The schools:
This is not a ranking; we’ve listed the schools in no particular order. That’s because we’re not exactly comparing apples to apples here. Some schools have strong journalism programs while others excel at prepping you for a career in PR. While some have a specific fashion focus, many don’t. You don’t necessarily need to go to a school that has the word “Fashion” in its name to pick up the skills and experience you need to work in the fashion industry.

The methodology:
We spoke to people in the industry, researched the schools’ specialties and strengths, and looked at their ability to help with internship placement (which is key to employment) to come up with this list. We also used hard data from LinkedIn as a benchmark, which helped us figure out if there was a higher concentration of grads from a certain school at some key fashion companies. If you see a notation that looks like this:

Condé Nast (3% of 2,000 employees)

it means that of 2,000 employees of Condé Nast who are on LinkedIn, 3% of them went to University X. This data is just to give you an idea of where grads get hired, nothing more.

A word on companies and famous grads:
The lists we provided of where grads get hired are by no means comprehensive–again, they’re just meant to give you an idea of your options. And the alumni lists for every single one of these schools is unbelievably impressive–senators, Nobel Prize winners, authors, actors. But we just tried to highlight a select few fashion industry notables as examples.

So without further ado, we present our list, which you can view in full here. Click through to start your career!

Additional reporting by Tyler McCall