MBA Employment Report by School (2026): Salary, Placements, Top Employers

What MBA Employment Reports Tell You

Every top MBA program publishes an employment report within a few months of graduation. These documents are the most reliable data you can find on MBA career outcomes. They tell you what percentage of graduates got jobs, what they earned, which industries hired them, and which employers showed up consistently.

Reading them carefully tells you a lot more than the headline salary number. A school might post a median base of $175K, but if 60% of graduates entered consulting at $190K and 40% entered corporate roles at $145K, the blended median undersells the top bucket and misleads the bottom. You need the industry breakdown, not just the aggregate.

The main numbers to look at in any employment report: the median base salary, the percentage employed within three months of graduation, the industry breakdown (what percentage went into consulting, finance, tech, and so on), and the list of top employers. Each piece reveals something different.

M7 Employment Reports: Key Numbers

Here is what the M7 employment reports show for the Class of 2025. Figures come from each school's official employment report; sources linked below the table.

Sources: Stanford GSB 2025 MBA Employment Report; Wharton 2025 Career Report; HBS Employment Data (Class of 2025); Chicago Booth Employment Report 2025; Kellogg Class of 2025 Career Outcomes; Columbia Business School 2024 Employment Report (Class of 2024); MIT Sloan 2025-2026 MBA Employment Report.

How to Read Median Salary Data

Stanford GSB and Wharton both show $185K median base for the Class of 2025. HBS came in at $184,500. Those numbers are not meaningfully different. A few hundred dollars in median base salary across an entire graduating class tells you nothing useful about where you specifically will land.

What matters more than the aggregate median: the median within your target industry. Employment reports break out median base salary by function and by industry. At most M7 programs, consulting pays $190K base uniformly across MBB. Finance (specifically investment banking) pays $175K base but adds $100K+ in year-end bonuses. Tech pays a lower base but adds significant equity.

The other critical number is the percentage employed at three months. At top programs, this runs 92-96%. Anything below 90% signals a program where career services is struggling to place students in a reasonable window, which matters if you're planning to service student debt immediately after graduation.

Consulting Percentage: Which Schools Lead

The share of graduates entering consulting varies widely across top programs. For the Class of 2025, Kellogg led the M7 at 38% and Booth came in at 36.7%. Consulting placement at M7 programs runs from 11% at Stanford GSB to 38% at Kellogg. Stanford is the outlier: its class skews heavily toward tech (35%) and finance (33%), with entrepreneurship taking another meaningful slice.

Outside the M7, several programs post consulting placement rates that rival or exceed the M7 average:

• Duke Fuqua: 34% consulting for the Class of 2025, led by Accenture Strategy, Bain, BCG, McKinsey, and Deloitte. (Fuqua 2025 Report)
• NYU Stern: 32.8% consulting for the Class of 2025, with Goldman Sachs, McKinsey, JPMorgan, and BCG among top employers. (Stern 2025 Report)

If your goal is a consulting career, don't assume M7 automatically means a stronger consulting pipeline. The specific school matters less than whether MBB recruits heavily on campus. Check each school's list of top employers in the employment report, not just the aggregate percentage.

Finance Placement: Where the Jobs Are

Finance (investment banking, private equity, hedge funds, asset management, and corporate finance) is the dominant career path at several M7 programs. For the Class of 2025, Wharton led at 38.2% financial services, Columbia at 35.9%, HBS at 34%, and Stanford GSB at 33%. Stanford's finance category carries a large VC and PE slice; the breakdown matters when you're comparing across schools.

One thing employment reports don't always make clear: the difference between investment banking (which hires heavily from top programs right out of school) and private equity (which often hires from banking one or two years after graduation). When a school says "34% into financial services," that bucket includes both IB associate roles starting at $175K base and PE roles with total compensation well above $300K. The breakdown within financial services is the number that matters if you're choosing between banking and PE.

Schools with strong PE placement tracks tend to be the same ones with strong IB placement: Wharton, Columbia, Booth, and HBS. The reason is structural. PE firms hire from the pool of IB associates who came from MBA programs. If your program has a strong IB pipeline, PE naturally follows two to three years later.

Technology: The Rising Sector

Technology placement has grown significantly at most top MBA programs over the past decade. For the Class of 2025, Stanford GSB led the M7 at 35% into tech. MIT Sloan placed 23.3% into technology and Berkeley Haas placed 39% (the highest among verified programs, driven by its Bay Area recruiting ties). At Wharton, tech came in at 15.3%.

The tech employment report story is complicated by compensation structure. Base salaries at Amazon, Google, Meta, and Apple run $160K-$180K for MBA hires, which looks lower than consulting on paper. But the equity component changes the math. FAANG companies regularly grant MBA hires $150K-$300K in restricted stock units vesting over four years. Total first-year compensation at a FAANG company often runs $230K-$280K or more, depending on the equity grant.

Tech employment reports at most schools report base salary and signing bonus, but the RSU component is often left off or disclosed separately. When comparing tech compensation to consulting or banking compensation in school employment reports, make sure you're looking at total compensation, not just base.

Top Employers by School: What the Lists Show

The top employer lists in MBA employment reports reveal which companies invest most heavily in each school's recruiting pipeline. A few patterns appear across the M7:

McKinsey, BCG, and Bain appear in the top employer list of every M7 school and most top-15 programs. These firms recruit broadly and deeply. At consulting-heavy schools like Kellogg and Booth, MBB often takes 10-15% of the entire graduating class. At finance-heavy schools like Wharton and Columbia, the MBB slice is smaller but still significant.

Amazon is arguably the most consistent MBA employer across all tiers. The company recruits at M7 programs and at state schools simultaneously, taking product managers, operations leaders, and strategy roles. If your school has Amazon in its top-10 employer list, it's a sign the school has credible reach into tech recruiting.

Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, and Morgan Stanley cluster at the finance-heavy programs: Wharton, Columbia, HBS, and Booth. Their presence in the top employer list is a meaningful signal of whether the school has a genuine Wall Street pipeline.

When you're evaluating a school's employment report, look at the top employer list and ask: are the companies I want to work for represented? If your target company isn't in the top 10 employers, that doesn't mean they don't recruit there, but it does mean the pipeline is thin enough that you'll need to network actively rather than relying on on-campus recruiting.

What the Report Doesn't Tell You

Employment reports are self-reported and have methodological quirks worth understanding before you use them to make a $300K decision.

First, not every graduate is included. Reports typically cover graduates who were seeking employment at graduation or within three months. Graduates who returned to a sponsoring employer, deferred employment, started companies, or didn't respond to the survey may be excluded from the base. The "95% employed" number sounds clean, but the denominator is usually "those seeking employment," not the full graduating class.

Second, salary data is self-reported by graduates who chose to disclose it. Non-disclosure rates of 20-40% are common. The median salary you see reflects the graduates who responded, not necessarily a representative sample of all graduates.

Third, "employed" typically means an offer accepted, not day-one at the job. A graduate who accepts a consulting offer in April but doesn't start until October counts as employed. This is standard practice and not a flaw, but it means the employment rate doesn't equal "people currently working."

None of these caveats mean the reports are useless. They're the best data available. Just read them as directional indicators rather than precise measurements.

See also: MBA ROI Analysis · MBA Consulting Percentage by School · MBA Salary by Industry · Overall Rankings