Top 10 MBAs for High Salaries in the Post-Covid World

The average Stanford graduate from the Class of 2021 earned a $158,400 base salary, on top of $67,500 in bonuses, bringing overall starting pay to a whopping $225,000. It was the seventh year in a row that Stanford saw an increase in starting salaries for its freshly minted MBA grads.

Wharton’s class of 2021 earned a median salary of $155,000, in a year in which 99 percent of recent graduates received a job offer. The highest-paid graduates worked in legal and professional services, excluding consulting, earning $190,000 on average.

More than 28 percent of NYU Stern’s 2021 class went into investment banking, where grads earn big bucks. The median base salary was $175,000, plus a signing bonus of almost $52,000 in banking. The median overall base salary was $155,000, with a joining bonus of $35,000.

Harvard Business School says it’s 2021 graduates earned, on average, a $150,000 base salary along with a $30,000 signing bonus and a $37,000 performance bonus. That means shortly after earning a Harvard MBA, alumni are making $217,000 annually.

Last year’s base salary at Dartmouth Tuck was $150,000, matching the record set in 2020 despite the economic downturn. Average sign-on bonuses were flat at $30,000, with 86 percent of the cohort receiving a ‘golden hello’ last year, down slightly from the year before.

Median salaries and bonuses were flat at MIT Sloan last year at $150,000 and $30,000 respectively. But other compensation such as performance bonuses surged from $11,000 to $34,000, reflecting the high demand for MBAs as the economy recovered.

Last year, Darden’s average salary increased 3.6% to $144,933. In the past five years, average salaries have risen by more than $22,000. Signing bonuses have also reached record highs, with last year’s grads taking home $33,266. The school also set a record for placement, with 91 percent of the class employed after three months.

Yale’s recent MBA graduates made median starting salaries of $140,400 last year, with a median signing bonus of $30,000. The performance bonus was $22,950, on average. It was consulting firms that paid the highest wages to Yale’s class: $165,00 on average, followed by investment banks which offered higher bonuses of $50,000.

Michigan Ross’s 2021 graduates received the highest total salary package in school history: $171,450, a 6 percent increase from 2020. The median base salary was up 6.7 percent at $144,000. Consulting offered the highest median salaries at $165,000, while banks paid the highest bonuses: $47,500 on average.

At California’s Berkeley Haas, median salaries leapt by $9,000 last year, reaching $140,000 for the class of 2021, while average bonuses inched upwards to $31,330, a $2,000 increase on the prior year. It was the tech jobs in nearby Silicon Valley that drove overall median salaries up, along with consulting firms.