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Columbia Business School’s 2017 Employment Report

Want to work at McKinsey? If so, you could do worse than an MBA from Columbia Business School. McKinsey was the top employer among both Class of 2017 grads and summer of 2017 interns from the school, hiring 55 and 25 respectively.

That’s according to Columbia Business School’s 2017 employment report, which includes information on where Columbia MBAs got hired, what jobs they did, and what salaries they made in 2017.

Most commonly, financial services and consulting were the industries of choice among 2017 Columbia grads when they hit the job market. Specifically, 34.4 of the Class of 2017 headed for finance while 33.1 went into consulting.

According to Columbia, these figures include the 71 sponsored students who went back to work for their employers after graduation (out of 777 total), but not the 28 who chose to strike out on their own and start businesses.

After finance and consulting, media/tech was the most popular industry, accounting for 15.6 of the graduating class. Finally, 5.8 percent went into manufacturing, with the remaining 11.1 percent being in the mysterious “other” category.

(Actually, the “other” category isn’t as mysterious as I’m making it out to be: it includes industries like healthcare, real estate, retail and non-profit.)

Grads who went into management consulting specifically had the highest base salary on average, at $140,000. Other especially well-compensated functions included investment management ($132,000) and private equity, which had a $130,000 median base salary and a $80,000 median bonus.

So how did Class of 2017 grads land these jobs? It’s a reasonable question, and one Columbia’s employment report can answer.

Seventy-three percent took advantage of school-facilitated opportunities – most commonly, on-campus interviews (31 percent) and school-facilitated internships (20 percent). And 27 percent seized graduate-facilitated opportunities, including by networking (12 percent).

You might not be surprised to hear that the top three companies that scooped up Class of 2017 grads were consulting firms: McKinsey (55), Boston Consulting Group (36) and Bain (27).

Other companies hiring at least ten Columbia grads this year included Amazon (23), Deloitte (21), JPMorgan Chase (14), PwC (14), Morgan Stanley (11) and IBM (10).

Overall, the results indicate that Columbia MBA grads continue to do well for themselves on the job market. For more details, check out the full employment report.

Granted, you probably already have an idea that a Columbia MBA tends to lead to a good job. You might be more curious about your prospects of getting a Columbia MBA in the first place.

If so, contact us for a free assessment. We’ll look at your profile, tell you what schools are a match, and help you hone your personal brand so it catches adcoms’ attention when they read your application!