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Alumni Impact

  • Updated

Alumni Impact 

Intent:

This forms part of our Employment Outcomes indicator. The list seeks to shine a light on which institutions are producing impactful graduates in all walks of life, from performing arts to finance, medicine to politics. 

 

List Composition:

We currently use more than 200 lists spanning approximately a 10 year period. As of June 2023, the list has 60,000 entries.  We use a combination of externally published lists (e.g. Forbes, Time), as well as sourcing the profiles of global politicians, arts leaders and business professionals from the boards of over 30 global stock exchanges. The list is continuously reviewed and added to.  To decide whether to include a list, or a job profile, we ask ourselves:

  • Has the list been in circulation for more than one edition?
  • Is the publisher well known and valid?
  • Is the list truly regional or global? 
  • Is the job title generally consistent across the globe (e.g. president/prime minister, CEO)

We look for geographic spread, and where a region is underrepresented in global lists (e.g. Africa) we attempt to find regionally impactful lists to supplement this.  Examples of the lists we use include:

  • Forbes 30 under 30
  • Forbes 30 under 30 Asia
  • Forbes Middle East
  • Most Powerful Women
  • Volvo Environment Prize
  • The World's 100 Most Powerful Women
  • World's Billionaires
  • Young Global Leaders
  • Fortune Top 500
  • Nobel Peace Prize
  • Global thinkers top 100
  • The Root 100
  • 100 most influential Africans

In addition to the lists, we also include:

  • Prime Ministers and Presidents
  • Secretaries of State / Ministers of Education
  • Top 10 most cited authors for each of the QS narrow subjects, as per SciVal that provides this report for papers published in the most recent last 5 years

To create the index, we collect information on where the alumnus went to school, which degree (s) they completed and in which subject, and their age. For graduates with multiple degrees, we award points where there is more than one university

 

Data Points and Calculation.

 

Data Point Description Scoring
Alumni Impact Index An index of how many alumni are recorded per institution.  The raw count is first z-scored and then scored from 1-100 using min-max normalisation.
Alumni Impact (Students) The size of an institution is proxied by the number of students it has, to account for the reality that larger institutions will naturally have an advantage in producing more impactful alumni. We therefore adjust the alumni impact index by institution size. The z-scored values (above) are divided by the number of FTE students, then scored from 1-100 using min-max normalisation.
Alumni Impact Index Adjusted

This is the final score for this metric. The formula is: Alumni Impact Index Adjusted = (Alumni Impact Index * 0.6) + (Alumni Impact Students * 0.4)

 

 A score from 1-100. 

 

 

Alumni Impact for MBA and Business Masters Ranking.

The process at a general follows the above. For our MBA and Business Masters ranking, we then make the following adjustments:

Data is segmented to look at the outcomes of those coming from relevant programs, e.g. MBA / Masters in Finance / Masters in Operations Management etc.

 

 

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