A Quick Note about the MBA and Business School Data

 Let’s pause for a second and reflect on what you’ve learned so far. We’ve covered frameworks to help you choose schools and build your career plan, looked closely at school stereotypes, learned about defining careers by industry and function, explored which post-MBA industries and functions are most common at top US programs, and reviewed the career searching process at school. Whew!

 

In the following sections, we’re giving you a glimpse into specific industries and functions, using the data from placement reports. We’re shifting from how to think about your post-MBA career, to sharing job-specific information with you, backed by placement report data.

 

Before we get into it, we want to share some information about the data. We’re going to use two metrics from the placement reports to explore which MBAs have the best outcomes for various functions and industries:

 

·       % of grads that go into each function / industry: This helps you determine which industries are well-represented at different MBA programs. This might mean that more companies from that industry recruit at that school, and/or that Career Services at that school has more experience and resources to support you recruiting for that industry.

·       # of grads that go into each function / industry: This is also an important

data point – for example, 13% of Minnesota Carlson grads and only 4% of HBS grads go into Manufacturing… but since HBS is a much bigger school than Carlson, that ends up being 10 grads from Carlson and 22 from HBS. The

number of grads that go into each industry helps you determine the actual number of job opportunities coming out of each MBA program.

 

We also want to note that our comparative data sets do not include geographic data (i.e., what state or region recruiters are hiring for), but you can look that up on each school’s website. A couple of additional points about geography:

 

·       In general, the higher ranked the MBA, the less geographically focused recruiting will be on campus. When McKinsey hires at Wharton, for example, they are hiring for any office globally, whereas at Emory, they are primarily hiring for the Atlanta office. If you have geographical constraints, be sure to ask the Career Services office about placement in your preferred geography for your target jobs.

·       Schools’ local industries influence the jobs that grads get. For example, the

best MBA programs for media and entertainment are Anderson and USC Marshall, both in Los Angeles. This happens because many companies recruit MBAs locally, and because schools become well-known for regional industries and attract students who want to work in those industries. So, if all your dream companies are New York-based, consider applying to more schools in New York!

 

One last note: Schools report their employment data in different ways, especially data about specific employers. Some schools report every company that hired their grads, but other schools only report top hirers or don’t report employers at all (looking at you, Stanford). Additionally, some schools combine full-time and internship employers in their list of companies, because why not make things more complicated? All this is to say, read employer lists and analyses carefully to

understand where the data might overstate or understate opportunities for full- time roles for grads.