MIT Sloan’s MBA Class of 2024 saw a decline in median salary, average signing bonus, average other compensation, and median and mean overall compensation, as well as significant dropoffs in both job offers and acceptances three months after graduation

It’s no mystery why so many top business schools chose to drag their feet and delay the release of their MBA Class of 2024 employment reports until well into this winter. The news they contain is less than rosy.

The latest example is MIT Sloan School of Management, which released its Class of 2024 report earlier this month. Even as the Sloan School’s MBA placement rates are its worst in many years, overshadowing even last year’s dismal numbers, they are accompanied by declines in median salary, average signing bonus, average other compensation, and both median and mean overall compensation compared to previous classes.

Offer rates were solidly in the mid- to high 90s and acceptance rates in the low to mid-90s from 2018 through 2022 at MIT Sloan. In fact, before last year, you had to go back to 2013 to find a sub-90% job acceptance result for Sloanies. Now it has happened in back-to back years: In 2023, as offers fell to 90.2%, accepts dropped to 86.9%; and this year, offers dropped further to 85.1%, and accepts fell nearly 10 more points to 77.2%.

MIT SLOAN MBAs BASE SALARY BY INDUSTRY 

Source: MIT Sloan

A DECLINE IN MBA PAY AT MIT

MIT’s MBA Class of 2023 had its own well-documented travails on the job hunt but that class was able to move the needle on the salary, bonus and compensation front. Let year’s Sloanies achieved a total compensation median of $217,780, up from $204,700 in 2022, to continue a handsome rate of median pay growth in comparison to previous years:

• 2019: 7.6%
• 2020: 3.8%
• 2021: 8.5%
• 2022: 4.7%
• 2023: 6.4%

But 2024 walloped this year’s graduates, dropping median salary and the numbers of students reporting both signing and other bonuses, which in turn dropped median pay. (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.) 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.

A bright note for Sloan was that its average salary was up nominally, 0.8% to $169,370 from $168,095. Even brighter: Among the 17.3% who reported stock and equity compensation, the median value was $100,000, while the average reached $196,823, driven by high-value stock and equity packages.

BIG JUMPS IN FINANCE & AUTO/AEROSPACE SLOANIES

Returning to the subject of placement rates, it’s noteworthy that those seeking jobs dropped from 75.3% of the 2023 class to 69.1% of the 2024 class. Among the reasons, 10% started their own business, up from 8.3% in 2023.

(Also noteworthy is a small but growing revolt against the three-month window for measuring MBA employment success. Though all B-schools continue to include three-month numbers in their employment reports, more and more are adding context — and caveats. One of Sloan’s fellow M7 schools, the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, even included a five-month number. Sloan adds this line: “As of publication date, 88.9% have received offers” — a significant increase from the 85.1% with offers at the end of August.)

Those who go to work for established companies increasingly avoid tech, mirroring their counterparts at other top B-schools: The industry was down again at Sloan, losing more than 5 percentage points to 19% of the class, its biggest-ever drop according to P&Q records. In 2017, tech-bound MBAs made up 31.8% of MIT’s graduating MBA class; two years later, tech tied with consulting for top industry among Sloanies. Seems like ancient history.

In other fields, consulting remains No. 1 but saw a slight decline to 32.1%, while finance got a big bump to 25.3%. Healthcare jumped a point to 6.8%, and auto/aerospace more than doubled to 4.5%. Retail, energy, and nonprofit/government each gained around half a percentage point. See chart above for details.

TOP REASONS SLOAN MBAs ACCEPTED A POSITION 2015-2024

Source: MIT Sloan

SLOANIES’ ‘COMMITMENT TO SUSTAINABILITY’ WANING?

Where do Sloanies go to work? Last year, the Northeast contingent — Boston and New York City, mostly — shrank to 44.7%, split evenly between Boston and New York, and paid evenly, too (though New Yorkers made a higher mean salary, $179,899 to $168,588). The West Coasters grew to 23.7%, and the 12.4% who found work in the San Francisco Bay Area were paid the highest of all grads, at a median of $180K. Those who left the States for work grew to 7.2% of the class.

This year saw a shakeup, as the Northeast grew to 47.5%, with a median salary of $175K; 16.3% of those were in New York, and 29% in Boston. The highest median salary was in a surprise location: Atlanta, where just 3.2% of Sloanies went to work, making a median $192K. The 5.4% who went to the Southwest were close behind at $187,500. The West contingent shrank to 19%, and those who left the U.S. shrank to 6.8%.

As it is every year, “growth potential” was the top reason Sloan MBAs accepted their position, up to 39.7% from 38.6% last year. The rollercoaster continues for “commitment to sustainability,” which had grown by leaps and bounds in 2019 as a cause for Sloan MBAs to take a job, then cratered from 4.3% to 0.9% the next year before notably bouncing back in 2021, grew for a third straight year to 4.3% in 2023 but collapsed again this year to 1%. “Commitment to social impact” likewise flattened this year. See above for details.

“In a highly competitive job market fueled by just-in-time hiring, the community came together to help MIT Sloan MBAs drive transformation at industry-leading companies and growing organizations in emerging industries,” wrote Susan Brennan, assistant dean of Sloan’s Career Development Office, in a foreword to the employment report.

TOP EMPLOYERS OF SLOAN MBAs 2014-2024

Source: MIT Sloan

AROUND THE COUNTRY: A TOUGH YEAR FOR ALL

The flood of late-year employment reports is a good indicator of the tenor of what those reports contain. At this late date (December 21) a handful of high-profile schools still have not released their 2024 data. One M7 school decided to release its report on the weekend before Christmas. Those that have, have shown 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 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%.

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%.

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.

Source: MIT Sloan

DON’T MISS 2023 WAS MIT SLOAN MBAs’ HARSHEST EMPLOYMENT LANDSCAPE IN A DECADE and NEARLY 1/4 OF JOB-SEEKING CLASS OF 2024 HARVARD MBAs COULDN’T FIND WORK AFTER MONTHS OF SEARCHING