 
|
|||||||||||||
              
|
What slump? Market turmoil, economic slowdown doesn't stop MBA grads from finding well-paying jobs
Tuesday, April 03, 2001 By Eve Modzelewski, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
Despite the recent carnage on Wall Street and the mounting layoffs on Main Street, local business students are hardly agonizing over job prospects. In fact, most district MBA students graduating this year can boast of salary offers and signing bonuses on par with or better than the class of 2000 received.
"Companies are still hiring," said Joan Craig, assistant dean of career services and corporate relations at the University of Pittsburgh's Katz Graduate School of Business.
All 18 of Pitt's dual MBA/Masters of Science in Management Information Systems (MS-MIS) students who graduate from Katz April 20 have landed jobs, with many having their pick of offers.
Todd Schrubb, for example, received two offers and chose a senior consultant job from the local office of Deloitte Consulting.
While Schrubb, 28, declined to disclose his salary, he said most so-called "techno-MBA" graduates from Katz will make more than the MBA-MIS class of 2000, which received starting salaries that averaged $70,900.
Schrubb estimated that the average increase could top 10 percent. And while Craig said the school has yet to compile starting salaries for this year's class, she agreed that the average probably would top last year's.
Fears about waning job prospects have been fueled more by the reports of layoffs than by the actual experience of Katz business students, she said.
For Schrubb, recruiters have been as aggressive as ever. One, McKinsey & Co., flew him to its Miami office in November.
Other techno-MBA students at Katz experienced similar good fortune.
With an undergraduate degree in English and work experience in human resources, Kathleen Sacco was concerned that her heavy liberal arts background might put her at disadvantage vis-a-vis her peers and cut into her job prospects.
Her worries subsided, however, after she got four job offers by January -- most of which guaranteed to triple her pre-MBA wage. She decided in February to join PNC Financial Services Group as a management leadership associate.
"Everyone keeps asking me, 'Are you worried about the economy? Are you worried about being in business school?' And I think I'd be more worried if I weren't," Sacco said. "I see my education as an investment."
Sacco financed her MBA/MS-MIS with "a whole lot of loans," but she is confident that she will pay them back quickly. Two years of tuition for the dual-degree program runs about $33,000 for in-state students and more than $54,000 for out-of-state residents.
Companies that employ MBA graduates sent recruiters to an average 10.4 campuses this school year, up from 8.4 campuses in 1999, according to a recent survey of 601 companies by the National Association of Colleges and Employers.
Duquesne University students can attest to that slight increase in recruitment.
The number of companies recruiting for business internships at the university jumped to 46 in the 2000-01 year, vs. 30 in 1999-2000.
There are about 600 students enrolled in Duquesne's John F. Donahue Graduate School of Business, and Associate Dean Bill Presutti said its 2001 graduates are finding work with ease.
Only about 20 percent of the full-time students at Donahue are actively seeking employment, Presutti said, while the other 80 percent maintained jobs while they went to school.
"We see no problems with placement," Presutti said, adding that salary levels for those fielding offers were about the same as last year.
"We hear a lot of talk about the economy softening, but companies are still recruiting," he said.
Business students at Carnegie Mellon University also are faring well.
"We're ahead of where we were last year at this time," said Jean Eisel, CMU's associate dean for admissions, the career opportunity center and alumni relations. So far this year, CMU MBAs are boasting salary offers averaging more than $93,000, up from last year's average of about $86,000.
But while salaries continue to climb, Eisel said, recruitment wasn't happening on as large a scale as it had in the past.
"People are still hiring, but not necessarily at the volume they were before," she said. Instead of taking 10 or 20 students at a time, companies are recruiting a little more cautiously.
"But we're still having jobs come in and we're still sending information out," Eisel said.
Most recruiting at CMU occurs before the winter break, and students usually have decided on jobs far before graduation, so it's difficult to gauge the effect of the most recent market slumps on the market for MBAs.
The slump could affect next fall's recruitment season, but Eisel and others said it was too soon to tell.
|
||||||||||||
