First-of-a-Kind Ranking Reveals Best Large Companies for High School Graduates to Start Careers

SEATTLE–The American Opportunity Index today released a first-of-a-kind ranking of the top 50 employers that can offer recent high school graduates with the best pathway to a sustaining career and increased compensation. The list provides a valuable new resource for the millions of young individuals entering the workforce without a college degree.

Topping the list are seven retailers and restaurants: Chipotle Mexican Grill, Lowe’s, Walgreens Boots Alliance, Foot Locker, Gap Inc., Best Buy and Starbucks. The PNC Financial Services Group, Goodyear Tire & Rubber and Chewy also made the top 10.

The American Opportunity Index’s 2024 Best Places for High School Graduates to Start a Career list is based on data from the full American Opportunity Index, a joint project of the Burning Glass Institute, the Managing the Future of Work Project at Harvard Business School and the Schultz Family Foundation, that measures how well America’s largest companies maximize their internal talent to drive business performance and individual employee growth.

The list is based on an assessment of the career trajectories of hundreds of thousands entry-level workers over the past five years. The assessment reveals that workers who start in the same entry-level jobs at select large companies can have very different outcomes.

The Index assesses 400 of the largest U.S. companies that file public financial statements, measuring how well these firms maximize their internal talent to drive corporate performance and the growth of their employees. The Index is unprecedented in this approach: It is not based on corporate surveys but on an independent, big-data analysis of the career trajectories of nearly 5 million workers from 2018 to 2022, drawn from how they report changes in their work history on social-media platforms, resumes posted online, as well as comprehensive salary and job-posting data.

The American Opportunity Index’s 2024 Best Places for High School Graduates to Start a Career list is based on scores on three key Index metrics: how well firms hire entry-level workers (First Jobs), promote them internally (Advancement Within) and prepare them for better opportunities when they leave (Advancement Beyond). Excelling in these areas can have a profound impact in the early stages of a person’s career.

• Top companies in the Index’s First Jobs metric are as much as 4.3 times more likely to hire entry-level workers than other large firms.

• Employees at top companies for Advancement Within are as much as 2.5 times more likely to get promoted than their peers at other large businesses. The Index’s Advancement Within metric considers how likely workers are to be promoted, how many further promotions they can expect over time, and how large of a raise they can expect at each promotion. The Index only counts promotions that yield at least a 10 percent increase in pay.

• Employees at top Advancement Beyond companies are as much as 5 times more likely to land a substantially higher paying job elsewhere when they leave compared to peers transitioning out of other large firms.

The full list can be viewed here.

ABOUT BURNING GLASS INSTITUTE

The Burning Glass Institute believes that everyone deserves meaningful work and the chance to move up. A fully independent non-profit, we advance data-driven research and practice on the future of work and on the future of learning. We work with employers, public agencies, educators, and policymakers to develop solutions that build mobility, opportunity, and equity through skills. Through our expertise in mining new datasets for actionable insight, the Burning Glass Institute’s discourse-shaping research draws attention to pressing problems and frames the potential for new approaches. Through project-based engagement and collectives, we put ideas into practice, bringing forward solutions that are high-impact and replicable. For more information visit https://www.burningglassinstitute.org/.

ABOUT THE HBS MANAGING THE FUTURE OF WORK PROJECT

Harvard Business School’s Project on Managing the Future of Work pursues research that business and policy leaders can put into action to navigate the complex, fast-changing nature of work. The Project’s current research areas focus on the many forces that are redefining the nature of work in the United States as well as in many other advanced and emerging economies: Technology trends like automation and artificial intelligence; Contingent workforces and the gig economy; Workforce demographics and the “care economy”; The middle-skills gap and worker investments; Global talent access and utilization; Spatial tensions between leading urban centers and rural areas. Learn more at: https://www.hbs.edu/managing-the-future-of-work/.

ABOUT THE SCHULTZ FAMILY FOUNDATION

The Schultz Family Foundation’s mission is to create greater opportunity, accessible to all. Our work is deeply rooted in the lives and values of our co-founders, Sheri and Howard Schultz, who believe talent is everywhere, but opportunity is not. We seek to apply the lessons they have learned over the decades to seed innovations and scale solutions to help young people successfully navigate the transition to adulthood and positively impact the trajectory of their lives. We are investors in unleashing potential and unlocking opportunity, working in partnership with employers, entrepreneurs, non-profits, and governments that share our aspiration of enabling everyone to access the full promise of America. For more information about the Foundation and its work: www.schultzfamilyfoundation.org.