SOUTH JORDAN — Utah's homegrown Neumont University may not be a household name, but that doesn't faze President Graham Doxey.

The fledgling computer science institution in South Jordan is well-known to the people that matter most — employers.

"We wanted to have students the employer can value — it worked," Doxey said.

The school's first crop of 28 graduates this spring all had at least one job offer before commencement, and the average salary of those offers — about $61,000 — both exceeded the national average and left Utah's mid-$40,000 average starting salary for computer science grads far behind.

And that was just the first batch, Doxey added, with national companies like Microsoft and IBM paying attention to the small one-building school in South Jordan. The companies are already out recruiting Neumont's 276 students with even more aggressive offers, he said.

The school's impressive first-year results are grabbing attention nationally. The school will appear in the July 24 issue of Forbes Magazine in an article citing its innovative approach to computer science.

"It's not just IBM that's interested in what's going on at Neumont University. The whole country needs to pay attention to what's happening in Salt Lake," Nicholas Donofrio, IBM executive vice president of innovation, told graduates this year.

Neumont University is the brainchild of Doxey and two colleagues who initially thought they would combine skills to be venture capitalists. After talking to industry leaders, the three men decided what the computer science industry needed most was a better-qualified hiring pool.

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts the United States will need 135,000 new computer professionals annually, but universities are only producing about 50,000 computer grads a year.

"The industry has been screaming for years that they need education to better prepare workers," Doxey said. "There's only one school that's focused on addressing that problem — that's us."

At Neumont, students are put through a 30-month curriculum of hands-on experience. Instead of theory classes and lecture halls, Neumont students are put up in groups from day one to work on projects commissioned by companies like Novell and the state of Utah.

When the students graduate, they leave with a portfolio of work that most software engineers don't have until they have spent years in the work force, Doxey said. For employers, that means less time and money spent on training new hires.

"They are better prepared to think and solve problems in a changing world than students in a standard university," he said. "They are building things from the first day they get here. Nobody else does that."