Today’s Wall Street Journal includes a great story written by Teri Evans about the surprising allure of state colleges and universities to recruiters at big employers. In short, writes Teri, the recruiters like the one-stop-shopping for recent grads with solid academics, job skills, and a proven track record of success.

The Wall Street Journal partnered with Payscale.com and Cambria Consulting to survey recruiters who work for some of the largest organizations in the country. These organizations recruited 43,000 grads last year, which sounds like a lot but is in fact only 0.2 percent of the 2.2 million graduates of associates programs (700,000) and bachelors programs (1.5 million). Nevertheless, it is these big employers that many and perhaps most students strive to work for so focusing on the schools which they like most is quite helpful.

It is helpful when reviewing these rankings that each and every one of these schools is a tremendous school, especially when you consider that there are over 4,000 two-year and four-year colleges in the U.S. Yet some of the top schools are clearly more attractive to recruiters than others. Ranked from the best of the best to the worst of the best are:

1. Pennsylvania State University (Penn State) – State College, PA
2. Texas A&M University – College Station, TX
3. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign – Urbana, IL
4. Purdue University – West Lafayette, IN
5. Arizona State University – Tempe, AZ
6. University of Michigan – Ann Arbor, MI
7. Georgia Institute of Technology – Atlanta, GA
8. University of Maryland – College Park, MD
9. University of Florida – Gainsville, FL
10. Carnegie Mellon University – Pittsburgh, PA
11. Brigham Young University – Provo, UT
12. Ohio State University – Columbus, OH
13. Virginia Polytechnic Institute – Blacksburg, VA
14. Cornell University – Ithica, NY
15. University of Califoria – Berkeley, CA
16. University of Wisconsin – Madison, WI
17. University of California – Los Angeles, CA
18. Texas Tech University – Lubbock, TX
19. North Carolina State University Raleigh, NC
20. University of Virginia – Charlottesville, VA
21. Rutgers University – New Brunswick, NJ
22. University of Notre Dame – South Bend, IN
23. Massachusetts Institute of Technology – Cambridge, MA
24. University of Southern California – Los Angeles, CA
25. Washington State University – Pullman, WA
26. University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill, NC