Business Schools Where MBAs Land Six Figures

Forget all the self-serving rhetoric over why people get MBA degrees. It's not to learn sophisticated theories about finance or strategy. And it's not to vaguely enhance one's career opportunities.

Plain and simple, it's about making more money. So which schools deliver the six-figure jobs right out of the gate?

Newly published data shows that there are now nearly 40 business schools in the U.S. alone whose MBA graduates last year pulled down average six-figure salaries and bonuses. The top ten money makers are sometimes obvious, sometimes not, but all familiar brand names in business education, nonetheless.

Our analysis is based on data provided by the business schools to U.S. News & World Report for its recently published annual ranking of the best full-time MBA programs in the U.S. One major benefit of the U.S. News data is that it is a true average of starting salaries and bonuses for MBA grads. Almost all the schools report these numbers separately and fail to take account of the fact that all grads do not receiving signing bonuses. U.S. News includes the MBAs in a class who failed to get a signing bonus so that the number is the real average.

The results are fairly revealing for a number of reasons. All together, there are 39 business schools in the U.S. alone whose graduates make six-figure salaries and bonuses right out of the gate. And when you look back at the trend line from 2008, only MBAs at five of the 39 schools are making the same or less last year than the graduating class four years earlier.

The Top Ten Six-Figure Havens

School	Average 2012 Salary & Bonus	Average 2008 Salary & Bonus	Percentage Change
Harvard Business School	$142,501	$144,261	-1.2%
Stanford GSB	$140,459	$140,771	-0.2%
MIT (Sloan)	$139,035	$131.087	+6.1%
Dartmouth (Tuck)	$138,713	$133,407	+4.0%
UPenn (Wharton)	$138,302	$136,676	+1.2%
Duke (Fuqua)	$136,461	$122,742	+11.2%
Chicago (Booth)	$135,653	$130,839	+3.7%
Columbia	$134,868	$130,281	+3.5%
Michigan (Ross)	$134,360	$125,773	+6.8%
Northwestern (Kellogg)	$134,001	$130,365	+2.8%

To see all 39 schools with six-figure pay, see PoetsandQuants.com:

Where Six-Figure MBA Pay Is A Done Deal