Oops! No Million-Dollar MBA Afterall

Oops!

About a week ago we reported that a Class of 2012 MBA from Manchester Business School broke the million-dollar salary barrier.

It now turns out the school made an error in converting the graduate’s pay from a different currency. The unidentified MBA not only didn’t land his reported $1,088,638 base salary. In fact, the person’s starting salary was less than $90,000.

The salary error, first reported by Bloomberg BusinessWeek, did not impact the magazine’s recent rankings of business schools because starting salaries are not a factor in the BW rankings.

A spokesperson for the school apologized for the mistake. Before publication of our story, PoetsandQuants had called the school to ask for comment on the number, but the director of career services at Manchester had been on vacation.

“We have reviewed the data we received from our students for this year’s BusinessWeek ranking and it appears an error was made in the currency conversion of one individual’s salary, for which we are sorry,” said Clare Hudson, director of MBA careers at Manchester Business School.

“Although this hasn’t impacted our overall ranking position, we are working with the team at Bloomberg Business Week to ensure they have the correct data and we have already reviewed our processes to ensure that this doesn’t happen again.  Although a $1 million salary is remarkable for an MBA student, it isn’t unheard of as we have previously had a student achieve this salary graduating from our full-time MBA program.”

“Also there was no translating/interpreting by BW–it was reported by the school, in writing, and validated by the school,” said Louis Lavelle, the top editor of BusinessWeek’s business school team in a comment left on PoetsandQuants.”Then, and only then, was it reported to our readers.”

 

 

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