Source: Poets & Quants
by John A. Byrne
Nov 25, 2015
Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business
Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business today (Nov. 25) announced that its graduating MBAs this year saw an 8% increase in median starting salaries to $120,000, up from $111,000 this year. The school said that 81% of the Class of 2017 received median signing bonuses of $25,000, while another 6% had median other guarnateed compensation of $20,500.
All told, total median first-year compensation for Fuqua was a record $144,130, a sum that even exceeded the numbers posted by the much higher ranked University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, largely because a higher percentage of Fuqua grads received sign-on bonuses (See table below). Total median pay at Fuqua was just a tad above last year’s $144,097 because fewer grads received guaranteed bonuses this year. Still, the Fuqua numbers are the best overall compensation and employment stats reported by Duke since the Great Recession.
The student landing the highest starting salary of $175,000 went into private equity or venture capital. The student receiving the lowest reported base salary of $50,000 accepted a marketing position with a household or personal consumer products company.
The school said 87% of its graduates received job offers at graduation, while 95% had offers three months later, just a sliver more than last year’s 94% total. International students trailed these numbers, reporting an 82% job offer rate at graduation, versus 91% for U.S. citizens, and 90% three months out, compared with 98%.
MCKINSEY DOUBLED ITS FUQUA INTAKE THIS YEAR TO 24 MBA GRADUATES
McKinsey & Co. lead all employers of full-time MBAs this year, hiring 24 graduates, double its intake of Fuqua grads last year when the firm employed 12. As recently as 2013, McKinsey had only hired seven MBAs from Duke. This year Deloitte brought aboard 21 MBAs, down from 31 in 2014, while Microsoft hired 19 grads, up slightly from the 16 MBAs it employed from Fuqua last year. Boston Consulting Group and Amazon rounded out this year’s top five MBA employers, with 17 and 15 hires, respectively.
As expected, the recruiting companies at Fuqua were a diverse group of some of the big names in American business. Following the top five employers this year are Bain and PwC, which each hired 10 Fuqua grads. Bank of America/Merrill Lynch took away seven, while Citi hired a half dozen. Employing five MBAs each were Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan/Chase, Accenture and Sears Holdings. Google, Apple, and IBM each hired four Fuqua MBAs this year.
Consulting, which paid the highest median salaries of $135,000, again emerged as the number one career choice for Fuqua MBAs. This year, some 32% of the class headed into the consulting industry, up two points from 30% in 2014. Five of the top seven major employers of this year’s class were all consulting firms, with the exception of Microsoft and Amazon.
FINANCE HAULED AWAY 20% OF THE CLASS WITH MUCH HIGHER STARTING SALARIES
Finance regained its status as the second most important recruiting industry for the school, attracting 20% of the Class of 2015, up three percentage points from the 17% level of last year. Many MBAs, no doubt, were enticed into financial services by significantly higher starting pay. The median base salaries in finance showed the largest year-over-year increase of any industry, rising to $125,000, from $100,000 a year earlier.
Technology, which doubled to 20% last year from only 10% in 2013, remained strong, drawing 18% of Fuqua’s MBA graduates this year, down two percentage points. Tech firms also increased their salary packages to MBAs, hiking them by $17,500 over last year to $120,000. Some 8% of the class accepted jobs in healthcare, down a wee bit from 7% a year earlier, while 7% took jobs in consumer goods, also down a percentage point from 2014.
A NUMBER OF COMPANIES UPPED THEIR HIRING OF FUQUA GRADS
In any typical year, Duke’s class is something of a bellwether for the top-tier MBA market. That’s because the school attracts a broad range of companies and industries to its campus to recruit its graduates as well as the fact that Fuqua MBA career choices tend to show greater diversity across the range of brand name corporations, from American Airlines to ZS Consultants. Fuqua, unlike many other business schools, also is far more transparent than many schools, sharing data on the major employers of the class and how many MBAs landed both internships and full-time jobs with those companies.
This year, a large number of well-known business names upped their hiring at Fuqua. Besides McKinsey, the following companies employed more Duke MBAs than the previous year: Microsoft, BCG, Amazon, Bain, Bank of America, Citi, Morgan Stanley, Sears Holdings, Cardinal Health, among others (see chart below).
Still, the largest single recruiter of MBAs at Fuqua over the years has been Deloitte which has hired 145 MBA graduates into full-time positions. McKinsey’s emergence this year as the No. 1 employer is therefore surprising. McKinsey has hired fewer than half the Deloitte total, 66 Fuqua grads in the past five years.
WHY OTHER GUARANTEED COMP DROPPED SO SEVERELY AT DUKE
Sheryle Dirks, associate dean for career management at Fuqua, told Poets&Quants that the percentage of graduates receiving other guaranteed bonus fell to just 6% this year from 68% in 2014 due to “an evolving clarification on what counts as other guaranteed compensation according to MBACSEA guidelines,” referring to the trade group that sets standards for compensation reporting.
“We are taking a very narrow definition for now but did not want to wait to release the report in its entirely,” added Dirks. “Depending upon how things evolve, we may update that one data set in the report.”
