Ross’s 2017 Employment Report

This year’s MBA grads from University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business flocked to Amazon and McKinsey. These two companies together hired 77 alums from this year’s cohort, according to Ross’s 2017 employment report.

With McKinsey and Amazon scooping up Ross MBAs, perhaps it’s no surprise that consulting and tech were the two most common industries for this year’s alums to end up in, at 32.7 percent and 23.6 percent respectively.

Other popular industries included financial services (11 percent) and consumer goods (8.8 percent). Overall, the vast majority of Ross alums – 97 percent – had received job offers within three months of graduation.

Alums in the three most common industries – consulting, finance and tech – were also the most well compensated, with median salaries of $144,500, $125,000 and $120,000 respectively.

Those employed in consulting had the most variation in their salaries, which ranged from $85,000 to $180,000. Meanwhile, those in finance had the juiciest signing bonuses. More than four in five finance-bound alums received signing bonuses, with an average bonus of $50,000.

As far as their specific job functions, 35.2 percent ended up doing some type of consulting – most often strategy consulting, at 30.8 percent. Marketing and sales were the next most common function, at 19.5 percent, followed closely by finance, at 18.2 percent. Eleven percent were in general management.

Of course, it doesn’t just matter what job you end up doing, but where you end up doing it. As it turns out, Ross alums spread to all parts of the country when they moved back into the workforce – most commonly, the Midwest (34.6 percent) and the West (32.1 percent).

Slightly over a fifth of alums accepted jobs in the Chicago metro area while 17.6 percent took jobs in the Seattle metro area and 10.4 wound up in the Bay Area. Ross is quick to point out that more than two thirds accepted jobs on either the East Coast or West Coast, or in the Chicago area.

So how did grads land those jobs anyway? Well, being at Ross certainly didn’t hurt. Seventy-one percent of the Class of 2017 found their jobs using school-facilitated opportunities, including on-campus recruiting (23.9 percent) and school-facilitated internships (32.3 percent).

Together, the data in Ross’s employment report paints a picture of a Class of 2017 that enjoyed a diverse range of employment opportunities and spread out into desirable jobs across many industries and regions of the country. For more information, take a look at the full employment report.

Of course, going to Ross might help you land a nice job, but there’s the question of getting into Ross in the first place. We can help with that – ask us for a free assessment, and we’ll evaluate how adcoms will see your application and outline a focused personal branding strategy for your application!