MBA Pay By Industry

Tell me a story.

You can almost picture Mad Men’s Don Draper delivering a client pitch. Whether he was trading in tobacco or chocolate, Draper would reel off a story. Depending on the value proposition, he would play to the comforts of nostalgia or the power of identity by turning clients into the mothers and travelers they targeted. In the end, Draper left them with a new confidence in their wares – and a deeper appreciation for their customers.

These days, Draper would ditch the easel and white cards for a laptop and deck. More than that, every slide – every bullet, image, and example – would be deliberately calibrated to reams of data. They would be easy to understand – and impossible to forget. Most of all, these pitches – and the stories around them – would always come down to a number: the windfall from seizing the moment…or the costs of missing out and falling behind.

A STORY THAT DEVIATES FROM THE EXPECTED PLOT

For individuals choosing graduate business schools, data tells stories too. Take inputs. Want to know how many applications your target school receives? The side-by-side data shows which schools are most attractive to prospective applicants, a testament to their brand power within the marketplace. Such data also reveals which programs are the most selective, giving candidates a glimpse into the odds of landing a coveted spot.

Just look at Georgia Tech’s Scheller College and Washington University’s Olin School. Both are relatively small programs, enrolling 71 and 103 students during the 2023-2024 cycle respectively, all while ranking 19th and 21st last year according to Poets&Quants. That said, both programs carry a prestige that belies their size and ranking, as each accepts roughly 18% of applicants. Compare that to Northwestern University’s Kellogg School or the University of Chicago’s Booth School, which ranked 1st and 3rd last year. Their acceptance rates each hit 28%…or 10 points higher than either Scheller or Olin.

The story: Don’t assume a smaller size or lower rank means it is easier to land an acceptance letter. Every school is driven by different cultures and metrics.

THE NARRATIVE BEHIND THE NUMBERS

The same is true of outcomes. Most applicants sign up for business school to improve their long-term career prospects. That means finding out what they might be worth after graduation. Hence, applicants can compare schools by starting pay and bonus as a whole…or dig deeper into industry and regional pay to find anomalies. At the same time, applicants can weigh costs against returns, to see where they can get the greatest ‘bang for their buck’. In other words, pay conveys tales about which business programs offer the best paths for landing the jobs applicants want…at a cost they can afford.

Exhibit A: Consulting pay. Think graduates earn roughly the same base at the top schools? To borrow a popular MBA response: That depends. Among the Class of 2024, for example Dartmouth Tuck grads outearned their counterparts from Harvard Business School by roughly $8,500 starting out. While one HBS grad pulled in a $270,000 base to start in consulting, that person was eclipsed by a Scheller College grad, whose pay started at $312,000.

The story: It only takes one decision-maker to really like a candidate to skew compensation metrics…at least at the high end. That means there is some room for negotiation.

Every year, P&Q collects and analyzes the data that matters most to MBA candidates: GMAT and GRE scores, acceptance and placement rates, and average pay. Looking for the stories are behind the data? Check out our stories below with the latest data on admissions, outcomes, and opinion.