How Regional is Your School? Looking at Job Placement Data

Thanks for your feedback guys. I have updated the file.

Great work! what this tells me though, every school is pretty regional. East coast and West coast schools a bit more then others (understandably so, since more MBA jobs are located on the coasts).

BUT, This tells me less about how regional schools are, and more about how regional regions are...

You can get to the Northeast or the West coast from pretty much anywhere, BUT if you plan on working in the Mid-west, South or even Mid-Atlantic post mba, you're best bet is to go to a school in that area.

Thank you highwyre! I wanted to do something similar with industries and job functions as well. But different schools categorize these in different ways. It will take a lot of effort. Maybe I'll do that in the future.



You have provided a great insight. But this really confuses me. Consider for example, a Stanford graduate wants to work in the South (for family reasons maybe), and it is safe to assume that he/she will be considered competitive against Fuqua/Darden/Goizueta/UNC graduates. So, even if any graduate from a top school wants to work in a region where the presence of their alumni is not strong, they should be able to get employment there.

Maybe the salaries of different regions have something to do with this?

I think this has to do with self-selective behavior more than anything. Yes, someone who gets into GSB can land a job ANYWHERE - it just happens that most are drawn to Stanford due to its Bay area location and placement in that region. The same can be said for a school like Goizueta - they draw a lot of interest from students who are interested in staying in the Atlanta or placing in the Southeast.

The logic here is if someone wants to be in a certain region after school, there's something about it they like, so they'd probably prefer to go to school in that region as well. I think the only schools that are exempt from this are HSW. In other words, people who say: "I want to be in LA after I graduate, but I'd like to live in NYC for two years before I do that." are in the strict minority.

And of course there's the "network cycle" if school "A" places most graduates in one region, that's where the network is strongest, and a lot of future graduates will want to end up in that region, so that feeds into a schools "regionality."

Spot on. The bolded part above is actually just what I was about to say myself. For example, the Sloan network is strongest in the North East and on the West Coast, so in some ways graduates get funneled there because opportunities are greater (through networking) and because a disproportionately high percentage of one's friends from each class are likely to go there.

agreed with Cobrakai and King Falcon.

To add, here's a few interesting pivot tables I threw together with your data, plus the class sizes of each school.

The first table shows the percentage of that MBA market a school makes up... so, lets say you want to work in the northeast, do you have more alumni to reach out to from a large midwestern school like Booth, or a small Northeastern school like Tuck?

(I know I know, Tuck alumni tend to be more responsive... if someone wants to put a metric around the response rate of an alumni base and add it into this calculation go for it...)

the second pretty much rolls the data from your table into regions, how regional is a certain region of schools?

As you can see, 57% of employees in the south went to school in the south, 65% of workers in the midwest, went to school in the midwest, while only 40% of workers in the west went to school in the west and 52% of workers in the east went to school in the east (but keep in mind 33% of all students went to school in the NE, see table below)

Row Labels-------% of Students
Mid-Atlantic-----------18.26%
Midwest---------------23.36%
Northeast-------------33.19%
South------------------11.76%
West-------------------13.42%

Really nice work!

Also agree with CobraKai. It seems like a self fulfilling prophecy.