Chicago’s Booth vs. Northwestern’s Kellogg School

Jobs and Pay:

The severe recession of 2009 hit Northwestern and Chicago hard as it did all the best business schools. Surprisingly given the greater diversity of industries that tend to hire Kellogg grads, however, Chicago seemed to fare slightly better. MBAs employed at commencement at Booth were a full five percentage points higher than those at Kellogg. What’s most surprising about that difference is that Booth has historically placed a far higher percentage of its grads in the especially hard-hit finance field. Even so, Kellogg MBAs tended to get higher starting salaries and bonuses–more than $5,000 each on average–and they tend to be better paid throughout their careers. The estimates of median pay over both 20 years and a full career come from a study by PayScale done for BusinessWeek and do not include stock options or equity stakes by entrepreneurs.

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Who Hires Who:

Big prestigious companies come to both Booth and Kellogg to hire graduates. But as the table below reveals, Booth MBAs get far more jobs in finance than those from Kellogg. Kellogg, on the other hand, does exceptionally well in management consulting and consumer marketing companies. In the latest year for which this data is available, for the Class of 2009, McKinsey hired more Kellogg grads than Booth MBAs. So did Boston Consulting Group by a dramatic 23 to 9 difference, along with Deloitte, Monitor Group, Booz & Co., and A.T. Kearney. Consumer marketing giants such as Johnson & Johnson, PepsiCo, General Mills, Kraft Foods, and Samsung were big hirers at Kellogg and relative no-shows at Booth. But the finance giants greatly offset that difference at Booth with Credit Suisse, Bank of America, Citigroup, and Deutsche Bank, taking double-digit numbers of Booth grads. Bottom line: If you want a job in finance, Chicago’s a good place to be. If you want a job in consulting or marketing, Kellogg is a great choice. NA does not necessarily mean that a company didn’t hire any graduates from the school, but rather that the number of grads it did hire was fewer than four.

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