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22 MBA programs where graduates earn more than $110,000 right out of school
University of Washington — Foster School of Business
Rice University — Jones Graduate School of Business
Location: Houston, Texas
Average starting salary: $111,400
At the Jones Graduate School of Business, first-year students take core curriculum courses in finance, marketing, and accounting and participate in an Action Learning Project — a 13-week consultative assignment for an established company. Rice MBA students also have the option to earn up to two degree concentrations from 10 areas, including energy, entrepreneurship, healthcare, and real estate. Ninety-one percent of 2015 grads accepted jobs within 90 days.
New York University — Stern School of Business
Location: New York, New York
Average starting salary: $112,100
Stern's MBA program heavily focuses on individuality, and students can choose up to three specializations, with options including everything from banking to real estate to luxury marketing. Post-graduation, students end up at a range of companies, including Boston Consulting Group, NBCUniversal, Morgan Stanley, and Burberry.
The school takes its name from billionaire property mogul Leonard Stern, who earned his MBA from NYU in 1959 and donated $30 million to construct a new building for the business school in 1988.
Emory University — Goizueta Business School
Location: Atlanta, Georgia
Average starting salary: $113,300
Goizueta Business School is named after Roberto C. Goizueta, the late CEO of Coca-Cola who led the company from 1981 until he died in 1997. The school, which was founded in 1919 and started offering an MBA in 1954, took Goizueta's name in 1994, and his business philosophy is now a central part of the school's mission: to develop professionals who will add value to their companies by changing the way business is done. The prep pays off: The business school has a 94% job-placement rate within three months of graduation.
University of Texas at Austin — McCombs School of Business
Location: Austin, Texas
Average starting salary: $113,800
The McCombs School of Business has an entire team of staff members dedicated to connecting students with recruiters and helping build their networks. Graduates go on to positions at top companies like Apple, GE, Microsoft, Wells Fargo, and JPMorgan Chase. Not to mention, an MBA from UT Austin comes with a network of more than 92,000 McCombs School of Business alumni around the world, bonding graduates to a lifelong community.
University of California at Los Angeles — Anderson School of Management
Location: Los Angeles, California
Average starting salary: $114,400
UCLA's Anderson School of Management prides itself on "looking to the future to discover and chart what will be." To that end, the school recently established an academic marketing partnership with Google to provide students with insight into Google's pioneering approach to marketing measurement and storytelling. The highest percentage of 2014 graduates (28.3%) accepted jobs in the tech industry, where notable alumni include YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki and a number of Google executives.
Carnegie Mellon University — Tepper School of Business
Location: Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Average starting salary: $115,300
Tepper graduates are encouraged to pursue careers within one of the four major corporate functions: marketing, finance, consulting, and operations. The career center helps students connect with companies, meet with potential employers, and build their networks. Students are directly recruited by some of the biggest names in business, including Goldman Sachs, IBM, Google, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo.
University of Michigan — Ross School of Business
Location: Ann Arbor, Michigan
Average starting salary: $118,300
The Ross School of Business strives to provide each student with opportunities to advance their career, and it facilitates a team of over 50 peer coaches to help them along the way. Hundreds of well-known companies visit the school to recruit MBA candidates, conducting more than 4,000 interviews for internships and full-time positions for the class of 2015 alone. It paid off: That class landed full-time jobs at a host of prominent companies, with the top employers including Deloitte, McKinsey & Co., Wells Fargo, General Mills, and Microsoft.
Cornell University — Johnson Graduate School of Management
Location: Ithaca, New York
Average starting salary: $118,900
Students in the one- and two-year MBA tracks participate in the Johnson Graduate School of Management's unique immersion program, in which students spend a semester focusing solely on a specific career path, such as digital technology or investment banking, through electives, site visits, and live case studies.
The school itself takes its name from a business legacy — S.C. Johnson, founder of the global household-product company of the same name. The school adopted the name in 1984 after the Johnson family gave $20 million to it, the largest amount ever given to a business school at the time.
Duke University — Fuqua School of Business
Location: Durham, North Carolina
Average starting salary: $119,100
Ninety-four percent of full-time MBA students at Duke's Fuqua School of Business land jobs within three months of graduation. The top-five recruiters from the school are Deloitte, Boston Consulting Group, McKinsey & Co., Microsoft, and PricewaterhouseCoopers. Deloitte alone hired 50 MBA students during the 2013-14 academic year for jobs and internships. Fuqua also offers a number of joint MBA programs, including JD/MBA, MD/MBA, and MPP/MBA.
Yale University — Yale School of Management
Location: New Haven, Connecticut
Average starting salary: $119,100
Each MBA student at Yale's School of Management is required to complete a global studies course, choosing among the International Experience course, Global Network Courses, Global Network Weeks, or spending a full semester at an exchange partner school. Yale reported that 8.9% of the class of 2014 were hired internationally, with approximately 30% of all grads accepting jobs in finance and accounting.
University of London — London Business School (LBS)
Location: London, England
Average starting salary: $119,200
University of London's business school is once again the best outside the US. With 75% of the top-500 global companies based in London, the school is a recruiting and networking gold mine for a host of multinational corporations, including Boston Consulting Group and McKinsey & Co. In addition to earning an MBA, students are required to graduate with a second-language proficiency in one of 15 languages offered by the Modern Language Centre at King's College London.
University of Virginia — Darden School of Business
Location: Charlottesville, Virginia
Average starting salary: $119,800
The Darden School of Business offers one of the top MBA entrepreneurship programs among b-schools, awarding over $1 million in scholarships annually and offering highly specialized training like Venture Capital Bootcamp, a three-day workshop focused on early-stage investing. Ninety-three percent of Darden grads accept job offers within 90 days of graduation, with a majority (33%) landing in at consulting firms like Bain & Co. and A.T. Kearney.
Northwestern University — Kellogg School of Management
Location: Evanston, Illinois
Average starting salary: $121,500
Northwestern's business school was established in the early 1900s, but it wasn't until 1979 that the school took the Kellogg name following a $10 million donation from the John L. and Helen Kellogg Foundation — heirs of the family that started the famed cereal company.
The school emphasizes international experience. Its International Growth Lab pairs its students with those at ESADE in Barcelona and the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology to develop strategies for solving an international business' real-world problems. Kellogg also offers an accelerated, one-year MBA degree for top students who already have a business background.
University of California at Berkeley — Haas School of Business
Location: Berkeley, California
Average starting salary: $121,800
The second-oldest business school in the US, the Haas School of Business was named for Walter Haas, who was an undergrad at Berkeley and grew Levi Strauss & Co. into the world's largest apparel manufacturer before his death in 1979. Haas boasts impressive diversity within its MBA classes. Typically, more than 30% of each class is composed of women, last year 37% of the class were international students, and 36% identified as minorities.
Dartmouth College — Tuck School of Business
Location: Hanover, New Hampshire
Average starting salary: $123,900
After their first year in the program, a full 100% of Tuck's class of 2016 gained hands-on experience through summer internships.
Within three months of graduation, 95% of the class of 2015 had accepted job offers, many of them at big-name companies, including Bain & Co., Goldman Sachs, Samsung, Deloitte, and Barclays Capital.
University of Chicago — Booth School of Business
Location: Chicago, Illinois
Average starting salary: $125,000
Though among the most expensive MBA degrees in the world, the Booth School of Business all but guarantees a coveted job: 98% of students from the 2015 class had secured employment within three months of graduation and the top-five employers were McKinsey & Co., Boston Consulting Group, Bain & Co., Amazon, and Bank of America.
Booth's full-time MBA program focuses on training students for real-world business scenarios through experiential learning and lab courses where students work with actual early-stage startups. The school also brings in guest lecturers from private-equity and venture-capital companies, and some Booth students intern with the companies and help them evaluate new market and business opportunities.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology — Sloan School of Management
Location: Cambridge, Massachusetts
Average starting salary: $126,300
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is not only the best college in America, but it's also home to one of the best business schools.
The Sloan School of Management, which celebrated its 100-year anniversary last year, offers three MBA tracks: enterprise management, entrepreneurship and innovation, and finance. Sloan reported that 93% of 2014 graduates accepted job offers within 90 days of graduation at companies like Adobe, Microsoft, Google, and Facebook, and 7.4% of grads went on to start their own businesses.
University of Pennsylvania — The Wharton School
Location: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Average starting salary: $127,300
The Wharton School earned the top spot in our full ranking in 2015 for all-around excellence. Though no other American school topped its tuition cost of $144,340, Wharton's stellar reputation, high average starting salary, and 95% job placement within the first three months of graduation make it the most worthwhile investment. No other school's students scored higher on the GMAT, either.
The first business school in the US, Wharton was established in 1881 from a $100,000 donation by industrial tycoon Joseph Wharton. The institute now boasts one of the largest alumni networks among b-schools, including notable figures like John Sculley of Pepsi and Apple, LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner, and billionaire financier Ron Perelman.
Columbia University — Columbia Business School
Location: New York, New York
Average starting salary: $127,600
Students begin crafting their network and community within the business world the minute they arrive at Columbia, thanks in part to the school's cluster system, which places first-year students in "clusters" of 65 to 70 people who take all their core classes together. Columbia also counts some of the greatest minds in finance among its alumni, including Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett and former Bank of America executive Sallie Krawcheck.
Harvard University — Harvard Business School
Location: Cambridge, Massachusetts
Average starting salary: $131,600
The high average starting salary its graduates command, the school's reputation with employers, and the HBS network of more than 44,000 living alumni makes Harvard one of the most coveted business schools in the world.
HBS's cadre of successful alumni — littered with politicians, CEOs, and billionaires — is unrivaled: Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, former President George W. Bush, JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, Blackstone CEO Steve Schwarzman, and HP Chairman Meg Whitman all graduated from the institution.
Stanford University — Graduate School of Business
Location: Palo Alto, California
Average starting salary: $133,400
Though Stanford's job placement rate is a cut below many other top schools at 86% (6% lower than the school's own figure last year, a change it attributes to students becoming "more selective"), graduates who do accept a job command a hefty starting salary that covers the entire $132,150 price tag for the two-year degree. Top employers include Facebook, Yahoo, Yelp, and a number of other Silicon Valley-based tech companies.
22 MBA programs where graduates earn more than $110,000 right out of school
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