Another M7 Tale Of Woe In The MBA Job Market, This Time From Chicago Booth

Chicago Booth School of Business — an M7 B-school, Poets&Quants‘ No. 3 B-school in the U.S., and a past No. 1 in U.S. News‘ annual ranking — was among the majority of big-name B-schools whose MBA classes took big steps backward in 2024 compared to their predecessors.

Booth’s latest class of 521 MBAs seeking employment reported a median salary of $175K, down $5K from the 527 in the Class of 2023, and a median signing bonus of $31K, down from $33K. These declines drove the new class’s total compensation down to $197,010 from $203,430, a setback of 3.2%. (Poets&Quants calculates total MBA compensation by combining base salary and signing and other bonuses and weighting the bonuses by the percentage of those receiving them. B-schools often use different measures to get a total pay number, sometimes simply adding salary and bonuses. For Booth’s signing bonuses, in both 2023 and 2024, 71% of MBA job seekers reported receiving one.)

Total pay for Boothies had grown 14% between 2021 and 2023, including a 3.5% increase between 2022 and 2023. It’s the first contraction of pay seen at the B-school in more than a decade.

An even bigger problem for Booth grads in 2024, as it has been for M7 peers Harvard Business School, MIT Sloan School of Management, Kellogg School of Management, and numerous other top schools in the U.S.: steep drops in placement rates. Job offers at three months were down for Boothies for a second straight year — though much more dramatically than last year, to 86.8% from 95.6%; while job acceptances fell more than 10 percentage points, to 84.1% from 94.3%.

PERCENTAGE OF HIRES BY MBB DROPS SIGNIFICANTLY

Consulting and finance have been neck-and-neck as the top industries for Booth MBAs for most of the last 10 years. It looked like consulting was pulling away last year when it climbed to an all-time high of 38.6% while finance — once Booth's bread and butter — had a big decline, dropping to 32.6% of the class from 35.1%. But this year consulting dropped nearly 5 percentage points while finance was stable, bringing the two back into a dead heat once again (see chart below).

Tech — beleaguered as it has been over the last three years — fell again after a one-year upward flutter, dropping to 14.8%. Just three years ago in 2021, tech accounted for almost 23% of the jobs accepted by the entire class of Booth MBAs.

The median salary for new Booth consultants fell to $190K from $192K in the previous class, and the signing bonus of $30K was unchanged. The salary range was $73K-$249,375. The tech salary median was also down, to $152K from $157K, but the bonus for that industry jumped to a median of $37,500 from $30K. The salary range for techies this year was $94,731-$218K. Finance, steadiest of them all, kept its median salary at $175K and grew its median bonus from $47K to $50K. Its range was $82,500-$400K, the latter figure being the high salary for the entire employment report, reported by a U.S. permanent resident with a previous business degree and more than five years' experience who went to work in investment management/private equity.

Other noteworthy salary facts:

• Highest median salary: Law (2.7% of the class): $225K
• Lowest median salary: Consumer Products (2.3% of the class): $128K
• Lowest salary: in Consulting, $73K

MEDIAN SALARY SHRINKS FOR BOOTHIES WHO STAY IN CHICAGO

Consulting falling by 5 percentage points among Boothies' industry destinations can be traced to one source: the MBB firms, McKinsey, Bain, and Boston Consulting Group, which in 2023 accounted for more than 150 of the class's 527 job-seeking students. This year, all three once again hired significant numbers of Boothies — but also fewer than before, especially "M": BCG hired 48 (11%), down from 52 (10.5%), and Bain hired 20 (4.6%), down from 30 (6%) — but McKinsey hired fewer than half, just 33 (7.5%), down from 71 (14.3%). In all, the MBB firms this year hired a total of 101 of the 521 total job seeking Boothies in the 2024 class; last year they accounted for 28.5% of all hires, and this year it was just 19.4%. (See the bottom of the page for more of the top employers of Booth MBAs.)

Where do Boothies prefer to find work? Chicago, of course. Most grads of the school stay in the capital of the Midwest, but that number dipped this year to 27.9% from 28.6%. Median salary for that group also shrank, to $181,500 from $190K, a year after growing from $175K.

More Boothies chose New York this year, 27.4% (up from 23.9%), where they made a median salary of $175K, same as the New York-bound MBAs in the Class of 2023. Those who went to the West dropped to 2022 levels, 20.8%, including a big top in the San Francisco Bay Area, to 9.8% from 14.1%, while both Seattle (5%) and Los Angeles (4.3%) saw increases. Boothies leaving the U.S. also shrank as a group, down to 5.9% from 6.8% last year. Half that group went to Asia, and half of those relocated to Tokyo, Japan.

WHERE BOOTH MBAs HAVE GONE TO WORK IN THE LAST 11 YEARS 

Industry	2024 Percentage of Booth Hires	2023	2022	2021	2020	2019	2018	2017	2016	2015	2014
FINANCIAL SERVICES	32.9%	32.6%	35.1%	27.0%	30.9%	31.3%	31.6%	29.9%	36.0%	35.2%	36.4%
I-Banking/Brokerage	9.4%	11.1%	10.8%	7.2%	10.3%	11.3%	10.5%	13.6%	13.6%	16.7%	15.6%
Diversified	11.4%	6.2%	7.2%	6.1%	5.3%	6.5%	6.4%	3.9%	7.7%	5.2%	5.1%
I-Mgt./Research	2.5%	3.2%	3.5%	4.1%	5.3%	5.7%	5.6%	5.5%	6.7%	6.0%	7.3%
Private Equity	6.4%	9.1%	7.1%	6.8%	6.4%	5.9%	5.6%	4.7%	5.1%	4.8%	5.9%
Venture Capital	1.6%	2.2%	5.2%	2.2%	2.6%	2.0%	2.8%	1.8%	1.2%	0.8%	2.0%
Insurance	1.1%	0.4%	0.6%	0.2%	0.4%	NA	0.6%	0.4%	1.2%	1.0%	NA
Commercial Banking	0.5%	0.2%	NA	NA	NA	NA	0.2%	NA	0.4%	NA	NA
CONSULTING	33.8%	38.6%	35.5%	34.4%	38.2%	34.8%	31.0%	32.6%	27.5%	32.1%	27.9%
TECHNOLOGY	14.8%	15.5%	14.9%	22.9%	16.3%	20.7%	20.3%	18.7%	16.7%	15.2%	13.5%
eCommerce & Internet	7.8%	7.2%	9.1%	13.5%	8.8%	11.7%	10.7%	9.4%	9.4%	6.3%	5.7%
Software	3.7%	5.0%	3.0%	6.5%	4.8%	4.6%	5.6%	4.3%	3.1%	3.3%	4.0%
Hardware	1.6%	1.0%	0.4%	0.7%	1.8%	1.7%	1.9%	3.9%	3.7%	4.2%	3.2%
FinTech	0.5%	1.0%	1.5%	0.9%	0.7%	NA	1.5%	0.6%	NA	NA	NA
Telecom	NA	NA	NA	0.4%	0.2%	NA	0.6%	0.4%	0.6%	1.5%	0.6%
Services	1.1%	0.8%	0.9%	NA	NA	NA	NA	NA	NA	NA	NA
Other	0.2%	NA	NA	NA	NA	NA	NA	NA	NA	NA	-
CONSUMER PRODUCTS	2.3%	2.2%	2.2%	4.4%	4.8%	4.6%	4.3%	5.3%	6.9%	5.0%	6.1%
HEALTHCARE	4.1%	2.8%	4.1%	3.3%	3.5%	1.1%	2.1%	2.9%	3.3%	2.9%	2.2%
TRANSPORTATION	0.9%	NA	0.8%	1.1%	0.9%	1.1%	1.9%	1.2%	NA	NA	NA
MEDIA/ENTERTAINMENT	1.1%	0.4%	0.4%	0.9%	NA	0.9%	1.7%	1.0%	1.2%	0.8%	1.6%
REAL ESTATE	1.6%	1.0%	1.7%	1.5%	2.0%	2.8%	1.7%	NA	1.0%	NA	1.2%
ENERGY	1.8%	1.4%	0.6%	1.1%	0.9%	0.9%	1.5%	0.8%	1.1%	2.1%	2.8%
RETAIL	0.9%	1.4%	0.7%	0.7%	NA	1.5%	0.9%	1.8%	1.2%	1.0%	1.5%
AGRIBUSINESS	NA	0.2%	0.4%	NA	NA	NA	0.9%	1.2%	NA	NA	NA
MANUFACTURING	0.7%	0.6%	0.4%	0.9%	NA	0.9%	0.9%	2.0%	1.6%	1.7%	2.2%
EDUCATION/GOVT/NONPROFIT	1.9%	0.6%	0.6%	1.1%	0.7%	NA	0.6%	1.4%	1.6%	1.7%	2.2%

Source: Chicago Booth

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CONSISTENT TALES OF WOE

The flood of late-year employment reports is a good indicator of the tenor of what those reports contain. Booth released its final employment data in 2023 in mid-October; this year it released its report just before Christmas. Like Booth, its peer schools have reported fairly consistent struggles in placement and pay:

Harvard Business School: Job offers three months after graduation dropped to 85% and job acceptances fell to 77%, lowest in many years, overshadowing otherwise good news in the rise of total median compensation, which was up thanks to a big jump in what was formerly known as performance bonus and now is known as variable bonus, from $40K to $47,500. With the class median salary flat at $175K and median signing bonus flat at $30K, the jump in variable bonus pushed Harvard's median pay to $221,800 from $220,100.

Stanford Graduate School of Business: 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.

MIT Sloan School of Management: Offers dropped to 85.1%, and accepts fell nearly 10 more points to 77.2% 2024 walloped this year’s graduates in pay, dropping median salary and the numbers of students reporting both signing and other bonuses, which in turn dropped median pay. MIT's 2024 Class achieved a total median pay of $214,450, which is -1.5% from 2023. In average salaries and compensation, the numbers were even more stark: mean signing bonus was down to $35,900 from $38,989, mean other comp was down to $88,870 from $111,764, and total pay was $247,661, down 8% from $269,227.

Northwestern Kellogg: Median salary for Kellogg grads is down $5K, to $170,000, and median overall compensation is down 1.7%, to $197,000. 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.

Columbia Business School: The one B-school where offers and accepts at three months increased — offers to 89% from 84% in 2023, and accepts to 86.4% from 81%. But while Columbia MBAs maintained the median base salary of $175,000 that their two predecessor classes reported, and they also reached a median signing bonus of at least $30,000 for a seventh straight year, median other guaranteed compensation dropped to its lowest level since 2013, and that clipped Columbia's compensation wings a bit. For the second straight year, the school lost ground in total median comp, falling 1.4% to $198,996. Since 2022, total median comp at CBS has dropped just over 2%.

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%.

Duke Fuqua: Duke MBAs maintained their median salary of $175K and median signing bonus of $30K. Because a larger percentage (87%) of the 340 grads reported receiving a bonus this year, Fuqua actually saw a small increase in its MBAs' total compensation, to $201,100 from $198,400 last year. But in placement rates Duke took big hits: From 93% of Fuqua MBAs receiving an offer by 90 days post-graduation in 2023 and 92% accepting, to 85% offers and 82% accepts.

MAJOR EMPLOYERS OF 2024 BOOTH MBAs

COMPANY	Hires	%	Interns
Boston Consulting Group	48	11.0%	47
McKinsey & Company, Inc.	33	7.5%	17
Bain & Company, Inc.	20	4.6%	23
Amazon.com, Inc.	16	3.7%	22
Goldman Sachs Group Inc.	9	2.1%	10
JPMorgan Chase & Co.	8	1.8%	12
Bank of America Corporation	7	1.6%	4
Citigroup, Inc.	7	1.6%	5
Deloitte Consulting	7	1.6%	4
L.E.K. Consulting	7	1.6%	7
Capital One Financial Corp	6	1.4%	3
EY-Parthenon	6	1.4%	5
TikTok Inc.	6	1.4%	1
Evercore Partners Inc.	5	1.1%	11
Google	5	1.1%	4
Morgan Stanley	5	1.1%	3
Guggenheim Partners, LLC	4	0.9%	4
Lazard Freres & Co. LLC	4	0.9%	2
Samsung Group	4	0.9%	-
UBS AG	4	0.9%	1
Walmart Inc.	4	0.9%	1

Source: Chicago Booth

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DON'T MISS MEDIAN PAY FOR CHICAGO BOOTH MBAs IS NOW OVER $200K (2023) and HO-HO-HOLY FALLING JOB OFFERS! MIT MBAs' HISTORIC STRUGGLES CHRONICLED IN DECEMBER JOBS REPORT