New MBA Grads Are Wealthier – and Less Happy
The good news: Recent MBA grads are making more than previous grads. The bad news: They are also more dissatisfied with their job offers.
Let’s start with the positive. 46% of newly minted MBA grads have had job offers for $125,000 or more, according to a new survey from Training the Street, a provider of educational courses.
The main reason behind the increase in salary? A strong competition for MBA talent, says Scott Rostan, founder and CEO of Training the Street.
“When you’re getting three, four offers from banks, and if you just do the math and think about that, that means a lot of firms are competing for the same people and the same talent,” Rostan tells CNBC. “If you’re a talented person, you’re going to be in high demand.”
Satisfaction rates
It gets better. More MBA students, roughly 28%, report receiving three or more job offers. When compared to last year’s 22%, it seems newly-minted MBA grads are getting more options. And more than half of students surveyed this year are “very satisfied” with their offers.
Despite the pay and offers, there is signs for worry. When compared to last year’s 45% satisfaction rate, the number of MBA students who report being satisfied with their job offers fell to 32%. Worse still, students who reported being dissatisfied with their offers has doubled from last year to 14%.
Like last year, the number of grads who report not receiving any employment offers has remained roughly the same at 17%.
So, what could these numbers mean? Well, according to Rostan, the increase in job offers means MBAs are in high demand. But that also means more competition.
“The war for talent is as strong as ever, and top candidates are in high demand, leading to higher starting salaries and multiple job offers,” Rostan tells PR Newswire. “Demand for MBAs remains strong, but firms are being more discerning in an effort to recruit those who can step in and contribute right away.”
Industry Preference
A large percentage of MBA grads reported a preference for working in consulting according to Training the Street. Roughly 31% of grads put working in consulting as their number one job choice. Last year, the number was 20%.
Part of the reason for consulting’s popularity may be the result of heavy recruitment efforts by consulting firms. 51% of respondents surveyed said consulting firms “actively recruited” them for employment. That’s up from 43% last year.
“We’ve seen a concerted effort on behalf of the big consulting firms to attract the strongest, young talent coming out of the nation’s business schools,” Rostan tells PR Newswire. “The results indicate that their efforts have paid off, as more MBAs see consulting firms as their top choice.”
Training the Street’s survey included a total of 262 students. 158 were full-time MBAs.
Sources: CNBC, Training The Street, PR Newswire
How To Approach Short-Answer Essays
When it comes to the MBA short-answer essays, many applicants find word limits to be challenging.
Yet, experts say having tight word limits pushes applicants to effectively convey how they will contribute to an MBA class.
Ilana Kowarski, a reporter at US News, recently spoke to some experts on how applicants can pack more punch into MBA short-answer essays.
“You really do have to think about what are the must-communicates versus the nice-to-communicates,” Isser Gallogly, associate dean of MBA admissions and program innovation at New York University’s Stern School of Business, tells US News.
NYU Stern’s “Pick Six”
One example of a short-answer essay prompt is NYU’s Stern, the “Pick Six” essay. The prompt asks applicants to use six images and corresponding captions to describe themselves to the admissions committee and future classmates.
According to NYU’s website, applicants upload a PDF that includes:
- A brief introduction or overview of your “Pick Six”
- Six images that help illustrate who you are
- A one-sentence caption for each of the six images that helps explain why they were selected and are significant to you.
Keep True To Yourself
The key to answering these essay prompts is being authentic and highlighting individuality, experts say. It’s also an opportunity to convey a side of yourself outside of a transcript or resume.
For instance, Stern MBA student Sebastian Hooker took a photograph of himself exploring an ice cave for his “Pick Six” essay. His intent was to convey his appreciation of nature and “Work Hard, Play Hard” mentality.
Hooker, who grew up in Utah, tells US News that he wanted to make clear to NYU that if he were to attend school in NYC, he’d continue pursuing his outdoor hobbies—a core part of his identity.
“I’m not going to move to the concrete jungle and become a 100 percent city-driven person,” he tells US News.
Ben Strickhouser, an MBA student at Carnegie Mellon’s Tepper School of Business, says it’s important to stay true to yourself when writing short-answer essays.
“You want to be authentic in the way that you answer the question, so most likely the first thing that comes to mind whenever you read this question is what you want to put, and then you just need to spend a little bit of time to make sure that it’s put in an eloquent way,” Strickhouser tells US News.
These Professors Want To Make B-School Research Relevant
Let’s say you’re a business manager and you’re having a problem with evaluating employee performance.
The last thing you’re probably going to do in solving the problem is read an academic journal.
Debra L. Shapiro, a professor of management in the Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland, and Bradley Kirkman, a professor of leadership and department head in the Poole College of Management at North Carolina State University, call this the “Lost in Translation” problem.
In their article for the Harvard Business Review, Shapiro and Kirkman argue that business schools need to take a broader approach to assessing what it means to have scholarly impact.
Two Main Challenges
Shapiro and Kirkman cite two main challenges that management scientists face in producing research knowledge that is both “academically rigorous and applicable to practicing managers.”
As noted previously, the “Lost in Translation” problem is simply the fact that no practicing managers turn to academic journals when they’re looking to improve their skills or practices.
“Researchers have found that managers tend to be unaware of research-supported management insights reported in academic journals, and that such insights are typically excluded in practitioner-oriented journals,” Shapiro and Kirkman write.
For instance, it’s common for managers to often believe in “long-held assumed truths” that academic scholars have already dispelled in their research.
“For example, many managers still believe that the errors they make in evaluating their employees can be corrected by training them to recognize the potential errors and suggesting ways to avoid them, while the actual evidence shows that such training can actually increase the number of errors they make,” Shapiro and Kirkman explain.
The second challenge management scientists face, according to Shapiro and Kirkman, is the “Lost Before Translation” problem.
In their words, it’s the “tendency for academic researchers to design studies without input from managers or employees — the populations that their studies’ results are meant to help.”
These two challenges, Shapiro and Kirkman argue, are what keep academics from truly helping practitioners improve the way the manage.
Certain Promotion and Salary Incentive Practices May Inhibit Research Reach
Shapiro and Kirkman cite the way business schools offer promotions and salary increases as a main inhibitor to making research relevant to practitioners.
“This is because promotions and salary increases at most business schools are primarily based on professors’ number of peer-reviewed, ‘A’ journal publications (or those appearing in journals with the highest impact factor, or frequency of citation-counts),” Shapiro and Kirkman write.
In turn, this type of promotion practice limits the publication outlets that researchers will seek out.
“Counting solely or primarily ‘A’ journal publications when determining rewards, recognitions, and other career advancement-prizes communicates, in essence, that professors won’t advance if they choose to publish in outlets that are more widely read by managers,” Shapiro and Kirkman argue.
Having this practice at business schools, consequently, produces a number of issues such as weakening professors’ ability to pursue activities that “engage scholarship,” incentivizing scholars to produce as many studies as possible without careful consideration of research, and encouraging academics to engage in “questionably ethical” research practices to produce results accepted by certain journals.
Changing How Academics Influences Practice
Shapiro and Kirkman offer three main changes that they say business schools should account for to assess what it means to have scholarly impact.
For one, they believe that business schools should take a “pluralistic approach to scholarly impact.”
“For example, rather than counting up the number of times a professor’s articles have been cited by other academics, we should also be looking at how often the work is cited or used by students, practicing managers, policy-makers, and in articles (e.g., news, periodicals, magazines, podcasts, etc.) that are mass-distributed to these multiple stakeholders,” Shapiro and Kirkman write.
Secondly, they argue that academics should focus on “responsible research.”
“Responsible research has been described as research that balances the interests of shareholders with the social and economic outcomes of companies, uses rigorous research methods to understand puzzling local phenomena, and seeks truth above all else by using ethical research methods,” Shapiro and Kirkman write.
Lastly, they call for all stakeholders—from researchers to journal editors—to work together in a “concerted way to encourage and reward responsible research and move beyond the limited approaches to conducting and disseminating management research that are currently used.”
The results, if these changes are implemented, are plentiful.
“Scholars will use their voice in ways that go beyond merely publishing in top-tier academic journals with very limited practitioner readership; there will be less incentive to engage in questionably ethical research practices, such as only putting their best research findings forward and hiding non-significant findings; and perhaps most importantly, it will lead to more interest in, and perceived legitimacy of, management scholars’ work,” Shapiro and Kirkman write.
Sources: Harvard Business Review, Academy of Management
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