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MBA Pay: Top B-Schools, Top Dollar

by | Sep 7, 2010 | Business, Business School, business school rankings, career, Financing the MBA, interesting articles, mba, professional advice | 2 comments

The article below is about a topic that will likely interest most readers of this site: post-MBA salaries. Specifically, the article focuses on research that reveals a high correlation between attending top business schools and earning high post-MBA salaries. This idea isn’t exactly a new one, but I can’t remember ever having seen any analysis comparing total 20-year post-MBA earnings between schools. That said, the analysis isn’t perfect. The article does describe some potential issues with the source data set, but I still found the outcomes of the analysis to be interesting, especially as it relates to international students who might come to the U.S. to pursue an MBA.

In the video below, I offer a few thoughts on the value of an MBA degree, based on the ranking of the school and the expected boost in salary. I should tee this up by saying that my perspective may not be what some folks want to hear, but it’s honestly what I believe. I’m a strong believer in advancing one’s education, but also believe that each person must do a thorough cost-benefit analysis to determine whether it is worth it to go to business school. I’ll give more on this idea in the video. The link to the article follows the video.

MBA pay: Top b-schools, Top dollar from Marquis Parker on Vimeo.

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Title: MBA Pay: Top B-Schools, Top Dollar
Author: Geoff Gloecker
Source: BusinessWeek.com – http://www.businessweek.com/bschools/content/may2010/bs20100521_243715.htm

Excerpt text from the article:

Harvard Business School is the most expensive full-time MBA program, with tuition and required fees eclipsing $106,000 for two years. It’s a big investment, but it pays off: HBS grads earn more money over the span of their careers than grads from any other MBA program. “It’s the trickle down effect,” says Robert Dammon, associate dean and professor of financial economics at Carnegie Mellon University’s Tepper School of Business (Tepper Full-Time MBA Profile). “The kinds of students that the best schools attract are going to get the highest-paying jobs.”


With few exceptions, Dammon is correct. The top-ranked—and most expensive—MBA programs produce the highest-salaried grads over the span of their careers, according to research commissioned by Bloomberg Businessweek. For the second year, Bloomberg Businessweek asked PayScale, a company that collects salary data from individuals through online pay comparison tools, to use its database of 23,000 MBA graduates at the top 45 U.S. business schools to calculate their median cash compensation—salaries and bonuses—around graduation and after they have an average of 5, 10, 15, and 20 years of work experience in the same industry. Bloomberg Businessweek used that data to calculate an estimate of median cash earnings over the entire 20-year span.