INSEAD Posts Strong 2014 Jobs Report

The INSEAD campus

The INSEAD campus

Even as Europe’s economy struggles, INSEAD’s largest single graduating class, the 1,011 MBAs in the Class of 2014, turned in a very strong pay and jobs report. Median base salaries rose to €89,400 in 2014, up 4.3% from a year earlier, while median signing bonuses were €19,400, up a sizable 19.8%.

Yet, compared against U.S. schools, the numbers look weak, largely due to the decline of the Euro in the past year. Translated into U.S. dollars, INSEAD’s median base this year was under $100,000 at exactly $99,462–significantly below many U.S. MBA programs, including Columbia Business School, where the median base was $119,400 last year, and Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business, where grads reported median salaries of $111,000. And that’s despite a big tilt toward consulting which tends to pay above-market rates for graduates.

There also was a five-percentage-point drop in the number of graduates who had job offers three months after graduation (see below chart). Of the 977 graduates actively looking for a job after completing the accelerated MBA program in July and December of 2014, 877 (90%) reported having received at least one job offer three months after their graduation date. Oddly, that percentage was even lower than the 93% rate reported during the Great Recession in 2010.

CONSULTING FIRMS ACQUIRED 41% OF INSEAD’S GRADUATING CLASS IN 2014

Still, given Europe’s debt crises, bailouts, and soaring unemployment of late, INSEAD’s numbers are impressive. “The year of 2014 was another great one for INSEAD MBA students, with 90% securing employment within 3 months of graduation,” said Graham Hastie, interim global director of INSEAD’s career management development center. “This is a quite remarkable figure for our uniquely global programme, which at just 10 or 12 months is half the length of its world-class peers.

“It is even more remarkable when you consider that just 8% of the class were fully-sponsored, that 81% of the class changed one of the 3 main career dimensions (sector, function or country) that our students found jobs with 333 different employers in 61 different countries and that no more than 17% of the class found employment in any one country.”

The consulting industry grabbed an increasing share of INSEAD’s freshly minted MBAs. Some 41% of the class landed jobs in consulting, up from 34% a year earlier. Six of the eight largest employers of the class were all consultants, lead by McKinsey & Co. which employed 120 INSEAD MBAs, including 52 who returned to the firm. All told, a remarkable 13.7% of the students who reported getting job offers went to McKinsey. Boston Consulting Group took 70 INSEAD grads, 27 of them sponsored by the firm, while Bain & Co. hired 44, including 15 who returned to their former employer.