MIT’s Sloan School vs. Harvard Business School

Jobs and Pay:

The Class of 2009 graduated into one of the worst job markets in recent memory. As the stats show, roughly 30% of Sloan School grads didn’t have jobs at commencement. Harvard fared much better, but even the HBS numbers weren’t comforting: nearly a quarter of the class lacked jobs at graduation. Grads from both schools fared much better three months after commencement, but these numbers are rare lows for the two of the best business schools in the world. Starting pay for MIT grads is fifth highest among U.S. B-schools, after Stanford, Harvard, Dartmouth, Northwestern, and Michigan. The estimates of median pay 20 years out and over 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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Where MBAs Go:

With Wall Street in near total collapse during 2009, the big, global consulting firms stepped up to take a large percentage of the best graduates at the top business schools. This was especially true at both Harvard and MIT which saw record numbers of MBAs go into prestige management consulting positions. More than a third of MIT’s graduating class of 2009 took consulting jobs, three times as many at those who went into investment banking.

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Who Hires Who:

Unfortunately, Harvard is one of the very few business schools which declines to report on its major employers. As a result, it’s not known which firms hire the most Harvard MBAs, though you can be sure that the elite MBA players, McKinsey, BCG, Bain, Monitor, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and JPMorganChase are high on top of the list. Truth is, it’s hard to imagine a better degree that opens doors more widely than a Harvard-stamped MBA. At MIT, the big, major consulting firms carted away the largest groups of students, making McKinsey, Bain, BCG, and Deloitte the top four employers of Class of 2009 Sloanies. Not surprisingly, technology companies love MIT as a primary hunting ground: Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Cisco, and United Technologies all hired five or more of Sloan’s MBAs; Amgen, Biogen, British Telecom, Genzyme, Google, Hubspot, IBM, Infosys, Intel, and Novell all hired three to four grads each. (MIT does not breakout specific numbers of hirers for companies that employ fewer than five of its graduates).