Why It’s Tough for Harvard M.B.As to Find Jobs Right Now
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Here's your money briefing for Wednesday, January 22nd. I'm Arianna Aspuru for The Wall Street Journal. Some graduates of elite business schools are struggling to find jobs after completing their business degree.
The vast majority of schools that I was looking at saw twice as many recent graduates on the job market this year still looking for work three months out than they did two years ago when the market was really hot.
We'll talk to Wall Street Journal reporter Lindsay Ellis after the break.
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Landing a professional job has become a challenge for everyone, even Ivy League MBA graduates. Wall Street Journal reporter Lindsay Ellis joins me. Lindsay, why are MBA graduates experiencing a tougher time landing jobs?
Overall, it is a tough market for white collar workers, and companies are looking for people with direct experience in many cases, making it harder for MBAs who may be trying to pivot into a new field from a degree program. That might be more difficult to make the case that they would be the exact right fit for an open position. Recruiters also, as recently as 2022, would come to campus early in the school year and would try and hire a ton of MBAs. And now companies are more apt to do virtual recruiting and they are hiring when they have a clearer sense of their business needs, which might be closer to graduation or even after graduation. That all adds up to MBA graduates who came onto the market after leaving campus in 24, that they are having a more difficult time finding work than those even two years prior.
Why are Harvard M.B.A. employment rates worse three months after graduation?
In your story, you highlight how difficult it is to land a job by using one of the most prestigious schools in the country, Harvard Business School. What's going on with their MBA students?
So almost a quarter of the Harvard Business School graduates who left campus in 2024 who were looking for jobs didn't accept one three months after graduation. Their career center leader, Kristen Fitzpatrick, she told me that graduates need to have the skills, that just going to Harvard is not going to be a differentiator. And she says that she doesn't expect this super selective job market to change much. Is this happening across the board with students? So Harvard is certainly not alone here. As part of the reporting for this article, I reviewed five years of employment data for more than a dozen MBA programs. And these programs were among the highest ranked in the country. And only one that I found, Columbia Business School, saw success.
better year-over-year outcomes from the class of 2023 to the class of 2024. The vast majority of schools that I was looking at saw twice as many recent graduates on the job market this year still looking for work three months out than they did two years ago when the market was really hot. So recent graduates from these extremely prestigious business programs are having longer searches and accepting jobs at lower rates than they did even two years ago.
For this story, you also spoke to some MBA graduates who are in the thick of trying to land a full-time job. How are they managing it?
Many of them tell me that networking has been key.
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