How we came up with the top 25

1. In September, we emailed Mendoza College of Business alumni to ask for suggestions on how to put America back to work. Hundreds of ideas were submitted.

2. The magazine staff pared the list to roughly 100 by eliminating duplicates and ideas that were off-topic, nonspecific or otherwise failed to meet the stated guidelines.

3. Three Mendoza faculty separately scored the remaining ideas on a scale of 1-5. (To guard against potential bias, all information about a submitter was removed.) The most important criterion was, "Would it work? Would it reduce unemployment, even a little?" The 25 suggestions that scored the highest are presented here in random order.

The Judges

• Jeffrey A. Bernel (EMBA '94), director of Mendoza's Gigot Center for Entrepreneurial Studies and an entrepreneur with extensive experience in industrial real estate and new-venture startup/turnaround investments.
• Thomas Cosimano, professor, department of finance; expert in pricing financial assets, monetary policy and computational finance; holds a doctorate in economics and has been a visiting scholar with the International Monetary Fund since 2000.
• Margaret Forster, associate professional specialist, department of finance; former principal at Wanger Asset Management in Chicago, where she was an international co-portfolio manager and an equity analyst. She previously was an economist at the International Monetary Fund.