelphia research company; and a BusinessWeek poll of the employers themselves. With a greater number of qualified employers participating, we ranked 119 this year, up from 95 in 2007. (The complete list is available online.) The increased competition, along with shifts in sentiment among students and career-services directors, sent several newcomers, including No. 14 Target (TGT), No. 17 Boston Consulting Group, and No. 19 Anheuser-Busch, vaulting up the ranking, while several favorites from last year came off their pedestals. Microsoft (MSFT) slipped seven spots, to No. 13; Disney fell 20, to No. 27; and Accenture (ACN) dropped 39, to No. 47.

While accounting firms again dominate the top of the list, owing to impressive perks and intense demand, one of the most surprising things about this year's ranking is just how well the investment banks fared. With five banks in the top 50, including Goldman Sachs at No. 4 and J.P. Morgan at No. 10, it was the industry's best showing since the inaugural ranking in 2006, perhaps in part because the surveys were conducted before the full extent of the turmoil on Wall Street had become apparent. High pay and an otherwise excellent reputation on campuses propelled four of the five banks—including beleaguered Lehman Brothers—higher up the ranking.

However, for almost every industry, economic conditions today are far different from those that prevailed last year, when both hiring and salaries were on the rise. Overall, hiring was down 2% in 2007—more than 30 companies had cutbacks—and salaries advanced at a sluggish 2.8% pace, trailing inflation. Demand for accounting, computer sciences, and engineering majors created a few exceptions to the unfavorable salary picture, explaining why the accounting and tech companies fared as well as they did. But for the most part, 2007 was the worst year for the entry-level job market since 2003.

Amid all the gloom, companies are seeking new ways to find and retain new college grads. For many, the effort starts with campus recruiting, a hugely expensive undertaking that, for companies with high turnover, often has a very poor return.

To make the most of their recruiting efforts, many companies are scaling back their scope. In recent years, Philip Morris USA dropped nearly 50 campuses from its program, leaving it with just 34. Philip Morris President Craig A. Johnson says the quality of new hires is up as a result, and that more interns are being converted into full-time hires: 47% in 2007, up from 32% in 2005. PricewaterhouseCoopers pairs a targeted recruiting effort with a beefed-up Web presence that now accounts for 20% of its new hires. Jean Wyer, a PwC partner who was instrumental in developing the strategy, says students who find PwC through the Web site—as opposed to PwC finding them through on-campus recruiting events—have the kind of resourcefulness that results in successful accounting careers. "These are people who are paddling on their own," she says.

One reason companies like Philip Morris and PricewaterhouseCoopers are succeeding in their recruiting efforts is they've done the math. Both companies focus their face-to-face recruiting efforts at schools that have traditionally yielded the most hires, employees with the strongest performance reviews, or those who have stayed with the company the longest, among other metrics. For Philip Morris, one such school is Penn State. As a result of its analysis, the company not only has increased the number of Penn State graduates it hires each year for the last three years but has also broadened its recruiting efforts on the school beyond sales jobs.

A different state school in the Upper Midwest wasn't so lucky. The school, which Philip Morris would not identify, was recently cut from its recruiting roster when the company discerned that the number of interns from the school who were hired for full-time jobs was unsatisfactory. Says Ken Garcia, a company spokesman: "The numbers just didn't pan out."