Best B-Schools for Getting a Job

You’d never guess which U.S. business school was most successful at placing its graduates into jobs by the time they wore their caps and gowns to commencement last year. If what pops into your mind is Harvard, Stanford, Chicago or Columbia, forget it.

How about the University of Arkansas’ Walton School of Business? Last year, 82.6% of Walton’s graduating MBAs landed jobs, the highest placement rate of any business school in the U.S. Equally surprising is who came in second? Pace University’s Lubin School of Business in New York.

Of course, the last couple of years have been difficult ones for the Career Service staffs at business schools who help to match graduating students with job offers. The severe recession that hit two years ago wrecked havoc with MBA job placement. Even though the market improved for the Class of 2010, it was still no walk in the park. So how did Walton in Fayetteville, Arkansas, of all places, manage to get jobs for more than eight of ten of its MBAs by graduation?

Truth is, as a Walton spokesperson points out, the school only graduates 30 to 35 MBAs a year. So placing them into jobs may be a lot easier than it is finding jobs for the 910 graduates at Harvard or the 650 or so at Northwestern’s Kellogg School. And you also can’t ignore the much higher pay. At Arkansas, starting pay totalled $64,993, compared to Harvard’s $131,759. As it turns out, three months after commencement, grads at the elite schools more than catch up. At Stanford, for example, 92.4% landed jobs, compared to Arkansas’ 87%.

So if you put Arkansas and Pace aside as anomalies, the list of schools that did the best job of getting jobs for their graduates becomes much more familiar. Of the highly ranked, prestige schools, Dartmouth College’s Tuck School of Business comes in first with an 80% placement rate by graduation. Harvard Business School is not far behind with 78.6%. Among the other top elites are Chicago’s Booth and Stanford (both at 75.8%), MIT Sloan (75.6%), and Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management (75.2%).

First, some advice on how to both read and interpret these numbers. Getting MBAs placed into last year’s job market was no cake walk. Only four U.S. schools in the top 25–Dartmouth, Washington University, Stanford and Harvard–were even able to get  90% or more of their graduates into jobs three months after graduation.

And even then, some grads accepted jobs they didn’t exactly prefer or want–but because there the “dream job” was unavailable, they had sign up for something to get a paycheck. Obviously, these numbers don’t reflect that dynamic.

Neither do they reflect the much smaller percentage of grads at each school who may hold out for something better, regardless of the job market. They have a job offer or two, but refuse to bite. Perhaps, they may be lucky enough to have a mom or dad who can finance a longer job search. So the fact that they’re unemployed–even three months after graduation–may be less a reflection on the school than it is on their determination to only accept a job they really want.

Most business schools are now only weeks away from graduating the Class of 2011 and all indications are that the market for MBAs is almost back to normal. So all these numbers should show significant improvement this year, particularly for MBAs with jobs at graduation.

Source: Data reported by business schools to U.S. News & World Report for the Class of 2010.

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