Source: Bloomberg
Tuesday January 25, 2011
B-School Job Market Thaws
By Alison Damast
After last year's dismal hiring season, many hoped that 2010 would bring better news to beleaguered business schools across the country. For the most part, those yearnings were met. The job outlook has improved, albeit slowly, at almost all of Bloomberg Businessweek's 30 top-ranked schools.
This year, recruiting started to bounce back, with all but three of the top 30 schools improving their job placement rates. Schools such as Emory University's Goizueta Business School (Goizueta Full-Time MBA Profile) and the University of Texas at Austin's McCombs School of Business (McCombs Full-Time MBA Profile), managed to boost their job placement rate by more than 10 percentage points over last year. Meanwhile, some schools like Dartmouth University's Tuck School of Business (Tuck Full-Time MBA Profile) managed to get their offer rate almost back to prerecession levels, with 97 percent of the class reporting job offers within three months of graduation.
For most schools, though, it has been a hard slog. Job placement numbers at the majority are still not quite back to where they were before the financial crisis hit. On average, about 12 percent of graduates were still jobless at the three-month mark. The sluggish job market has also hurt starting salaries and signing bonuses, which are flat or down at most schools.
Here, we list this year's median salaries and rate of job offers for our 30 top-ranked schools as they compare with 2009, when the financial crisis hit and many schools saw placement figures plunge. Click through to see how the landscape changed in 2010.
Note: The schools are ranked in order of placement rates. Those with the lowest percentage of unemployed 2010 graduates three months after graduation are listed first; those with the highest percentage appear last. In the case of ties, schools whose percentage improved the most since 2009 rank higher; those where the percentage most deteriorated rank lower.
