What Companies Pay MBA Interns

HIGHEST PAID MBA INTERN LAST YEAR MADE THE ANNUAL EQUIVALENT OF $384,000

And the highest paid interns really raked in some big dough. The highest paid MBA intern last year appears to be a London Business School MBA student who managed to land a summer stint in consulting for $8,000 a week or $32,000 monthly–more than four times the class median. On an annualized basis, the MBA’s pay would have been a whopping $384,000. Obviously, that is something of an anomaly that can be attributed to the student’s previous work experience and track record or a return to a pre-MBA employer who had already highly valued the person.

In the U.S., the single highest internship offer went to a Columbia Business School student last year who also did a summer stint at a management consulting firm for $22,192 a month, or an annualized salary of more than $266,000. Meantime, a Stanford GSB student, who got a summer job with a private equity/leveraged buyout firm, pulled down more than three times the class median: $21,000 a month vs. the class’ $6,800. On the other hand, several Stanford MBAs agreed to token sums of $1,000 a month to intern in a media and entertainment company, a non-profit, and for an internet service company, the latter in all probability a startup.

Nearly across the board, the consulting firms–led by McKinsey, Bain, BCG and Deloitte–routinely are the most generous employers of MBA interns. At one school after another, consulting beats every other industry recruiting MBAs for the size of the pay packages. At Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, students who hung out in consulting firms last summer brought home a median $10,600 monthly paycheck, compared to just $6,700 in consumer product companies, $6,000 in private equity, or $7,200 in manufacturing.

TECH FIRMS ARE HIRING MORE MBA INTERNS THAN EVER

Another big trend: Over the past five years, more of the MBA students from top schools are gravitating to tech. Last year, for instance, 21% of Harvard Business School’s Class of 2015 took internship jobs with tech firms, up from 17% a year earlier and only 9% for the Class of 2011. Most of those gains have come at the expense of financial services which hired 27% of Harvard’s class for internship jobs last summer versus 37% for the Class of 2011.

That is true elsewhere. “We have doubled the percentage of interns in tech over the past five years from 8% to 16%,” says Darden’s Oakes, “and it is probably even higher for this year’s class, with Google, Microsoft, and Apple in the mix.”

And when it comes to tech, no top ranked business schools sends a higher percentage of its students into tech internships than UC-Berkeley’s Haas School where 37% of last year’s crop of MBA interns went into technology at such top hirers as Adobe Systems, Amazon, Cisco Systems, Google, LinkedIn, and Microsoft.

Monthly Median Intern Pay At Leading Business Schools

School Monthly Pay Weekly Pay High Low
Stanford $6,800 $1,700 $21,000 $1,000
Harvard $7,494 $1,874 NA NA
Wharton $8,000 $2,000 $17,000 $400
Chicago $8,200 $2,050 $16,000 $1,000
Columbia $8,000* $2,000* $22,192 $300
Kellogg $7,900* $1,975* $17,628 $700
MIT Sloan $8,000 $2,000 $15,800 $900
Dartmouth $8,000 $2,000 NA NA
Duke $7,725 $1,931 $12,500 $1,666
Berkeley $7,500 $1,875 NA NA
Michigan $7,800* $1,950* $16,250 $1,806
Yale $7,600 $1,900 NA NA
Virginia $7,356** $1,839** NA NA
UCLA $6,875 $1,738 $14,000 $1,600
Cornell $7,580** $1,895 NA NA
NYU $7,340 $1,835 $12,308 $600
Carnegie $6,997 $1,749 $11,250 $400
Texas $6,995 $1,761 NA NA
Emory $7,126 $1,782 NA NA
Indiana $6,500 $1,625 $12,100 $1,000
Georgetown $6,010** $1,503** NA NA
Univ. of Washington $5,600 $1,400 $11,250 $600
Vanderbilt $6,500 $1,625 $11,266 $1,500
London $6,732 $1,683 $32,000 $336
INSEAD $3,059 $765 $14,094 $70

Source: Business school employment reports

Notes: * Estimate, ** Average instead of median

Questions about this article? Email us or leave a comment below.