According to a new national survey, the majority of spring graduates with a Master of Business Administration degree reported they haven’t found employment. However, graduates of two Oklahoma programs have reportedly had much greater success in their job searches.
68% of the 1,000 graduating full-time MBA students surveyed by Intelligent.com on May 12 said they had not secured a full-time position. According to the survey, 63% of men were still looking for work while nearly three-fourths of women had not found employment.
MBA programs are available in Oklahoma City’s downtown business district from both the University of Oklahoma and the University of Central Oklahoma. The opposite, according to representatives from both programs, is happening to their 2023 graduates.
“We had 85% job placement at the end of the semester and only three left one week after graduation,” said Eddie Edwards, the MBA program’s executive director at the Gene Rainbolt Graduate School of Business at Oklahoma.
“We always have great placement for our grads,” said Erin Wolfe, senior director for the program’s graduate student success. 90 days after graduation, 85% to 90% of graduates, according to Wolfe, are employed using their MBAs. She and Edwards anticipate that it will be 100% this year.
According to Wolfe, the 90-day period that most MBA programs use to determine success will probably see an improvement in the low national numbers. Except for the West Coast, where a large number of layoffs in the technology sector have halted hiring, colleagues across the nation have not reported that their graduates are having trouble finding jobs, she said.
Jack Stoner, an OU spring graduate, attributes his ability to land a position in Northrop Grumman Corp.’s space systems division to his MBA. He relocated to Utah this week and will start working on June 12.
In May 2022, Stoner graduated from OU with a bachelor’s degree in industrial and systems engineering. A year later, he completed the accelerated five-year MBA program.
“It helped me stand out against candidates from higher-ranked engineering schools,” he said. “It enabled me to land numerous interviews.”
He submitted 171 applications, and 26 % of them led to interviews. From Texas Instruments and Boeing, among others, he received numerous job offers.
“All my friends in the accelerated program got jobs they are super happy with too,” Stoner said.
Edwards said the MBA program gets “tons of engineers,” but the degree adds value to any career field – health care, law, marketing, even fine arts.
“A business overlay is always good to have,” he said. “Any question, in our opinion, can be answered by getting an MBA.”
According to Edwards, many OU MBA graduates pursue careers in cybersecurity, technology, and data analytics. “Young people who can talk both to tech people and managers and help them make decisions using data (are in demand),” he said.
The Wall Street Journal reported Top consulting firms, one of the biggest employers of graduates from business schools, began making offers for MBA jobs on April 18. However, some start dates are being delayed.
Bain & Co. told MBAs with offer letters that if they waited to start until April 2024, the firm would pay them $40,000 to work for a nonprofit or $30,000 to learn a new language or participate in an educational program, according to the WSJ article.
Numerous students who have received offer letters claim that McKinsey & Co. has yet to set start dates for many MBA hires. According to the article, the company, which is in the process of terminating up to 2,000 employees, said the new hires will be made gradually, beginning soon after graduation and continuing through February 2024.
One OU MBA graduate, according to Wolfe, had a job offer delayed until January 2024, while a few others were asked to start in May rather than June as originally scheduled.
According to the Intelligent.com survey, 28% of MBA students who have found full-time employment will begin in September through December, while 28% won’t begin until 2024. Of those who have found full-time employment, 44% will begin between May and August.
86% of those with full-time employment plans will earn more than $100,000 annually, and 11% will make twice that. The majority of respondents claim to have also received a moving stipend (62%), signing bonus (63%), or both.
Reference: journalrecord.com
