If you want to know why majoring in business has become so popular in recent years, look no further than the starting salaries of graduates. Get your undergrad degree in business from a top school and you can walk into a job paying $70,000 a year.
That’s pretty good money, no matter how you slice it. And when you can pull down that kind of paycheck to start, it’s even better. Of course, this is starting salary only. At Wharton, more than 80% of the graduating class typically receives average sign-on bonuses of nearly $10,000, on top of annual bonuses over $26,000 each.
It’s also worth noting that the average senior in the class of 2013 at Wharton had 11.5 interviews and 2.2 job offers during senior year. The numbers are slightly skewed because nearly 40% of students accepted offers after junior year summer internships; those students frequently don’t interview at all during their senior year.
And the pay is not only good at the top-drawer business schools. Last year’s business graduates at Binghamton University, for example, gained starting salaries of $60,000–just ten grand less than Wharton grads. And at the College of New Jersey, business grads picked up jobs that paid median salaries of $56,000 a year.
Schools Where Business Graduates Earn The Most To Start
| School | Median Starting Salary |
|---|---|
| University of Pennsylvania (Wharton) | $70,000 |
| University of Virginia (McIntire) | $70,000 |
| Carnegie Mellon University (Tepper) | $70,000 |
| Cornell University (Dyson) | $65,000 |
| University of Michigan (Ross) | $65,000 |
| Georgetown University (McDonough) | $64,500 |
| New York University (Stern) | $64,000 |
| Washington University (Olin) | $62,500 |
| University of California-Berkeley (Haas) | $62,000 |
| Emory University (Goizueta) | $60,000 |
| University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill (Kenan-Flagler) | $60,000 |
| Binghamton University | $60,000 |
| Notre Dame University (Mendoza) | $58,000 |
| University of Texas-Austin (McCombs) | $58,000 |
| College of William & Mary (Mason) | $58,000 |
| University of Alabama (Culverhouse) | $58,000 |
| Lehigh University | $57,750 |
| Fordham University (Gabelli) | $57,540 |
| Boston College (Carroll) | $57,000 |
| Northeastern University (D’Amore-McKim) | $57,000 |
| University of Maryland (Smith) | $56,500 |
| Wake Forest University | $56,000 |
| Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (Lally) | $56,000 |
| James Madison University | $56,000 |
| College of New Jersey | $56,000 |
Source: Business schools reporting to Bloomberg BusinessWeek
Questions about this article? Email us or leave a comment below.