This is what the average Yale business school graduate earns as a base salary

Mentioning that you attended an Ivy League university can still set you up for success, even when people are questioning the cost and value of a college degree. The Yale School of Management offers not only a solid, top-tier education, but also wields upper-echelon contacts, school-specific experiences, and higher wages early on.

Yale’s notable alumni

Yale’s graduate business school has a reputation for turning out the best in business. Notable individuals who pursued graduate degrees within the halls of this storied school include Paul D. Bell of Lead Edge Capital, former PepsiCo CEO and chairperson Indra Nooyi, philanthropist Martha Finn Brooks, Altitude Learning CEO and former Googler Max Ventilla, author and former Amazon director of social responsibility Christine Bader, Carlyle Group managing director Joaquin Avila, and Rose Rock Group CEO and chairman Steven C. Rockefeller Jr.

90.2% of graduates are offered a job right away

Almost every graduate of the business school program gets a job offer almost as soon as they’re handed a degree.

“90.2% of the students received a job offer three months after graduation in 2020, and 85.9% of students accepted these offers,” according to the Graduate Management Admission Test website. “87.1% of full-time hires were within the U.S., and 12.9% were international.”

Of those, 47% of the class of 2020 stayed in the Northeast, while 29.2% headed to the West Coast, followed by the mid-Atlantic at 7.4%, Southwest at 6.9%, Midwest at 5.9%, and 3.5% in the South.

The median base salary for graduates is $140K

The median base salary in every reported industry was absolutely mind-boggling for students fresh out of the Yale graduate business program, though these findings were last reported for the class of 2020, so COVID-19 setbacks and hiring freezes might make the statistics a little trickier. Last year, consulting jobs came in first, with 36.9% of the graduates, making a median base salary of $160,000 with an average sign-on bonus of $30,000.

Investment banking nabbed 10.6% of Yale business graduates and left them with a median salary of $150,000 and sign-on bonus of $50,000. Retail e-commerce won over nearly 7% of the 2021 graduates, who made an annual salary of $138,690 with an average signing bonus of over $67,000.

In 2020, 77.3% of graduates received a signing bonus. Other impressive signing bonuses besides those already mentioned were in technology, which averaged $27,500; healthcare and pharmaceuticals, which brought in about $25,000; and consumer packaged goods, floating an average of $35,000 on signing bonuses.

Acceptance rate

With an acceptance rate of 23.7%, the Yale School of Management isn’t easy to get into. The Yale business school class of 2020 entered with an impressive median undergraduate GPA of 3.67, even higher than Harvard Business School��s recently reported averages. The Yale class of 2020 averaged a GMAT score of 724.

Yale’s business school prioritizes diversity: 39% of the students in the graduating class of 2022 are female, and 8% identify as LGBTQ+. What’s more, 32% were students of color and 11% of the total were underrepresented U.S. students of color.