Category Archives: MBA Jobs

A new survey released by GMAC earlier this month reports that new MBA grads are growing more confident about the economy, despite a drop in the percentage of grads who have jobs compared to last year.

According to the latest GMAC Graduate Management Education Graduate Survey, the percentage of full-time two-year MBA program grads who had an offer of employment prior to finishing school dropped to 40% this year, down from 50% in 2009. The numbers are even worse for part-time MBAs: 22% of part-time grads had a job offer before graduation, down from 38% in 2009.

Although these numbers look pretty grim, about one-third of grads who said they felt the global economy is stable or strong, up from just 9% a year ago. So, what gives? How could optimism bounce back while the job picture actually gets worse by some measures?

GMAC’s news release doesn’t go so far as to answer this question, although it may simply be a matter of “bad news fatigue,” and our tendency to doubt that things can stay this bad for that long. Not many MBA grads (other than perhaps a handful of older part-time MBAs) are old enough to remember the last time the U.S. or global economy last went through an extended rough patch, in the late 1970s. So, for most of these grads, two years into a recession, one can’t help but ask, “This thing has to be over soon, doesn’t it?”

Or, do these grads know something we don’t? Maybe they’ve noticed that more companies are returning to campuses to interact with students, even if the job offers aren’t yet flowing more yet. GMAC echoed this idea in its announcement, mentioning that the increased optimism among graduates mirrors the trend highlighted in the GMAC Corporate Recruiters Survey, which found that employers are finally shifting their attention back to expanding their businesses. If that’s the case, then maybe this really is the first sign of a light at the end of the long, dark jobs tunnel.

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Building on our recent post about the MBA job market appearing to thaw, GMAC just released the results of a survey that shows that three-quarters of 2009 full-time MBA grads had jobs by September. Of part-time MBA graduates, 96 per cent of them had jobs by then.

While those statistics are pretty encouraging, the salary numbers present a slightly less rosy picture. Many MBA grads found that the starting salaries they were offered were lower than those offered to their counterparts from previous years. The median starting salary for all survey participants who finished school last year was $79,271, down slightly from the Class of 2008′s $80,000 median starting salary.

Back to some more good news: The survey reports that the Class of 2009 also reasonably satisfied with their jobs. Fifty-eight per cent of grads said they were in the kind of position they had hoped to find, 48 per cent indicated they were very or extremely satisfied with the direction their career was taking, and 47 per cent said they felt their employer placed particular value on their graduate management degree. Meanwhile, 78 per cent of respondents who graduated in 2009 reported that their degree was essential to landing their job.

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