What’s the best MBA in the world if you want a career in investment banking? It’s hard to say. But if your goal is to kickstart your career in financial services, then there’s a pretty convenient metric to judge them by: how often graduates from each program go into a career in the industry.
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In the chart further down this page, we’ve ranked some of the biggest and best MBAs in the world, according to the proportion of their MBA graduates who went directly into financial services careers in 2024, based on publicly available information in their own employment reports.
One important thing to remember is that the breakdown is for all financial services industry professionals, not just ones that go into the most prestigious firms such as investment banks, hedge funds, or private equity firms. It also doesn’t distinguish front-office from middle- and back-office roles.
As expected, American business schools dominate the ranking. Cornell Johnson, Harvard Business School, and Stanford Graduate School of Business send the highest proportion of their MBAs into financial services, but the numbers conceal some big variations. At Cornell, in 2024, for example, fewer than 2% of MBA graduates went into private equity and venture capital. At Harvard, the equivalent number was around 24%. By comparison, 32% of Cornell’s MBAs went into jobs in investment banks. Some MBA colleges specialize in particular areas of financial services, therefore.
Also as expected, MBAs from US colleges earn the most. At Cornell in 2024, the average starting salary for MBA graduated in finance was $175k. At Stanford, graduating MBAs going into finance jobs earned $200k last year. At European schools like Oxford Saïd and HEC Paris, by comparison, 2024 MBA starting salaries were only around $100k. Slightly higher pay was on offer at London Business School – $118k, on average, last year.
There are some curious names on our list. Ohio State’s Fisher School of Management, for example, sent a higher percentage of its MBA alumni into financial services than MIT or HEC Paris. Fisher’s employment report says that graduates from the class of 2025 now work at JPMorgan, Bank of America, and Goldman Sachs, among others. They don’t appear to be in revenue-generating roles in investment banking or trading, but in operations roles in the back office. These are more likely to be located in cities like Columbus Ohio and Phoenix Arizona.
It might be worth asking – do you really need an MBA to get into finance? After all, the course is a huge investment, with many on the list costing over $200k for two years of education. Cornell’s MBA for example, done across two years, costs around $173k in tuition fees alone.
That depends on what you want to do. Most people in our 1.3m strong CV database do not have an MBA. But many of them work in middle- and back-office functions such as compliance and operations, where MBAs aren’t as recognized. MBAs are more prevalent in investment banking functions such as M&A or in sectors such as private equity, where they’re a traditional entry route into the associate rank.
In investment banking, an MBA can be a shortcut into an associate job after skipping the grueling analyst rank. In private equity, an MBA was historically part of the “2+2” path into the industry: two years as an investment banking analyst, and then two years studying an MBA before joining a private equity firm. That particular path is now less common, though, and private equity firms are training-up associates themselves.
An MBA is least relevant for sales & trading roles. Much more popular is the masters in finance, and the masters in financial engineering, especially for quant jobs.
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