Real Estate Programs: How the Universities of the USA stack up

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The unpleasant working hours and the grim atmosphere in the Finance industry has caused many gifted students to jump ship into the sector of real estate and Entrepreneurship. Firms like Google and Facebook have long taken over major banks as dream employers while real estate offers a myriad of job opportunities.

Yet compared to (investment) banking and consulting, recruitment for jobs in the real estate sector is less structured. Large companies in this sector don’t focus their recruitment like tech firms and investment banks at prestigious campuses with set amounts of students hired per year, rather revolving it through personal connections.

This approach seems logical, as many of the skills for real estate jobs for hedge funds or private equity firms require skills like those used in Finance: analysis, pricing, logic. A major difference are people skills.

With such similarities, and current development in job prospects, real estate programs and business programs carry many similarities. It is therefore vital to evaluate both: undergraduate business programs and real estate programs to judge among the most exceptional programs in the nation.

The rank of each program is usually measured through various metrics, as the methodology of Forbes, Princeton Review, and the US News & World Report suggest. Unfortunately, many of these rankings are geared towards prospective students with wellness in mind, emphasizing various metrics that are of little importance for recruiters and businesses.

“It is always important to keep in mind the different interests of the parties involved; the characteristics of a university that stand out to a student are not necessarily aligned with those of a recruiter” said Keith Knutsson of Integrale Advisors.

For example, the Forbes ranking bases 50% on the happiness and debt level of students, and an additional 7.5% on students’ graduation rates.

The Princeton Review bases its ratings “on surveys of 137,000 students at the 382 schools,” with each survey covering 80 questions. The questions cover a student’s opinion on:

  • school’s academics/administration,
  • life at their college
  • their fellow students
  • themselves

While this approach certainly creates results with large samples, the qualitative nature of the questions, unreliable nature of peoples’ opinion, and lack of relevant information make it difficult to take such results as a serious metric for program rankings.

The US News & World Report on the other hand arrives at its results for Undergraduate Business rankings by surveying “deans and senior faculty members at each undergraduate business program accredited by the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business.” The opinion of those surveyed is assessed, creating the ranking seen on the website.

Additionally, those same respondents nominate the ten best programs in business specialty areas like accounting, marketing finance, and real estate. Those programs that received the most mentions in each area appear on the site ranked in descending order by number of mentions.

Under these metrics, the real estate rankings for 2017 are as following:

  • University of Pennsylvania
  • University of Wisconsin – Madison
  • University of California – Berkeley
  • University of Georgia
  • University of Southern California
  • New York University
  • University of Texas – Austin
  • University of Florida
  • Marquette University
  • Cornell University

This mention-only ranking notably differs from the results of the overall best undergraduate business programs which are:

  • University of Pennsylvania
  • Massachusetts Institute of Technology
  • University of California – Berkeley
  • University of Michigan – Ann Arbor
  • New York University
  • Carnegie Mellon University (tied)
  • University of Texas – Austin (tied)
  • University of Virginia (tied)
  • Cornell University (tied)
  • Indiana University – Bloomington (tied)

Other methodologies such as the College Report from Payscale rank schools by the average starting pay and mid-career pay of alumni. The value behind such information is well-reasoned, but the data lacks information regarding graduate degrees and doesn’t cover a considerable portion of students. Until such data can be more comprehensive, it seems as if the US News & World Report has the most usable information for businesses and recruiters alike.

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