Another Record MBA Pay Year At Harvard Business School

Outside on the Harvard Business School campus

A BIG DECLINE IN THE NUMBER OF HARVARD MBAS TAKING JOBS AT PRIVATE STARTUPS

Another determination in pay is location. MBA graduates who accepted jobs overseas earned more than $25,000 less in starting total compensation than the majority of students who gained jobs in the U.S. The difference? $173,400 in the U.S. vs. $148,350 outside the U.S. The main element of pay that was different was starting salaries: A median of $150,000 in the states versus $124,150 abroad (see table on page four).

Harvard said that roughly 10% of its graduates went into startup companies, defined as organizations that are still private and 10 years of age or younger. That is a big decline from the 17% who chose this career option last year. Those firms paid the MBAs median base salaries of $140,000 in 2020, $3,000 more than the median last year. Not surprisingly, 53% of those companies were in the tech space, while 12% were in healthcare.

Whether COVID had a direct impact on students becoming entrepreneurs is an open question. But what is not a question is the big rise in startup activity among Harvard MBAs in the Class of 2020. Some 105 members, or 11.3% of the graduates chose to become entrepreneurs founding startups. That’s a big jump on the previous year when only 65 graduates, or 7% of the class, did their own startups. Harvard said that 56% of this year’s founders have a co-founder on their teams and 47% (up from 22% in 2019) of them connected with their co-founders on the HBS campus.

HBS said there were 930 members of the Class of 2020, of which 72% were seeking employment this year. Roughly 13% were sponsored by their employers and will return to them or are already employed, down from 15% a year earlier.