McKinsey Hires 8.7% Of Booth Class

Elspeth Wilde is a Chicago Booth MBA who landed an internship with Kurt Salmon

McKinsey & Co., the prestige global consulting firm and the largest single employer of MBAs in the world, significantly increased its hires from the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business this year. The firm hired 41 Booth MBAs from the Class of 2013, up 46% from the 28 McKinsey employed last year. McKinsey alone was responsible for hiring 8.7% of the entire class.

Meantime, the highest reported starting salary for a graduating MBA at Booth was a quarter of a million, a sum that does not include either a starting bonus or guaranteed bonus number. The $250,000-a-year gig was landed by a Boothie who took a private equity job and had come to the school with three to five years of work experience.

That’s according to the school’s final employment report for the Class of 2013 released earlier this month. Booth said the median annual starting salary for this year’s crop of MBAs was $115,000, with a median $25,000 signing bonus. About 60% of the graduates received signing bonuses this year. Another 11% of the class received other median guaranteed compensation of $27,500, according to the school.

It was another good year for Booth. The school reported that 86.3% of its MBAs had job offers by graduation and 93.7% had offers three months later. Slightly over half of the job offers came from internships, with 50.2% of the graduates reporting that they took jobs with their summer employers. Just 4.2% of the class started their own businesses right out of school.

A $200K BASE WAS ALSO LANDED BY AN MBA IN INVESTMENT MANAGEMENT

Overall, the highest median salaries at Booth in 2013 were paid by the consulting industry: $135,000. Consulting claimed nearly a third of the entire class, 30.7%, a few percentage points lower than the 35.0% of Booth grads who went into financial services. Though the median salary in finance was significantly lower than consulting at $100,000 a year, some of the biggest individual paychecks went to MBAs who landed jobs in the sector.

Besides the $250K in private equity, Booth reported that another grad who went into investment management–a category defined by Booth to include hedge funds–had a starting salary of $200,000. A Boothie who went into venture capital landed base salary of $148,000. The third highest reported salary was in healthcare–a category that includes biotech: $180,000. Usually, such high sums are awarded to graduates with the kind of pre-MBA work experience that makes them especially valuable to an employer.

MCKINSEY HIRED 41 BOOTH MBAS THIS YEAR, MORE THAN ANY OTHER EMPLOYER

Four of the top five employers of Booth grads this year were management consulting firms, led by McKinsey. Bain & Co. took on 21 hires, or 4.4% of the class, Boston Consulting Group, brought aboard 18, or 3.8% of the class, while A.T. Kearney hired a dozen MBAs, doubling its intake from the six it brought in last year. Credit Suisse was the largest financial employer at Booth this year, landing 13 members of the Class of 2013. Amazon.com was the sixth largest employer, taking on 10 Boothies, exactly the same number as Morgan Stanley.

(See following page for major employers and their hires for 2013 and 2012 at Booth)