Quit A Six-Figure Job For An MBA? That’s What Students Have Done At These Ten B-Schools

If you are in your mid-to-late twenties and already comfortably earning a six-figure income, should you quit and go back to school for an MBA?

Walking out the exit door to spend two years without a paycheck is not a theoretical question. The median pre-MBA pay at ten business schools have done just that. The typical Stanford MBA leaves a job paying $123,743. At Harvard, incoming MBA students leave behind jobs that pay them $120,591. And at Wharton, MBA students walk from a job that paid them $116,137 a year.

Not surprisingly, according to an analysis, the highest pre-MBA salaries are at those three business schools. But there are at least ten MBA programs that routinely attract students who make their exit from jobs that have paid them a six-figure salary. After all, that is already twice the annual income of $52,936 a person who is 25-to-34 years old in the U.S.

PRE-MBA PAY AT TEN SCHOOLS IS IN SIX FIGURES

The majority of MBA students at Chicago Booth, Northwestern Kellogg, Dartmouth Tuck, Columbia, UC-Berkeley Haas, MIT Sloan, and UT-Austin McCombs have hit that magic six-figure threshold (see table below). There are students at many more business schools who are knocking at the door with pay that rounds up to six figures at NYU Stern, Cornell Johnson, and Virginia Darden.

The numbers come from recently published pre-MBA salary stats obtained by Bloomberg from its surveys of MBA graduates. It’s a reflection of the quality of admits–you can generally but not always assume that young professionals making more money are already succeeding in the world of business. In fact, it may be a more reliable signal of quality than a GMAT or GRE score which can be inflated by tutoring, prep classes, and the overall time spent by a test taker to prepare for the exam. On the other hand, it is also a sign of the elitist nature of MBA admissions at highly selective schools that tend to admit students from prestige undergraduate colleges and employers.

In any case, the pre-MBA pay stats tend to correlate with rankings of what are often thought of as the best MBA programs in the U.S. So perhaps it is little surprise that Stanford, Harvard, and Wharton comfortably sit at the top, a place where candidates are willing to forego their high salaries to get an MBA degree.

PRE-MBA PAY AT YALE BELOW VANDERBILT? HERE’S WHY

There also are surprises in the data. Incoming MBAs who go to Vanderbilt’s Owen School, for example, actually earned more than those who go to Yale School of Management: $90,148 at Owen vs.$88,811 at Yale. The most likely reason? Yale typically admits and enrolls in its MBA class more non-profit types who have worked in government, for NGOs, and for other non-profit organizations.

In the table below, we also show you what students expect to make in their first year after graduation as well as the estimated ten-year gain in income that can be attributed to getting the degree. The gain is most likely an underestimate for several reasons, including the fact that Bloomberg’s calculation assumes annual increases of just 3.9% through the ten-year period.

WHERE PRE-MBA PAY IS THE HIGHEST

Source: The Bloomberg School ROI Calculator

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