One of the advantages of top-tier MBA degrees is their portability – candidates from top schools often have the opportunity to work in any city they want. For certain industries such as the federal government, a location like Washington, D.C. is synonymous with the industry and is regarded as “the place to be” in terms of career growth. But what if there was a way to analyze what U.S. cities have to offer MBA students?
Utilizing data provided by MBAs across the nation, we are able to analyze metrics such as average compensation, the most common functional roles and industries, and the companies that hire a large number of MBAs in any major city in the United States. Sixth up in our analysis: Boston, Massachusetts.
(This entry is part of a series exploring such measures for various cities. You can find our other entries in the series here: Atlanta, Chicago, Detroit, and New York.)
According to the sources Bungalow, Numbeo, and Apartment List, the average cost of living in Boston is approximately $4400/month, with the median rent of a one-bedroom being $3190/month. In terms of the average post-MBA salary in this city, the data indicates it is around $126,853 while the average post-MBA compensation is $177,449.
City ranks for three separate measures out of a total of 55 evaluated cities
When looking at the top ten industries of MBAs living in this city, Consulting leads the pack by a large margin with 28.8% of MBAs belonging to this industry, followed by Technology, Internet, & Ecommerce and Pharma, Medical Devices, & Biotech with 19.1% and 8.4%, respectively. Insurance, Investment Management, and Hospitals, Medicine, & Healthcare Services trail at fourth, fifth, and sixth place with 7.4%, 6.9%, and 6.0%. This leaves Diversified Financial Services (4.7%); Consumer Products (2.7%); Retail (2.2%); and Non-Profit, Social Impact, & Social Work (1.7%) finishing off the list. Our other category, which constituted 11.9%, included industries such as Education, Manufacturing, and Aerospace & Aviation.
Now that it has been established what the popular industries for business students in Boston are, let’s take a look at the functions they are hired for. Consulting comes in first again with 33.7% followed by Marketing with 9.7% and Corporate Strategy with 6.5%. General Management takes fourth place with 6.2% while Investment Management and Product Management takes fifth place with 5.7%. Analytics & Data Science and Operations share the sixth position, tyinging with 4.7%, and Business Development comes in seventh with 4.5%. Corporate Finance rounds out the list with 4.2% while the Other category encapsulates 14.4%.
You may be wondering which employers are hiring for these MBA functions. According to the data, the top 5 employers are Wayfair (7.9%), Liberty Mutual Group(6.7%), Fidelity Investments (5.7%), Boston Consulting Group (4.7%), and L.E.K Consulting (3.7%).
However, when specifically looking at the top employers for the Consulting Industry, Boston Consulting Group has 16.4%, L.E.K Consulting has 12.9%, and Bain & Company has 9.5% of all the MBAs in our dataset from this industry living in Boston. Trailing behind them is Parthenon-EY with 5.2% and Accenture with 3.4%. In contrast, Technology, Internet, & Ecommerce—the next most common industry— has its top employers as Wayfair with 39.0%, TripAdvisor with 6.5%, IBM with 5.2%, and Amazon and Black Duck Software with 2.6% each. Likewise, Pharma, Medical Devices, & Biotech has a different set of top employers with Boston Scientific Corporation and Thermo Fisher Scientific having 11.8% each, Medtronic having 8.8%, and Biogen and Johnson & Johnson tying for third place with 5.9% each.
The last question asked was which business schools have the most alumni working in this city. MIT Sloan School of Management comes in first with the alumni making up 13.4% of the data while University of Chicago Booth School of Business makes up 11.9%. This is followed by Harvard Business School with 10.7%, Dartmouth Tuck School of Business with 6.2%, and Boston University Questrom School of Business with 5.5%.
MBAs of Boston– City Guide:
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