
Harvard Business School is the world’s most expensive full-time MBA program, with tuition and required fees eclipsing $106,000 for two years. It pays off: Havard Business School graduates earn more money over the span of their careers than those from any other school. Harvard degree holders earn more than $3.9 million during their careers compared to $3.5 million for those from University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton school and $3.3 million for those who got their MBAs from Columbia University, reports Bloomberg BusinessWeek on its website. “It’s the trickle-down effect,” says Robert Dammon , associate dean and professor of financial economics at Carnegie Mellon University’s Tepper School of Business in Pittsburgh.
The kinds of students that the best schools attract are going to get the highest paying jobs.” With few exceptions, Dammon is correct. The top ranked–and most expensive — MBA programs produce the highest salaried grads over the span of their careers, according to research commissioned by Bloomberg BusinessWeek. For the second year, Bloomberg Businessweek asked PayScale , a company that collects salary data from individuals through online pay comparison tools, to use its database of 23,000 MBA graduates at the top 45 U.S. business schools to calculate their median cash compensation — salaries and bonuses — around graduation and after they have an average of 5, 10, 15, and 20 years of work experience in the same industry. Bloomberg Businessweek then used that data to calculate an estimate of median cash earnings over the entire 20-year span. Lifetime Earnings On average, MBAs from the top 45 business schools will make about $2.5 million in base pay and bonuses over the course of a 20-year career. There are great differences between the total compensation of the schools at the top of the list compared to those closer to the bottom, especially as MBAs move deeper into their careers. An MBA graduate from the Tippie College at The University of Iowa will earn less than half that of a graduate of Harvard, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Newly-minted MBAs at some programs, such as Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, earn high starting salaries, but experience a only a minimal increase over time. At other schools, like the University of Connecticut, MBA grads more than double their salaries over the 20-year timeframe. The numbers don’t include stock or options, and the pay data for some smaller schools at the 20-year mark may be based on fewer than 100 pay reports. They also do not track the same graduates over time; they reflect the experience of individuals who graduated at various points throughout the last 20 years.