Higher Salaries for 2008 MBA Graduate

Our investigation for BusinessWeek’s 2008 ranking of full-time MBA programs  came out a truly interesting fact. While there were many forecastings of gloom and doom for students graduating in 2009, those who graduated this year did astonishingly well for themselves.

My co-worker, Geoff Gloeckler, compared the post-MBA salaries for the preceding class of 2008 with those for the class of 2006, the last time we ranked full-time programmes. He found out that the 2008 salaries averaged $104,000, a growth of 9% and the first time that figure topped $100,000 in the history of the BusinessWeek rankings.

These calculates—for salaries only, not taking into account bonuses, stock options, etc.—are for all the schools taking part in the ranking. (They’re also founded on BusinessWeek’s own research of grads; this data does not come from the schools, and does not present the entire class, just a big part of it.) While the schools that take part vary slightly from ranking to ranking, it’s a fairly stable group, so this is very close to an apples-to-apples comparing.

These calculates—for salaries only, not taking into account bonuses, stock options, etc.—are for all the schools taking part in the ranking. (They’re also founded on BusinessWeek’s own research of grads; this data does not come from the schools, and does not present the entire class, just a big part of it.) While the schools that take part vary slightly from ranking to ranking, it’s a fairly stable group, so this is very close to an apples-to-apples comparing.

When you look at independent schools, the numbers are even more striking. Stanford takes the honors with the highest average post-MBA salary, $125K, up from $110K in 2006, when Harvard ($121K), Wharton ($120K), and Dartmouth ($115K) all leapt about 15%. Nevertheless, not everybody was rolling in the dough. At New York University the 2008 average post-MBA salary topped out at $95K—no shift from 2006—while Yale ($97K) saw a very minor 2% increase.

I consider that when we do the rankings again in 2010 we’ll have a much contrasting (and far more sad) tale to tell. Thus enjoy these figures while you can.