Our Most Popular Stories Of 2016

8) What Graduating MBAs Made In 2015

Saying that 2015 was a really good year for MBA graduates was an understatement. For young professionals coming out of business school, the year was one for the record books, with record levels of employment and starting pay at many of the world’s highly selective MBA programs. In fact, since the onset of the recovery, most schools are reporting double-digit increases in MBA compensation for the first time in many years (the early evidence is that growth in pay slowed in 2016 but all the numbers are not yet out).

After a long slog of stagnant pay–the result of the Great Recession–the financial sector significantly raised the ante in attracting MBAs from highly selective business schools. The median base salary in investment banking jumped by $25,000 last year to $125,000, with median signing bonuses that reached $47,500 at Harvard Business School and $40,000 at Chicago Booth. Median base for investment management jobs at Harvard rose to $150,000 from $125,000 two years ago, with $30,000 sign-on bonuses, and median other guaranteed compensation of $120,060, up from $72,500 in 2013.

It was heightened competition for MBA talent from the big guns in finance that also caused the MBA-hungry consulting industry to increase their base salary offers to $140,000 last year, a $5,000 increase from the standard $135,000 offers to top-tier MBA graduates in recent years. And tech firms, which have been hiring an increasing number of MBAs, pushed up their offers as well. At HBS, for example, median base pay rose to $125,000, up from $115,000 two years earlier, while sign-on bonuses jumped to $25,000, from $20,000. Read more.

9) America’s Wealthiest Business Schools

The most elusive yet revealing stat about a business school is the size of its endowment. Few schools disclose this number in any public way, though it’s fair to say that B-school deans put more focus on this one number than any other. After all, it’s the ultimate measure of a school’s true “wealth.”

With painstaking research, Poets&Quants produced the most complete and up-to-date list of business school endowments ever published, with more than 50 top schools sharing their latest data. More than just bragging rights, a school’s endowment may well tell you more about the quality and strength of a school than any ranking which is why this story attracted so much attention in 2016.

A wealthy school is more likely to attract and retain the best faculty and staff. It’s no surprise that business schools with the largest budgets devote at least half of their expenses to salaries and benefits. A wealthier school is also more likely to have better facilities, in the form of new state-of-the-art buildings or well-maintained historic buildings with the latest technology. Wealthy schools typically have more flexibility to fight for the best students in the form of scholarship money, which in turn improves the overall profile of an incoming class and ultimately the career outcomes of its graduates.

In fact, the size of a school’s endowment is far more important an indicator of a school’s power and impact than an individual ranking, location, facilities, acceptance rate, career prospects, network strength, or industry placement. Because a business school’s wealth typically comes from gifts and other donations from its alumni network, a school’s wealth is a good indication of the strength of its alumni base. Which schools lead and which institutions have some catching up to do was the focus of this exclusive study of endowments. Read more.

10) Our 2016 Honor Roll: The 40-Under-40 Most Outstanding MBA Professors

Poets&Quants latest annual list of rising stars at business schools from around the world was another big reader favorite (we’re already asking students and alumni to nominate under-40 faculty for next year’s gallery of professorial stars). Last year, the response to our nominating call was immediate and the response was incredible. In all, 75 professors from 40 different business schools all over the world were nominated by students, alumni and the schools themselves.

What the nominations uncovered was an inspiring group of young women and men who are making red hot names for themselves through academic research and classroom teaching. Here, we speak of classroom teaching that’s so impactful, it’s almost legendary as it causes groups of students (and even alumni) to ban together and submit one nomination after another..after another.

Harvard Business School’s Rory McDonald received a whopping 20 nominations, the most ever received by a faculty member in the four times that Poet&Quants has showcased the top under 40 professors since 2011. The 37-year-old McDonald consistently gets rave reviews for his teaching of the elective course Building and Sustaining a Successful Enterprise after having won similar praise for having taught the Technology and Operations Management course in the MBA required curriculum. University of Toronto Rotman School of Management’s András Tilcsik, a 34-year-old assistant professor of strategic management, wasn’t far behind with 13 nominations, while Wharton’s Laura Huang, a 37-year-old teacher of entrepreneurship, received 10. Read more.

DON’T MISS: OUR MOST POPULAR STORIES OF 2016 ON UNDERGRADUATE BUSINESS SCHOOLS or OUR MOST POPULAR STORIES OF 2016 ON EXECUTIVE MBA PROGRAMS