Penn, Villanova top LinkedIn rankings based on grads' career paths

If you're hoping for a career in finance or marketing, the University of Pennsylvania may be the best college for you. A future accountant? Villanova University may be your best bet.

That's according to just-released rankings from LinkedIn on the best universities to attend for various career paths.

The career-networking site says its new rankings are based on "career outcomes." The site says it identified the top companies for a variety of professions, found LinkedIn users in those industries, and calculated the percentage of alumni working at top companies to compile its rankings.

"These percentages allow us to rank universities based on career outcomes across different professional areas," LinkedIn says in a blog post announcing the rankings.

For a number of professions, Philadelphia-area universities fared well under LinkedIn's rating system.

Villanova was the top-rated school for accounting professionals, while Lehigh University ranked fourth on that list. Villanova also ranked 13th for finance professionals.

Penn ranked first for finance and marketing, and was 2nd for investment bankers, 14th for media professionals and 18th for software developers.

Princeton University rated highly on a number of lists: The school was fourth for finance, sixth for investment bankers, fifth for software developers, and fourth for software developers at start-ups.

Both Penn State University and Rutgers University had several mentions on LinkedIn's top-25 lists. Penn State was 23rd for designers, 17th for marketers and 23rd for media. Rutgers was 22nd for finance, 16th for marketers and 13th for media

Of course, LinkedIn's rankings only include alumni who use the site, which skews the results toward schools that have the most graduates with LinkedIn accounts.

The site is the latest to attempt to rank colleges using a variety of metrics, joining annual lists from U.S. News & World Report, Forbes and the Princeton Review, among many others.