Joshua Baehring

The School of Management’s latest employment report revealed a decline in students who received and accepted full-time job offers three months after graduation.

The class of 2024 data shows that 84.8 percent of students received job offers three months after graduation and 81.2 percent accepted job offers, a decline from the numbers of the class of 2023, which were 88.4 percent and 91.5 percent, respectively. These numbers averaged 93.18 percent and 90.62 percent over the last five years.

“We’re seeing a lot of employer demand — it’s just different than it was 10-15 years ago,” wrote Abigail Kies, the assistant dean of career development at SOM. “It’s no longer about employers going to a few campuses to hire, all with timelines in sync with their competitors. It’s not as much about employers hiring many students for the ‘same’ positions and figuring out exactly where they’ll be when they arrive.” 

Kies explained that several factors contributed to this year’s drop in post-graduation employment rates. Kies pointed out that the numbers from two years ago were impacted by the considerable expansion undertaken by the big consulting firms, and that 2024 signified a return to “still strong yet more historic” numbers. However, Kies also noted many graduates accepted offers after SOM’s data reporting deadline.

Decreases in post-graduation employment offers has been a recent trend across business schools. At Harvard Business School, only 85 percent of graduates received job offers post-graduation, compared to 95 percent in 2022. Similarly, at the Massachusetts Institute for Technology’s Sloan School of Management, only 77 percent of students in the class of 2024 had accepted job offers three months post-graduation, as compared to the 93 percent that was the average during the decade to 2022.

Kies stated that there is still demand for MBAs and especially SOM MBAs. And while some big brands have taken a step back in terms of hiring MBAs, others employers have joined the market to acquire the newly available talent to join their respective organizations. Moreover, Kies made clear that the employment report only communicates the choices graduate students have made and not the opportunities and offers students had as there is no complete information on declined offers.

“During COVID, all the consulting firms made huge cuts to their workforce because they thought they were going to lose a lot of money coming out of COVID in 2021 into a robust economy — there [were] major gains made, and then in order to supplement those gains, they sort of had the staff back up, and they started to hire like crazy,” said Shivansh Chaturvedi SOM ’25, a second-year master’s student and career advisor at SOM. “And then 2024 came, and things slowed back down. And that meant they had to either, in many cases, fire a lot of their employees, but also not hire a lot of employees,” Chaturvedi added.

Chaturvedi explained that the declines were probably caused by the decline in major industries that hire SOM graduates, including consulting, banking and tech. Chaturvedi said that since more than 40 percent of SOM graduates go into consulting, it contributed significantly to the drop in post-graduation employment rate. In addition, since the other big employers of SOM graduates, investment banking and technology, also experienced a similar trend, many students who were targeting those industries had a harder time finding a job.

But Chaturvedi further explained that while the class of 2024 had around 35 people gain consulting internships, the class of 2025 had 35 students get a consulting internship in one firm, which indicates that these firms may be starting their hiring pipeline back up again. Chaturvedi stated that in recent years, there has been an increased trend of students going into more non-traditional industries such as impact investing and nonprofits, which generally have a longer searching period.

In addition, Chaturvedi noted the 10 to 20 percent of students, which is about 35 to 50 students in the graduating class, who aren’t immediately jumping on job offers might be those who just want to take more time or need some time to figure out exactly what they want to end up doing.

“Generally speaking, it’s just getting more competitive for applicants, across the board, in all of these industries. And so for MBA students in particular, this is difficult because these are largely the industries that they’re seeking direct employment [in],” said Pol Berger Romeu ’25, the president of Yale Undergraduate Consulting Group.

Romeu said that many firms are actively cutting down available positions, explaining that in recent years these firms have sized down their internships programs, which impacts undergraduates as well as some MBAs. In addition, they have also laid off a lot of their senior employees, which would presumably affect MBA graduates as well. Romeu further explains that a part of the reason that this affected MBAs quite a bit is the fact that a lot of them are looking at these same industries such as banking and consulting.

Moreover, Romeu noted that some undergraduates are now questioning the value of an MBA, especially as a lot of firms are choosing to keep their employees around for those two years that they would have spent in school and instead accelerate their progress in-house. 

In addition, Romeu points to an increased trend in combining MBAs with another degree, such as a JD or even an MD as more and more people look at alternative paths. Although as Romeu explained, this doesn’t signify a shift in those who had aspirations for an MBA looking to add something on to their MBAs, but rather, a lot of those pursuing other professional and graduate degrees deciding to pursue an MBA alongside their studies.

In fact, Romeu said that he believes that there will always be an interest in MBA programs, since they do offer a great networking opportunity, as well as the opportunity to gain strong connections in similar fields that might serve one down the line.

“I’d be much more curious and much more interested to see where the students end up a year after graduation, and equally curious to see how their career paths are impacted a decade down [the line],” explained Chaturvedi. “I think the value of the MBA is generally seen to be something longer term.”

The School of Management was founded in 1976.

ELSHADAY TEKESTE
Elshaday Tekeste covers Graduate and Professional Schools. He is a first-year in Timothy Dwight from Charlotte, North Carolina.