Why elite MBA graduates are struggling to find jobs

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Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. In business there is no surer sign of distress than when a firm delays its financial results. That also appears to be true of business schools.

Around Christmas—and in many cases behind their usual schedules—America’s top business schools published their equivalent of annual reports, which include data on the new jobs of graduates from their Master of Business Administration (MBA) programmes, typically two-year courses for students with professional experience. We have crunched the numbers. At the top 15 business schools, the share of students in 2024 who sought and accepted a job offer within three months of graduating, a standard measure of career outcomes, fell by six percentage points, to 84%.

Compared with the average over the past five years, that share declined by eight points. Some declines are jaw-dropping. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has a decent claim to be the world’s top university.

But at its business school, named after Alfred Sloan, a giant of the automotive industry during the 20th century, the wheels are coming off. During the decade to 2022, on average 82% of its students searching for a job had accepted one at graduation, and 93% had done so three months later. In 2024 those figures were 62% and 77%, respectively.

At some top schools the reality may be even worse than it looks. One professor worries that some students who are counted as entrepreneurs are in fact unemployed. American business may be booming.

But those who imagine themselves as its future leaders are suffering a recession. America’s business schools are used to criticism. The argument that business is something which is done and not taught has been around at least since the first