Consulting Overtakes Finance At Booth

University of Chicago, Booth School of Business

HIGHEST STARTING SALARY WAS $225,000 FOR AN MBA WHO WENT INTO PRIVATE EQUITY

Even so, the highest paid member of the class predictably landed the biggest pay day by taking a job in finance. The Booth report discloses that the highest salary–$225,000–went to a graduate who accepted a job in private equity. The lowest reported salary–$65,000–went to an MBA who accepted a job in the healthcare sector, even though the lowest median salaries overall were earned by MBAs who went into nonprofit, government and education jobs. That sector was the only one that failed to reach the six-figure median salary level, coming in at $99,750.

Booth is the first M7 school to release an early look at 2017 employment stats. School reports are only beginning to trickle out from less than a handful of top schools, including Emory University’s Goizueta School of Business and Vanderbilt University’s Owen Graduate School of Management. Duke University’s Fuqua School is expected to release its 2017 employment report shortly. Booth’s interim report is based on 92% of the students self-reporting their data. In this early release, Chicago Booth did not reveal the percentage of its class with job offers at graduation or three months later.

While the shift toward consulting was the most significant year-over-year change for Booth, there were other notable differences this year in the employment preferences of the school’s MBAs. Some 18.3% of the class took jobs in technology, up from 16.7% a year earlier at a time when MBAs headed into consumer products (5.8% this year vs. 6.9% in 2016) and healthcare (2.9% in 2017 vs. 3.3% last year) declined. Boothies who accepted jobs in the manufacturing sector were slightly up to 2.2% of the class, from 1.6% in 2016.

With Amazon emerging at the top employer of Booth’s interns this past summer, with 33 to McKinsey’s 26, Morton sees no worries yet for next year’s MBA market. “Based on what we have seen so far, all indicators are really positive. Second years came back from their summer internships with lots of offers. We had a good campus recruiting prcoess for next year’s graduating class, and the first-year class of MBAs is off and running. A corporate netowrking night this week was packed.”