Middle Management Vanishing? Tuck Professor vs. Simon Dean

The University of Rochester Simon Business School

The Simon School’s rate of job offers by three months after graduation matches Tuck’s for 2014, at 95% (average starting salary for newly minted MBAs was $116,000 from Tuck and $92,000 from Simon), but Simon is not an extreme outlier among non-elite schools. The University of Pittsburgh’s Katz Graduate School of Business, ranked No. 43 in the country by Poets&Quants, had a 2014 rate of 96%, according to BusinessWeek, and even schools further down the rankings, such as the University of Cincinnati College of Business, ranked No. 69 by Poets&Quants, and the University of Oklahoma, ranked No. 79, hit rates of 84% and 88%, respectively.

Ainslie says he cringes whenever he sees an article such as Finkelstein’s BBC piece. “It worries me a little when I see people say things like, ‘Middle management is dying,’” Ainslie says. “What is dying is the number of American people in their 20s applying to MBA programs. A lot of this is because there are these continual Chicken Little sky-is-falling articles.”

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