10 min readJun 12, 2017

2017 company rankings are out, and with them, insights that will surprise you. Throughout the tech industry, combatants in the war for talent are gearing up to host summer interns, and to tackle the pivotal fall season. See who is best positioned.

Overall Rankings

Across all 689 schools across the US and Canada where students made selections, the 5 most popular companies, in order, are: Google, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, and Facebook.

Amazon beats Facebook…in the race for 4th

Across all schools: Comparing 2016 to 2017

We wanted to dig further into what changed from 2016 to 2017.

Google remains #1, for the fourth year in a row
Buoyed by growing affection for Alexa and ever-greater efficiencies, Amazon displaces Facebook to claim the #4 spot
Twitter and Dropbox both fall out of the top 15, as students and investors alike lose confidence in their ability to adapt
Nvidia makes its debut in the top 15, riding momentum from powering Tesla’s Autopilot 2.0 and bringing the self-driving supercomputer to the market

Satya overtakes Tim at Top Schools

At the Top14: Comparing 2016 to 2017

We chose to narrow down several insights to the top 14 schools which receive the most on–campus love from our tech companies (in no particular order): Harvard, Princeton, MIT, Stanford, UC Berkeley, Carnegie Mellon, Georgia Tech, University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign, University of Waterloo, University of Texas Austin, University of Pennsylvania, University of Michigan, Cornell, and Columbia.

Specifically at the Top14, from 2016 to 2017:

After displacing Facebook for the #3 spot last year, Microsoft jumps Apple this year to #2
Tesla flexes its trademark acceleration, jumping 5 spots and eclipsing Netflix, Airbnb, Intel, Dropbox, and Uber
Palantir and Uber drop 8 and 4 spots respectively, following Thiel’s surprise Trump endorsement, and numerous PR headaches headlined by #DeleteUber
Snap and Spotify enter the top 10

Adventures in Natural Selection

From 2014 to 2017: Comparing CS majors at the Top14 across 4 years

When comparing ranks from 2013 to 2017, in order to avoid bias based on new companies being included in the survey, we used relative ranks among the 22 companies that were in the survey all four years.

Comparing rankings from 2014 to 2017:

Following a brief dip, Microsoft climbs steadily, mirroring the growth that has marked Satya’s first three years at the helm
Dropbox’s status as a campus darling is waning
Airbnb enjoys a meteoric rise from 2014 to 2016, but ebbs a bit in 2017
Uber rises consistently, then falls sharply over the past year
Twitter nosedives from 2014 to 2017 as the post-IPO reality is hammered home
Oracle, despite entering the cloud concurrently with Microsoft, is slipping bit by bit

Zuck, once the new kid in Palo Alto, beats Satya and Bezos at Stanford

In 2017: Comparing all schools to Stanford

Looking at this year’s rankings among students at Stanford, compared to rankings among students across all schools:

Tesla, Airbnb, and Palantir jump to #5, #7, and #13 respectively
Alex Trebek: “These old-school stalwarts are dropping the hardest at Stanford.”
Watson: “Who are Dell, Qualcomm, Intel, and IBM?”
Goldman and McKinsey do well at Stanford, which remains quite friendly to Big Finance and Big Consulting despite its reputation as a startup haven
In the competitive arena, volatility rules. At Stanford CS, Google is #1 overall, but current freshman rank Microsoft #1, while sophomores favor Facebook. Nothing is static.

Where execs go, students follow

At specific schools, comparing 2016 and 2017

When execs know how and where to engage with students, their companies win. Comparing overall performance to campuses receiving VIP visitors:

Nvidia’s execs are making the rounds, correlating with a jump in rankings (from #14 to #6 at UIUC following CEO Jensen Huang’s talk on self driving cars and gaming; and from #19 to #8 at CMU following Head of Infrastructure Engineering Tom Hotchkiss’s talk on GPUs and deep learning)
Amazon jumps from #7 to #5 at UC Berkeley after Ashwin Ram, Alexa’s Head of AI, speaks about conversational AI
IBM enjoys a big boost (from #20 to #10) at CMU after several senior execs present for IBM-CMU Day. Suddenly, the 105-year-old behemoth is competing with the likes of Uber and Tesla for talent
Tesla jumps from #26 to #15 at CMU following CFO Deepak Ahuja’s campus talk about re-imagining the auto industry. In general, Uber’s CMU land grab seems to be sparking intense competition

Nike, Pinterest, Netflix win with under-represented groups

In 2017: Comparing under-represented CS majors to overall CS majors

Employers have taken a particular interest in hiring students among specific, under-represented groups. Let’s see who has the edge, and where:

Among African American students, Nike jumps from #43 to #14, while Facebook and Google tie for #1
Online tastemaker Pinterest is the biggest winner with women (#32 with men vs #12 with women). Disney also fares well (#39 with men, #21 with women)
Tesla (#12 to #29), Nvidia (#9 to #32), SpaceX, and Uber all drop among women
Among LGBTQ students, Netflix jumps from #7 to #3, with Slack and Pinterest jumping at least 10 spots
Intel drops out of the top 10, and Nvidia, Oracle, and Dell drop at least 10 spots apiece among LGBTQ students

Red States vs Blue States: 2017 still an election year

In 2017: Comparing red states and blue states

Comparing the 10 states with the biggest margins of victory for Donald Trump (red) with the 10 states with the biggest margins of victory for Hillary Clinton (blue) in the 2016 election:

NASA jumps to #4 in the reddest states, where many components are built and rockets are launched
The CIA, once headed by Bush 1, is also a red state favorite, jumping 37 spots
Aerospace institutions Lockheed and Boeing and more recent contender SpaceX all make the top 20 in red states
Fake news? Facebook drops to #8 in the red states. Airbnb also drops from #12 to #37
Big tech institutions Google, Microsoft, Apple, and Amazon perform consistently between blue and red states

Uncle Sam comes in dead last, taking the bottom four spots

In 2017: Comparing all schools to Top14 for Government

Comparing rankings for government organizations and contractors among students across at the Top14 and students across all schools:

Consistency: the ancient Army, Navy, and Air Force, and the US Digital Service (launched 2014) are in a virtual tie for last overall and at the Top14
The CIA and NSA are the USG’s elite standard-bearers, but remain in the bottom quartile for both cohorts
The CIA beats the NSA both overall and among the Top14 schools — probably to the ultra-tech-savvy NSA’s surprise
SpaceX and Palantir both enjoy solid jumps from overall schools to the Top14
“Beltway bandits” Raytheon, Northrop, and Lockheed Martin drop from the overall rankings to the Top14

Watson in Jeopardy? IBM’s big bet stumbles among ML powerhouses

In 2017: Comparing overall to specific subjects

When comparing the overall rankings with rankings among students taking specific classes:

Among machine learning research powerhouses, Google and Facebook beat Microsoft and Amazon, and despite years of Watson hype, IBM lags behind them all among students taking ML classes
Amazon beats Microsoft among ML TAs
Cryptography students prefer the NSA to the CIA, but Google’s still getting the best overall by far
Nvidia, Uber, and Tesla respectively jump to #7, #8, and #9 among computer vision students. This one seems clear enough: to attract computer visionaries, build self-driving cars (or key infrastructure supporting them)

Hidden Gems/Hidden STEMs: Companies recruit Math and Stats as if they were CS

In 2017: Comparing overall to specific majors

Comparing the overall rankings with rankings with specific majors:

Google, Microsoft, Apple form the top 3 among CS students
Unsurprisingly, hardware giants Intel and Apple in a dead heat among EE majors
Tesla is #1 by a mile among ME majors
Math/Stats majors seem to be CS majors in disguise with Google, Microsoft, and Apple still forming the top 3. As many old-timers have joked, “We had data science too, we just called it stats!”
Physics majors think space is cool (or they’re just CS geeks in disguise), with NASA, SpaceX, Google, Microsoft as the top 4
Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, and Morgan Stanley take the top 3 spots with Econ majors, though they struggle to attract CS majors (ranking #41, #44, and #51 respectively)
Genentech is #1 with Bio/Chem/BioE/ChemE majors (6 spots above parent company Roche), but even with the explosion of computational biotech, they struggle with CS majors, finishing #84

Rarefied Air: From base camp to summit, some companies get stronger; others are left gasping

In 2017: Comparing all schools to increasingly selective cohorts of students

We looked into four cohorts we believe represent increasing levels of selectivity (while acknowledging not everyone will agree with our selection criteria): CS students, CS students at the Top 14, CS TAs at the Top 14, and CS TAs at Stanford and MIT. Amazingly, the distribution of preferred companies was all but turned on its head as the audience grew more selective — with one major exception.

Google still ranks #1 among every selective cohort of students
Facebook improves from #5 to #2 as we move to more selective cohorts
Airbnb (#15 to #3), Slack (#27 to #5), and Palantir (#37 to #8) improve dramatically from the overall population to Stanford/MIT CS TAs, while gaining ground with each intermediate cohort as well.
Microsoft remains strong among CS students (#2) and CS students at top schools (#2), but falls to #9 among Stanford/MIT CS TAs
Intel falls hardest as we move through more selective cohorts, from #6 overall to #28 among Stanford/MIT CS TAs
IBM falls among most cohorts, but Watson and the siren song of AI help IBM regain some ground among Stanford and MIT CS TAs (#17) vs Top 14 CS TAs (#19)
Twitter improves among CS majors (from #19 to #15), but falls drastically as we get more selective, ranking below Intel with each cohort

Hungry for more?

Drop us a note at insights@piazza.com for a booklet of even more insights.

About Piazza

Piazza is the predominant Q&A platform used by millions of students around the globe to engage online with classmates, TAs and professors. They spend 3+ hours a night on the platform asking and answering class related questions, and now with Piazza Careers, are connecting with employers to find jobs and internships.

Each year, we collect data4 on which companies our students are interested in and marry that with proprietary data we have on their classes, majors, and grad years to unveil insights.

Why does this matter? We’re all familiar with the war for talent — executives show up to campus blind with the hopes that students will come. Companies invest time, money and resources in building unqualified pipelines and no means to target their top of funnel.

With Piazza, that’s changing — we’re where the students are. And with an average of 800 data points per student by their senior year, there is opportunity to be infinitely more targeted. And to use data to set the right strategies.

How we collected the data:
This year, we included companies from nine industries: Technology, Consumer Internet, Financial Services/Consulting, Pharma/Healthcare, Aerospace/Defense, Retail/Consumer Brands, Industrials, U.S. Government, and Telecommunications. In total, 98 companies were included in the survey. We presented six of the nine industry groups on any given impression (where on each impression the six groups that are presented are randomly selected from the nine), showcasing 54 companies out of the total list of 98 companies on any given impression (where companies within an industry were also randomly selected and ordered). These 6 industry groups were placed in a randomized grid that students could express interest in.
We wanted to look at combining classes and companies data (anonymized to protect the students) ourselves to better understand our users and better serve our customers. This post isn’t intended to be a journal paper. We just hope to share interesting insights and data in an area that typically lacks either.
If you look back to prior company rankings and selections, you will see a variation in % points of students in their selections for companies, and that stems from the difference that each year we are presenting students with varying number of companies.