At Universities, a Push for Data-Driven Career Services

“Back then, we had records on 125,000 alumni, but we had good employment information on less than 10,000 of them,” recalled Armin Afsahi, who oversees alumni relations as the university’s associate vice chancellor for advancement. “Aside from Qualcomm, which is in our back yard, we didn’t know who employed our alumni.”

Within three months of setting up the university page, LinkedIn connections surfaced information on 92,000 alumni, Mr. Afsahi said.

The names of the companies which are the top employers of the school’s graduates are ranked in order for anyone who visits the page to see: Qualcomm, Google, the University of California, San Diego, Kaiser Permanente, Northrop Grumman, Hewlett-Packard, Apple, Microsoft and so on.

Amazon has busted up the traditional publishing system and done more to widen access to books than anything since the invention of the mass-market paperback. It is the reader’s best buddy. Or is it?Read more…

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