MIT’s MBAs Outdid Harvard On Pay This Year - Poets&Quants

A collage of photos from MIT Sloan’s 2018 employment report

Here’s one for the books: Graduating MBAs from MIT’s Sloan School of Management this year actually outlearned their cross-town counterparts at the Harvard Business School for the first time ever. Median total compensation for Sloanies jumped 6.5% to $161,355, edging out Harvard’s $160,268 total.

In both cases, the starting pay numbers are records. They include median base salaries, with sign-on bonuses and other guaranteed compensation adjusted for the percentage of MBA graduates reporting those extras. At MIT Sloan, median starting salaries rose by $10K to $135,000, while sign-on bonuses came to $30,000, received by 70.3% of the class, and other guaranteed comp totaled $27,000, reported by 19.5% of the graduates.

While Harvard’s median base was $5,000 higher at $140,000, MIT’s MBAs managed to eke out the win due to higher sign-on bonuses than HBS’ $25,000 reported by a larger percentage of the class, 65% at HBS versus the more than 70% at Sloan (see Harvard MBAs Now Landing Starting Pay Over $160K).

NEARLY A THIRD OF MIT’S CLASS OF MBAS WENT INTO CONSULTING

All this makes MIT Sloan MBAs the most highly compensated of 2018–at least until Stanford GSB releases its 2018 employment report during the week of Dec. 10th. Stanford MBAs typically lead all other business graduates in the annual pay sweepstakes.

Of course, one reason why Sloan beat Harvard in pay this year has to do with industry choice. Some 31.6% of Sloan’s class took jobs in consulting versus the 25% over at Harvard. That is significant because the industry offering the highest starting salaries was consulting where the median base at Sloan was $147,000, considerably above the $132,500 in investment management. The highest paid salary in consulting was $185,000, not nearly as big a pay day as the Sloanie who landed a $230,000-a-year gig with an investment management firm, presumably a hedge fund. Of course, investment management made up for that salary difference with median sign-on bonuses of $52,5000 at Sloan, compared to $30,000 in consulting.

In a year when one school after another has been setting new records in MBA starting pay, Sloanies had a truly exceptional year. Besides beating out HBS in total pay, employment rates were among the highest ever. Some 90.9% of the class had job offers at gradution, up from 90.1% a year earlier, with 85.9% accepting those offers of employment, up from 84.2% last year. Within three months of graduation, 97.0% of the class reported offers, accepted by 93.6%, about the same as last’s year’s 97.1% offer rate accepted by 93.4%.

AMAZON IS TOP EMPLOYER FOR THE SECOND YEAR IN A ROW

While consulting again proved the most popular sector for Sloan’s grads, technology was not far behind. Tech firms employed 29.4% of this year’s class, down a touch from the 31.8% last year. The big news: Financial services made something of a comeback, though it remains far below the 26.6% of the Class of 2013 which chose that career field. Some 16.4% of this year’s graduating class went into financial services, up from 13.7% a year earlier.

For the second year in a row, Amazon hired more Sloan MBAs than any other company. The ecommerce giant employed 27 members of the class. Amazon overtook Sloan’s long-time number one employer McKinsey & Co. two years ago. This year, in fact, McKinsey fell to third place behind The Boston Consulting Group which hired two dozen Sloanies compared to McKinsey’s 22 (see table on top employers of Sloan MBAs over the years).

Also among the school’s top employers this year were Bain & Co. (15), Google (10), Deloitte Consulting (9), Fidelity Investments (6) and Goldman Sachs (6). Four companies—Analysis Group, Microsoft, Testa Motors and Wayfair—each hired five Sloan MBAs, while Ford Motor and IBM employed four each.

Of the 402 graduates in the Class of 2018, some 307 were seeking employment. Some 44 members of the class were sponsored and returned to their pre-MBA employers, while 39 students started their own businesses. MBA entrepreneurs this year accounted for 9.7% of the class, a big jump from the 4.6% in the Class of 2017.

The post MIT’s MBAs Outdid Harvard On Pay This Year appeared first on Poets&Quants.

from Poets&Quants
via IFTTT