12 Charts That Explain Why So Many Want A Harvard MBA

A Harvard Business School graduation

When a Harvard MBA takes a job at Google or Microsoft, the school will count that as an MBA who entered the technology industry. But what an MBA hire will do at Google or Microsoft can differ greatly. Some will work in finance; others in marketing and still others in business development. So this chart helps to explain what Harvard MBAs actually do in the first jobs they take after graduation. The number one field? It's the same as it is among industry choices: finance, followed by consulting.

If you go to Harvard, you probably want a job in the U.S. Last year, 85% of the graduates accepted jobs in the U.S., largely in the northeast. Only 15% left the U.S. after graduation to get a job overseas, even though 37% of the class were international. That obviously means that the majority of international MBAs at Harvard are using the degree in part to emigrate to the U.S. The most popular destination was Europe, followed by Asia and Canada. But even regions in the U.S. , including the midwest and the southwest, draw more Harvard MBAs than most other regions of the world.

2020 was a great year for entrepreneurship at Harvard Business School. Some 105 members of the class of 732 students, or 11% of the entire class. That was a record, at least for the past five years and significantly more than the 64 graduates who did startups back in 2016. You can partly blame the pandemic for the explosion in 2020. At least some students found it difficult to find jobs and decided to pursue their own ideas instead.

The most popular area of startups at Harvard Business School is technology, followed by financial services and health care. That makes total sense. It can often be easier and less expensive to launch a tech company than one in manufacturing  and tech has changed or is changing every part of the economy. So that means that there is still a lot of opportunity to disrupt an existing industry or to enter an entirely new field with technology.

In more recent years, many MBAs prefer to go to work for a startup instead of a larger company where they would inevitably play a more narrow role. While median base salaries for Harvard MBAs who took jobs with startups it a record last year at $140,000, most of them also receive equity that could become very valuable if the company they joined were ever to go public. Overall, the percentage of the students who landed startup jobs fell sharply in 2020 as a result of the pandemic.