Nestlé, Google and UBS ranked one, two, three in a survey of students at 48 universities, conducted by consulting firm Universum and released on Tuesday.

Credit Suisse ranked fourth, followed by Ernst & Young, one of three professional services companies ranking in the top ten, with the others being PricewaterhouseCoopers (seventh) and McKinsey & Company (eighth).

Other companies most admired by business students included the Swatch Group (sixth), L’Oréal (ninth) and the Swiss National Bank (tenth).

Earlier this year, Nestlé ranked ninth among global companies with the best reputations, in a survey conducted by the New York-based Reputation Institute.

In other fields of study, ABB tops the list of most appealing employer for engineering students followed by Siemens, Swiss Federal Railways (SBB), Google and Alstom.

Google, judged the world’s most attractive employer by Universum in a global study, ranked number one for Swiss IT students, ahead of IBM, Microsoft, Swisscom and the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN).

Natural sciences students picked Novartis as their top choice, followed by Roche, CERN, Nestlé and Google.

Law students judged the federal government as the best place to work, followed by the International Committee for the Red Cross, Nestlé, international law firm Lenz & Staehelin and UBS.

The survey was conducted between December 2012 and March 2013 among 10,094 students.

Universum said the research “indicates a company’s position in relation to other ideal employers in the recruitment market”.

Its rankings, it said, “enable employers to track and set targets for measuring thei level of employer attractiveness”.