Another M7 School Reports MBA Salaries & Pay Slipping In 2024: Kellogg

2024 will be a year to forget for many in the world of graduate business education. For MBAs looking for jobs fresh out of school, it was a year of struggle unlike any in recent memory — worse even than the pandemic year of 2020, at least by some key metrics.

Even graduates of the M7 B-schools had a rougher than usual time on the job hunt. Stanford Graduate School of Business released its MBA employment report last week showing salaries, signing bonuses, and overall compensation all sinking, as well as — more troublingly — its grads’ increasing difficulty finding jobs in certain familiar sectors. Now Northwestern Kellogg School of Management has published its 2024 data and, lo and behold, they largely align with what has been reported elsewhere — with one big caveat.

Median salary for Kellogg grads is down $5K, to $170,000, and median overall compensation is down 1.7%, to $197,000. (Poets&Quants calculates compensation by combining base salary and signing bonus and weighting the bonus by the percentage of those receiving it; Kellogg uses a different measure, and calculates its median compensation for the Class of 2024 at $205K. This, too, is a decline from Kellogg’s 2023 comp number of $207K.) Meanwhile both offers and acceptances for Kellogg MBAs at three months post-graduation were down by 5 percentage points compared to 2023, to 90% and 87%, respectively.

TECH PLACEMENT ACTUALLY RISES

About that caveat: Unusually for any business school this year, tech placement was up at Kellogg, to 20% from 17% last year. Tech returned to the No. 2 spot after finance had jumped into the second spot for the first time since 2015 (see chart above). Elsewhere, tech has been on a two- and three-year slide; at UC-Berkeley Haas School of Business, for example, where tech had been the top industry for more than two decades, it was displaced this year by finance after falling for the last three years.

But as Liza Kirkpatrick, assistant dean of Kellogg’s Career Management Center, writes in a blog about the new employment report, Kellogg Class of 2024 grads embraced the beleaguered industry and "accepted roles such as product manager and product marketing manager at leading software, fintech, health tech, e-commerce and hardware firms. Others landed tech-focused roles in traditional firms, stepping into product manager positions at companies such as Capital One and Walmart. Tech industry companies hiring from Kellogg this year include Amazon, Adobe Systems, Google, Apple, PayPal, VISA, Uber, Samsung and many others."

Tech claimed the high salary for the entire class, at $260K (last year's high was a monster $450K finance payday), and notably also notched the highest median signing bonus ($42,150). The highest median base salary went to consultants, who represented the largest group of the class (35%) and made a median $190K (same as last year).

Regionally, there was little change in Kellogg MBAs' post-graduation distribution: As a Midwest institution, the school has always seen the largest group of any graduating class remain in the region, especially Chicago. Thirty-six percent of the Class of 2024 stayed in the Midwest, up from 32% in 2023. More headed West: 27%, up from 23% last year but down from 30% in 2022. The spike in East Coast interest from last year was just that, as New York- and Boston-bound Kellogg grads shrank to 21% from 28%. Nine percent went South, down from 11%, and 6% went international, same as last year.

KELLOGG MBA EMPLOYMENT 2019-2024 

Stats	2024	2023	2022	2021	2020	2019
Median Base Salary	$170,000	$175,000	$165,000	$150,000	$144,000	$140,000
Median Signing Bonus	$30,000	$30,000	$30,000	$30,000	$30,000	$30,000
% Receiving Bonus	90%	85%	87%	86%	93%	83.6%
Median Total Pay*	$197,000	$200,500	$191,100	$175,800	$172,200	$165,080
Offers by 3 Months	90%	95%	99%	97%	95%	98%
Acceptances By 3 Months	87%	92%	97%	96%	93%	95%

*Calculated by adding base salary and signing bonus and weighting bonus by percentage of grads reporting receiving one

Source: Kellogg

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POSITIVE NEWS

It may be a temporary reflection of the challenging year or it may be the beginning of a more permanent shift, but schools have increasingly seen the standard three-month employment data reporting interregnum as insufficient. Kellogg is the first to capture this in its actual report by including a five-month number: After five months, the school notes, 92% of its 2024 class had accepted job offers.

Another positive spin on a tough year: The median base salary for Kellogg MBAs is approximately double graduates' pre-MBA salaries and has risen 21% over the last five years.

And another: Nine percent of 2024 graduates accepted roles in healthcare, a five-year high and an increase from 3% last year. "Their success," writes Liza Kirkpatrick, "is a recognition of Kellogg’s considerable strength in addressing the challenges and opportunities in the healthcare ecosystem. Graduates are entering roles having taken advantage of the many academic and co-curricular opportunities provided through Healthcare at Kellogg, such as the innovative Healthcare Deep Dive course. These students’ next steps are taking them to a wide variety of exciting companies, including pharmaceutical manufacturers such as Eli Lilly & Co and Pfizer; biotech and healthtech firms such as Genentech and Headspace and insurers such as UnitedHealth Group and Humana."

Kellogg also saw stronger interest in entrepreneurship this year, with 12 graduates starting a new business, including those starting search funds. "Programs such as APEX, the Zell Fellows Program and programming through Entrepreneurship at Kellogg are preparing them to succeed as they launch and grow their startups," Kirkpatrick writes.

"The Class of 2024 is breaking boundaries in career success, with our graduates landing exceptional roles across the global business landscape," she writes. "From finance to healthcare, and tech to consulting, Kellogg’s newest alumni are finding opportunities that align with their ambitions and the rigorous training they’ve received at Kellogg. The entrepreneurial spirit was alive and well in this class, with a record number of students choosing to forego a traditional hiring path to start a new business."

KELLOGG MBA CLASS OF 2024 JOBS BY INDUSTRY

Industry	Accepted job offers	Median base salary	Base salary range	Median signing bonus
Consulting	35%	$190,000	$70,000 – 230,000	$30,000
Consumer Packaged Goods	7%	$128,000	$115,000 – 150,000	$35,000
Financial Services	19%	$173,000	$100,000 – 225,000	$40,000
Healthcare	9%	$140,000	$120,000 – 185,000	$30,000
Manufacturing	2%	$136,186	$118,400 – 175,000	$27,500
Media/Entertainment	2%	$140,000	$135,000 – 250,000	$11,000
Retail	3%	$133,000	$130,000 – 178,000	$25,000
Technology	20%	$157,000	$120,000 – 260,000	$42,150

Source: Kellogg

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A LOOK AROUND THE COUNTRY

The flood of late-year employment reports is a good indicator of the tenor of what those reports contain. At this late date (December 18) a handful of high-profile schools still have not released their 2024 data. Those that have, have shown consistent struggles in placement and pay:

Stanford GSB: Average base salary shrank by 1% to $187,504, average signing bonus dropped by nearly 20% to $33,967, and total compensation was down 3.2%, to $268,490. Job offers at three months dropped to 88% from 89% last year. Acceptances fell from 82% in 2023 to 80% this year.

Dartmouth Tuck School of Business: While the class median salary and bonus were flat for a third straight year, at $175K and $30K, respectively, MBAs receiving a bonus grew to 84% from 83% — increasing the total compensation from $199,900 last year to $200,200 this year. Ninety-one percent of the Class of 2024 received offers after 90 days, and 89% accepted, only the second time in 11 years that Tuck grads have failed to reach 95% job offers.

NYU Stern School of Business: Stern Class of 2024 MBAs report an average salary of $166,148, down 1.2% from their predecessors, and an average signing bonus of $37,028, down 4.5%. Total compensation dropped 1.4% to $199,473. Offers at graduation were down nearly 5 percentage points to 80.6%, while offers by three months after graduation (86.1%) were down more than 8 points.

Virginia Darden School of Business: Darden MBAs reported an average base salary of $163,710, down 2.5% from the average reported by their colleagues in the Class of 2023. The school’s average signing bonus also fell this year, by nearly 8%, to $34,562. Class of 2024 job offers at graduation plummeted by nearly 6 percentage points, to 86.5% of the class; acceptances at graduation dropped more than 6 points, to 83.4%. Offers by three months post-grad were down from 95.4% to 92.9%, and acceptances at 90 days were down from 94.2% to 90.1%.

Michigan Ross School of Business: Median starting salaries for Ross MBAs fell by $5,000 to $170,000, and median overall pay for graduates dropped as well, to $195,800, a decline of 3.1%. Just 77.5% of Ross’s latest class reported receiving offers by graduation this spring, down from 90.5% a year earlier. After three months, the overall class offer number had climbed to 84.6%, after six months, more than 90% of Ross MBAs had job offers.

UC-Berkeley Haas: Average base salary for Haas Class of 2024 MBAs was $159,412, down from $162,831 for their predecessors, while the average signing bonus dropped to $34,740 from $36,777. Average total compensation dropped by 2.1% to $184,425 from $188,354. About 86% of the 207 graduates seeking post-graduation employment received offers within three months of graduation, down from 90%, with 84% accepting offers within that window, down from 89%.

DON'T MISS NORTHWESTERN KELLOGG JOINS THE $200K STARTING PAY CLUB (2023) and 2024 BROUGHT SMALL SALARY, BIG BONUS SETBACKS FOR STANFORD MBAs