New England was recently named worst in the nation for retaining college graduates. Not the best PR for a world-class academic hub. Yes, Boston can be a tough place to get a job, but that doesn’t mean the area’s brightest students ought to give up, pack up and move away. A number of Boston-area universities have been home to many successful students that went on to build nationally recognized brands, so fear not, campus marketing departments. Here’s some support for an argument about ROI.
Babson College
- The Princeton Review and Entrepreneur magazine ranked Babson first on their lists of the top 25 graduate and undergraduate entrepreneurship programs in the nation.
- Success story: Daniel Gerber attended Babson in the early 1920s, after which he expanded his father’s canning company to produce strained baby foods. Everyone loves a Gerber baby.
- Here are 12 more brands built by Babson alums.
Boston College
- BC has been recognized as a “Best College”, while its Carroll School of Management has received top honors as one of the top business schools in the country.
- Success story: Robert Leonard, a member of the class of ’54, helped found online marketplace Ticketmaster in the late 1970s. He also studied at MIT and Harvard Business School, and was later named Ticketmaster’s president and chief executive.
- Here are eight more companies to spring out of Boston College.
Boston University
- BU breeds entrepreneurial thinking, and encourages students to be nothing if not interesting.
- Success story: Ben Fischman starts Lids when he was only a junior at Boston University of Lids, and after growing the company to 350 retail locations, sold it in 2001. He then went on to found SmartBargains.com and Rue La La, which were bought by GSI Commerce for $350 million.
- Here are 14 more companies that were crafted by BU grads.
Tufts University
- Tufts’ Director of Entrepreneurial Leadership James Barlow says the school “has this incredible foundation in entrepreneurial leadership” and that’s putting it lightly.
- Pierre Omidyar earned his Tufts degree in 1988, then went on to found online auction and shopping website eBay, which currently has more than 112 million active users.
