Part 3

The Chart Zone

Everything, for the reader who wants to compare all 29 schools. This part is reference, so it’s dense on purpose. Skim it, scan it, or come back when you need to look something up.

Find your answer fast

Your question	Go to	Start with
1. Is the MBA still worth it?	Jobs and pay, then What it costs	Jobs 3, Jobs 9 and Cost 2
2. Which programs fit my goals?	Industries, Functions, and Employers and reachability	Industry 4, Function 4 and Employer 8
3. Will robots eat the MBA jobs?	AI and these jobs	AI 1 and AI 3
4. Can I build a U.S. career on a visa?	Visas	Visa 1 and Visa 3
5. Is it harder to get in?	Getting in	Admissions 2 and Admissions 5
What about my school?	School pages	Your school’s page

The sections

Jobs and payCome here when you want to know whether MBAs are still getting hired and paid, school by school. For scale, GMAC puts the average post-MBA starting salary at roughly $120,000, against $72,000 for a college grad.What it costsCome here when you’re ready to look the price tag in the eye.IndustriesCome here once you know the industry you want. These charts show which schools actually send people there, and how many.FunctionsIndustry says who signs your paycheck. Function says what you actually do all day. Come here to see which schools feed the job you want.Employers and reachabilityCome here when you have specific companies in mind.AI and these jobsCome here for the full story on AI and post-MBA jobs: how we measured it, where the risk sits and what to do about it.VisasCome here if you need a visa to work in the U.S. Read the disclaimer first.Getting inCome here for the numbers behind your odds: applications, acceptance rates and the class averages you’re up against.School pagesA page for each of the 29 schools: the stats, where its graduates went, and what they were hired to do.MBA Recruiters by SchoolThe Reachability tool. Pick a company and see which schools list it, or pick a school and see what it reaches.

How to read the Chart Zone

Every number here was read from a school’s own employment report, class profile, website or press release. The point of putting 29 schools on one grid is that you can finally compare them, differences and all. Unless a source note says otherwise, a chart shows the Class of 2025.

Two rules for reading it. A blank cell means the school didn’t publish the number, and blank never means zero. And percentages are a share of the people who were looking for a job or who accepted one (the standard these schools follow), so each school is counting a slightly different slice of its class. Where a school left a gap we could reasonably fill, we filled it and said so.

A few more things that hold everywhere. “Class of 2025” means the people who graduated in 2025. Placement rates are a share of the graduates who were looking for a job, so founders and people going back to a sponsor are left out. Top 10 schools are in bold wherever we rank them. And Columbia, UNC, USC and Georgetown don’t publish every head count, so a few of their numbers are our estimates, marked where they appear.

Who’s included and why (our 30 schools and why it’s 29 this year):

Years ago, we picked our list off a Poets&Quants ranking that we largely agreed with at the time. We just took that rank order (including who is top 10 and who is top 30) and stuck with it ever since, even as individual schools have bounced in and out of the top 30 according to whichever ranking agency you ask this week.

UF Warrington has been on that list since the beginning for the same reason. This year, we're taking it off. Not because the program changed, but because we could not find usable employment data for the Class of 2025 anywhere. No employment report, no class profile with placement numbers, nothing we could stand behind.

If there are any artifacts in chart names that say 30, this is why. This year, it’s 29.

Some schools just aren’t that transparent about their data

Kiarash, Claude, and I scoured the internet for this data. We even used the Wayback Machine for some of it. When a value is zero, that means it’s not out there. AKA, schools didn’t publish it or there is no digital record of it to be found today.

For example, we did deep analysis on specific employers at each school. Stanford and Arizona State don’t publish actual employer company names, and Georgia Tech doesn’t publish a list tied to a specific class. Why? We don’t know. But the absence of that information means we can’t compare them fairly in a company-by-company analysis (the Employers and Visas sections of the Chart Zone), so we excluded all three from that particular analysis.

So keep this in mind as you read this report. Where there is no info, there is no info. And that in itself is info.