Duke MBA Grads Enjoy Impressive Pay Hike - Poets&Quants

The Class of 2017 is enjoying a ‘blue’ Christmas. By blue, we mean Fuqua festive over December dreary.

Yes, the annual employment report is out.  Looking at the numbers, you can bet that second years have visions of sugar plums – or dollar signs – dancing in their heads!

A good year? That’s an understatement. In 2017, the Fuqua graduating class landed median pay packages of $145,500. That’s a $5,500 improvement over the previous class. Such pay places the school in the same league as Ivies like Dartmouth Tuck and Columbia Business School – and above Midwest darlings like Chicago Booth and Northwestern Kellogg. By the same token, average total compensation reached $147,896, nearly $3,400 better than the 2016 Class.

Pay & Employment Remains Strong At A Wide Range Of MBA Programs

School	Job Offers	Total Median Pay	Major Employers
Chicago (Booth)	97%	$141,500	McKinsey, Amazon, BCG, Bain, Accenture, Morgan Stanley
UPenn (Wharton)	97%	$149,300	McKinsey, BCG, Amazon, Bain, Goldman Sachs
Michigan (Ross)	97%	$147,845*	Amazon, McKinsey, Deloitte, BCG, Microsoft
Duke (Fuqua)	96%	$145,500	Deloitte, McKinsey, Amazon, BCG, Accenture
Minnesota (Carlson)	96%	$122,400	3M, Deloitte, Ecolab, Land O’Lakes, Microsoft
Harvard Business School	95%	$154,750*	NA
Dartmouth (Tuck)	95%	$146,250	McKinsey, Bain, Amazon, BCG, Microsoft
Northwestern (Kellogg)	94%	$140,350	McKinsey, BCG, Amazon, Bain, Microsoft
New York (Stern)	94%	$154,147*	Amazon, Deloitte, JP Morgan, McKinsey, Credit Suisse
Emory (Goizueta)	94%	$144,580*	E&Y, Amazon, PwC, Deloitte, Citigroup, Georgia Pacific
Columbia	93%	$146,550*	McKinsey, BCG, Bain, Amazon, Deloitte
Virginia (Darden)	93%	$149,750	Microsoft, BCG, McKinsey, Accenture, Amazon
Vanderbilt (Owen)	93%	$130,750	Amazon, Deloitte, Wells Fargo, Microsoft, North Highland
Stanford GSB	92%	$165,250*	NA
Indiana (Kelley)	92%	$134,113*	E&Y, Microsoft, P&G, Amazon, Deloitte
Cambridge (Judge)	92%	$130,218	Amazon, McKinsey, Google, Uber, BCG

* Reflects starting salary, sign-on bonus and other guaranteed compensation, adjusted for the percentage of students receiving bonuses and other comp. The rest of the numbers include only salary and sign-on bonus because the school does not report other guaranteed compensation. Job offers data is for three months after graduation.

The results look even better when you drill into the numbers. For starters, the increases are heavily concentrated in improved base pay. 2017 graduates earned $125,000 in base out of the gate, a $5,000 bump in just one year. That’s not to say bonuses didn’t rise, however. Employers shelled out $29,236 in median sign on bonuses this year – a $4,000 improvement – with 82% of Fuqua grads reporting a bonus.

Here’s the best part: These numbers don’t even factor in the ‘Other Guaranteed Compensation’ category, A combination of goodies like tuition reimbursement and stock options, it was removed from the 2017 employment report (and P&Q’s numbers below). In large part, this category artificially inflated compensation figures. For example, just 9% of 2016 Fuqua grads received such compensation on top of base and bonus. For savvy graduates who negotiated this compensation into their pay, it added $20,000 in value to their earnings.

The six largest employers of Fuqua MBAs over the past five years

A FUQUA EDUCATION BECOMES THE GREAT EQUALIZER

Pay wasn’t the only measure of Fuqua’s prominence in the marketplace. Overall, 96% of the 2017 Class had received job offers within three months of graduation. What’s more, 93% of the class had accepted their offer during that time. That said, VISA status played an adverse role in these numbers; 96% of graduates with U.S. work authorizations had accepted offers at the three month mark compared to the 86% number posted by those who lacked such papers. Work status also played a role in pay. Graduates without a U.S. work authorization were paid $8,200 less than their peers. However, that gap was offset, to an extent, by sign on bonuses, which were $5,000 (mean) higher for graduates without authorization.

Pay was also influenced by student backgrounds. North American graduates grossed the highest median bases at $124,908. European Union graduates placed second with $115,551 followed by Asia at $109,115. Among North Americans, Mid-Atlantic employers landed the highest median bases at $130,000, followed by the Northeast, Midwest and Southwest each at $120,000.

Alas, a Fuqua education turns into the great equalizer when it comes to educational backgrounds and work experiences. Take the former, where 2017 grads who earned “Technical,” “Business,” or “Other” undergraduate degrees each reaped $125,000 in median base pay. In other words, the proverbial poets and quants are on par with each other after completing two years of graduate business studies. That $125,000 median also applies regardless of the number of years of prior work experience too, further confirmation of how quickly student business aptitudes coalesce as MBAs.

For the ninth consecutive year, consulting reigned as the largest consumer of Fuqua talent. This year, 33% of the class entered the field, matching the 2012 Class’ high water mark. Not surprisingly, consulting firms accounted for four of the five largest employers of the 2017. Deloitte led the parade by landing 26 members of Team Fuqua, followed by McKinsey (21), BCG (14), and Accenture (12). Despite Fuqua graduates’ pay spike in 2017, consulting firms continued to dole out the same $140,000 bases as the year before – with mean pay actually declining by $1,500. Looking at the top end, the highest-paid consulting recruit made $170,000 in base, with Fuqua declining to furnish bonus averages by industry in 2017.

Finance rounded up the second-largest bloc of Fuqua graduates at 20%, as Bank of America led the way with seven recruits. Median salaries held steady at $125,000, though the mean improved by nearly $4,000. Even more, a finance grad snagged the highest base at $200,000 – though $20,000 less than highs posted by graduates from the consulting and tech sectors in 2016. While the percentage of Fuqua consulting grads have climbed by 8% over the past decade, the number has fallen by 13% in its financial sector in the aftermath of the 2008 economic collapse.

This shortfall, however, has been made up by the tech industry, whose share of Fuqua graduating classes has jumped from 9% to 19% since 2008. Amazon wooed 15 class members in 2017, though Microsoft (11), Apple (6), Cisco (6), and Google (5) have also been quite active in Durham. 12% of the class also entered healthcare, up four points over the past decade, with DaVita Healthcare and Cardinal Health each securing five members of the class. In fact, median base pay rose by $7,000 in the past year in the health sector. In contrast, the number of Fuqua graduates entering consumer goods has plummeted from 13% to 5% over the past five classes (though median pay did inch up by $2,000 in 2017).

Still, you won’t find a bigger proponent of Fuqua than Deloitte. Since 2012, the firm has hired 160 graduates, easily outpacing McKinsey (94), Microsoft (79), BCG (77), and Amazon (63) as the top recruiters on campus. Over that time, Amazon has quadrupled its recruits. Not every indicator was so positive. Exhibit A: PwC, which hired 37 Fuqua grads from 2014-2016, added just two from the 2017 class. IBM and Citi also curbed hiring at Fuqua this year as well.

To read the full report, click here.

DON’T MISS: MEET DUKE FUQUA’S MBA CLASS OF 2019 OR DUKE FUQUA: WHERE THE BUSINESS HERO IS DEAD

 

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