No matter how you slice it, new data and analysis has been reporting in business school employment reports in recent years: Compensation for MBA graduates is going up, including in those signing bonuses meant to sweeten the employment pot.
Leap Quest aggregated more than 10 years of signing bonus data for MBA graduates from 115 business schools, looking at trends not only over time but also in three different tiers of programs.
So, according to the analysis, MBAs at schools in Tiers 7-13 saw average signing bonuses rise a whopping 63% between 2013 and 2022, from $14,367 in 2013-15 to $23,452 in 2020-22.This put them almost on par with schools in tiers 4-6 in the 2020-22 sample, although both groups lagged behind the top tier schools by a significant margin in terms of overall average signing bonus.
Schools in the second bucket, Tiers 4-6, had an average bonus of $25,927 in 2020-22, just $2,475 more than the lower tiered bucket. The top schools (Tiers 1-3), meanwhile, had an average starting bonus of $31,709, or $5,782 more than Tiers 4-6 and $8,257 more than Tiers 7+.
| 1 | Stanford GSB | $161,831 | $29,148 | $173,199 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2 | Chicago (Booth) | $149,058 | $40,544 | $175,290 |
| 3 | Penn (Wharton) | $153,379 | $34,963 | $175,021 |
| 4 | Northwestern (Kellogg) | $142,719 | $32,236 | $168,057 |
| 5 | Harvard Business School | $153,156 | $33,671 | $169,015 |
| 6 | MIT (Sloan) | $148,075 | $30,006 | $166,739 |
| 7 | Columbia | $146,482 | $37,444 | $164,567 |
| 8 | Dartmouth (Tuck) | $142,179 | $33,745 | $166,948 |
| 9 | UC-Berkeley (Haas) | $143,696 | $33,775 | $163,758 |
| 10 | Yale SOM | $138,676 | $34,716 | $162,005 |
| 11 | Duke (Fuqua) | $141,109 | $34,958 | $170,474 |
| 12 | Michigan (Ross) | $142,055 | $32,177 | $169,277 |
| 13 | NYU (Stern) | $149,524 | $38,211 | $178,182 |
| 14 | Virginia (Darden) | $144,933 | $35,488 | $174,246 |
| 15 | Cornell (Johnson) | $139,121 | $37,684 | $169,231 |
| 16 | CMU (Tepper) | $134,847 | $30,399 | $158,345 |
| 17 | UCLA (Anderson) | $135,273 | $29,877 | $154,574 |
| 18 | USC (Marshall) | $131,976 | $29,473 | $147,980 |
| 19 | UNC (Kenan-Flagler) | $125,687 | $29,751 | $144,876 |
| 20 | Texas-Austin (McCombs) | $129,854 | $28,153 | $156,036 |
| 21 | Washington (Foster) | $130,407 | $39,283 | $154,134 |
| 22 | Indiana (Kelley) | $121,999 | $30,398 | $140,876 |
| 23 | Georgetown (McDonough) | $126,107 | $34,073 | $147,062 |
| 24 | Rice (Jones) | $131,384 | $33,221 | $153,277 |
| 25 | Vanderbilt (Owen) | $125,130 | $27,651 | $145,882 |
| 26 | Emory (Goizueta) | $134,700 | $29,151 | $157,496 |
| 27 | Georgia Tech (Scheller) | $123,843 | $25,066 | $143,971 |
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