Where We Are

Care to guess the largest employer of new college graduates this year? Did I hear you say Microsoft? Boeing? Intel? Nope. According to Collegegrad.com, it's Enterprise Rent-a-Car. The top 10 are:

Enterprise
Lockheed Martin (the military-industrial complex is about jobs!)
Walgreens (no, not Wal-Mart)
PricewaterhouseCoopers
Deloitte & Touche
Ernst & Young
Schlumberger
U.S. Dept. of Agriculture (so much for big government)
Hertz
KPMG

So, of the top 10 employers of recent college graduates four are accounting firms and two are rent-a-car companies, only one is a manufacturer and one is an industrial service company. We've come a long, long way from the days when the U.S. economy was based on companies that actually make things.

There are some other interesting tid-bits in the listing. For instance, the US Customs and Border Protection Agency comes in 11th on the list. The military services are a bit further down; surprisingly (at least to me), the Marines lead the services in employing new graduates, although the Leathernecks typically have only about a third as many people serving as the Navy, Air Force or Army.

(If you were wondering, Microsoft is 24th on the list, Boeing 11th and Intel 19th.)