MBA Salary: It Depends on Your School

by | MBA Salary | 2 comments

Your MBA Salary depends largely on the school you attend. This comes from the “shouldn’t shock anyone department.”

MBA graduates from the best MBA schools make more over the course of their lifetime than those from other schools. Bloomberg Businessweek recently compiled research that indicated those graduating from a program like Harvard or Stanford stand to make $126,000 when starting out. Those with MBAs from lesser programs, however, stand to make much less.

This adds up over the course of your career. Graduates from the top 57 programs made $700,000 more over the course of their lifetime than graduates from the University at Buffalo. The contrast is even starker when compared with graduates from Harvard, whose graduates earn around $3.6 million, almost $2 million more than our University at Buffalo MBA grads.

Based on expected annual MBA salary alone the top schools were:

  1. Harvard University ($3.6 million over a 20 year career)
  2. University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School ($3.34 million over a 20 year career)
  3. Stanford Graduate School of Business ($3.29 million over a 20 year career)

Of course expected pay shouldn’t be the sole arbiter in choosing your school. One should consider the ease of entrance, convenience, and the school’s overall reputation, among others.

Read more on the affect of your school on MBA salary at Bloomberg Businessweek.

 

2 Comments

  1. MarkB_74
    MarkB_74 on July 5, 2011 at 5:00 pm

    I think a lot of the reason is because you have to be very smart and driven to get into Harvard or Stanford. It makes sense that a person who’s smart and driven will be making more money. That’s the main reason I think.

    • paul
      paul on July 5, 2011 at 11:51 pm

      I think that’s a huge component of the study that is underweighted, Mark.

      The Bloomberg study treats each MBA program as if it could be separated from the students that go there. As if you could pluck a student out of University at Buffalo, plug her into Harvard, and voila! $2 million more earning potential.

      But we all know that’s not true. The students at Buffalo chose it for very different reasons than the students that chose Harvard. And Harvard chose different students than Buffalo chose.

      In the end it proves a truism. Yes, the very gifted and driven students that choose to go to Harvard (or Stanford or Wharton, etc) and are accepted are going to take a different career path than your typical student at your local school.

      As I said in the beginning of the post, “this shouldn’t shock anyone.”