"Lifetime" MBA Earnings Ranking

You'll also see differences based on where graduates tend to go in geographic terms. If you're working on Wall Street or San Francisco, you can expect higher salaries partially due to the higher cost of living. Look at the top 10 schools on that list--they tend to put a lot of grads into finance or tech jobs with firms that are concentrated in pricey locales. Look at the bottom of the list--while the bottom 10 are lower-tier schools, most are also located in places with more reasonable costs of living (UT, WA, IN, TX, GA). $150K a year goes a lot further in Salt Lake City or Atlanta than it does in NYC. Michigan and the midwest in general would fall into the category of cheaper places to live, and Ross tends to put a lot of grads into the midwest.

Average salary is worth considering, but it's not something to base your whole decision on. You're probably better off picking a school that's good at producing people who do what you want to do, in a region or regions where you'd like to do it.

Another thing to keep in mind:

The wealthier you are, the less important "earnings" really is.

True wealth comes from the accumulation of assets, and that comes through your ability to make smart investment decisions *and/or* your building your own business.

In other words, the more assets you accumulate over time, the less you will be focused on salary (or earnings).

The lifetime earnings perspective is useful if you're planning on being an employee for life. That may have been more prevalent 10-20 years ago, but will become less so going forward.

Remember that in the old days, the biggest benefit of "working for a company" was job security and benefits - especially at large companies. And both of that (job security and benefits) are eroding or largely gone. As such, there's really not much value in "working for a company" beyond getting some exposure and experience.

In other words, the risks in relative terms of starting your own business (or joining a startup) are becoming less because "joining a company" in a way isn't a lot safer or secure.

And when it comes to entrepreneurship and startups, it's less about "earnings" as it is about accumulating assets, *and* the independence to steer your own ship or to have more control over how to navigate that ship.

For many of you, I can assure you that there's a strong chance you won't be working for someone else for your entire working life - and that there will be significant chunks of your working life where you will either have your own business, or will be close to it (i.e. working at a startup).

Again, these lifetime earnings metrics may have been useful if we were living in the world of the 1950s-1980s where careers were more linear and stable (and the differences in cost of living between different regions wasn't quite as extreme as they are today), but it won't really do you much good going forward since for most of you, it's highly likely that:

(1) You will make 180-degree changes in your career (not just within "business" but even outside of business) every 10-15 years or so, and

(2) There will be a significant chunk of time (5-15 years?) where you will likely be self-employed, have your own business, or working at a small business as a near-owner.

As such, when there's such big non-linear changes in your career choices, you can't simply extrapolate earnings/numbers from a prior career to subsequent ones, since they are independent events (i.e. what you used to make as an investment banker has NOTHING to do with how much you'll make working as a real estate developer, or a mgmt consultant who becomes a school teacher for a few years and then goes back to working in mgmt at a nonprofit before running for office, or whatever).

Great stuff, Alex.

who cares how much graduates make? there are some schools that attract a lot of people who very much want to go into non-profit. their $$ are lower but they are doing exactly what they wanted to do. other schools have lots of finance folks, doesn't mean it's a better school, just means that's where the focus is. there have got to better measures of "good" school.

This. I would say that an overwhelming majority of the variance in these numbers stems from this fact above only. NYC pays significantly more than most other cities (Houston, Atlanta), and it costs TWICE that to live there.

Not really...New York pay isn't that out of line from other cities for many jobs when you compare position to position. A corporate companies isnt going to pay someone 2X just because location, costs are too important and if it was that glaring of a difference they would switch. Its more a function of what jobs are in NYC vs Atlanta. Not a whole lot of investment jobs in Atlanta when compared to NYC. NYC has corporate positions that will pay higher than the vast majority of jobs at a company. Corporate jobs are almost always white collar and require higher education and greater responsibility.

Look at employment reports for various schools and look at the regional pay data and it will show there is not a huge difference in pay for functions from one region to another. In fact a lot of jobs, such as consulting have the same salary for all locations. So that 130k salary is going to be the same for all offices whether they are NYC/Boston/San Fran, or Dallas/Atlanta, etc.

I've always wondered based on these MBA earnings rankings, do most top-tier JDs make more $$$ than H/S/W grads?

see: https://www.infirmation.com/shared/searc ... _abbrev=NY

Note that the overwhelming majority of law school graduates from top 25 law schools make the above law firm salaries upon graduation (see, e.g.: https://www.lawschooltransparency.com/cl ... ?school=bu)

So a Boston University JD is likely to make more earnings than the average Harvard MBA? Sounds dubious...what am I missing?

many interesting reasons to discredit these rankings. any reason we should pay attention to them?

Base is significantly higher in early years, bonus potential much less. Evens up as you go up the levels.