Hiring Company Number of Hires
at NYU* Number of Hires
at Columbia
McKinsey & Co. 3 46
Boston Consulting Group 3 21
Bain & Co. 3 20
Morgan Stanley 3 5
Citigroup 3 11
JP Morgan Chase 3 15
Deloitte Consulting 3 12
Deutsche Bank 3 11
Goldman Sachs 3 8
Credit Suisse 3 11
Microsoft -3 NA
Booz & Co. 3 20
BofA/Merrill Lynch 3 9
Barclays Capital 3 10
Johnson & Johnson 3 NA
UBS 3 9
American Express 3 6
Unilever 3 6
American Continental NA 4
Fidelity Investments -3 4
General Electric -3 4
IBM 3 3
PricewaterhouseCoopers 3 3
Blackstone Group NA 3
HSBC 3+ 3
Job & Pay Data New York Columbia
Starting salary & bonus $124,112 $123,150
MBAs employed at commencement 72.1% 61.1%
MBAs employed 3 months after commencement 80.4% 77.3%
Estimated median pay ten years after commencement $135,000 $165,000
Estimated median pay & bonus over a full career $2,918,748 $3,349,669
Who Hires Who:
When it comes to looking at detailed numbers on which companies hire most from NYU’s Stern School, it’s somewhat difficult because Stern isn’t nearly as transparent as most of the other top business schools. Instead of listing the major employers by the number of graduates each hires, Stern simply publishes “a small sample of Stern employers” and puts an asterisk next to each company that hired three or more graduates. Why? We’re not sure but we’re immediately skeptical of such secrecy because it’s very possible that NYU wouldn’t look very good in head-to-head comparisons on such a list. Columbia is more open and what its numbers show is that consulting firms helped to offset the near total collapse of finance for the Class of 2009. Even so, about 48% of Columbia’s Class of 2009 still went into financial services, vs. 43% at Wharton. NA does not necessarily mean that a company didn’t hire any graduates from the school, but rather that the number of grads it did hire did not qualify it for breakout treatment by the school. The cutoff number at Columbia was three hires. The asterisk in the NYU column indicates that an employer listed hire three or more grads.
The financial meltdown of 2009 led to a disaster of an MBA recruiting season at Columbia’s Business School and NYU’s Stern School. Nearly four of every ten graduating students in Columbia’s Class of 2009 was without a job at commencement. Columbia was more severely impacted than any other top ten school because it traditionally feeds Wall Street and the big banks which were largely on life support at the time. In fact, for the first time in recent history, three consulting firms–McKinsey, Boston Consulting Group, and Bain–were at the top of the list of employers hiring Columbia MBAs rather than the financial services firms which tend to dominate. Though NYU also is heavily dependent on finance for jobs, it seemed to do a much better job of getting its graduates placed. The number of Stern MBAs employed at graduation were 11 percentage points higher than those at Columbia. Stern’s uptown rival closed the gap three months later, but still trailed NYU by more than three percentage points.
Another surprise in these numbers: the average salary and bonus at NYU was slightly higher than Columbia by nearly one thousand bucks.
The estimates of median pay 10 years after graduation and over a full career come from a study by PayScale done for BusinessWeek and do not include stock options or equity stakes by entrepreneurs. Columbia grads did better after ten years and over a lifetime than NYU grads. In fact, Columbia MBAs were third in career pay behind only Harvard and Wharton.
The big difference in undergraduate backgrounds at these schools seems to occur among the heavy quants. Columbia gets a smaller percentage, just 13%, versus NYU which takes in just about a quarter of its class in engineering and math majors. On the other key undergraduate experiences, the schools are pretty even.
Undergrad Degrees NYU Columbia
Humanities/Social Science 23% 20%
Engineering/Math 24% 13%
Business/Economics 45% 46%
Columbia is one of the largest two-year, full-time MBA programs in the world, with a total enrollment of nearly 1,300 students–not including more than 600 additional Executive MBAs. NYU, in contrast, is significantly smaller at 826 full-timers, but has a massive undergraduate business school population as well as one of the largest part-time MBA programs in the world. NYU has more women in its full-time MBA program than Columbia by a full six percentage points, but far fewer international students (some 32% of Columbia MBAs are international vs. 23% at NYU. Stern also does better with minority students by a full ten percentage points.
Enrollment Stats New York Columbia
Total MBA Enrollment 826 1,293
Women 40% 34%
International 23% 32%
Minority 28% 18%
These are two of the most highly selective business in the world. NYU accepts just 14.5% of its applicants, while Columbia says yes to only 14.9% of those who apply.
There are only four other full-time MBA programs in the world that are more selective than these two New York City universities: Stanford, Berkeley, Harvard, and MIT.
This is a world of difference from where Columbia was in the early 1990s when it was accepting 47% of its applicants in 1992. NYU’s average GMAT score for the Class of 2011 is slightly higher than Columbia’s by a mere four points, 717 to 713. It’s worth noting that the hurdle to get into NYU’s part-time program with nearly 2,000 active students is much lower. Stern accepts about 55% of its part-time applicants, versus the much more selective rate above. * 10th to 90th percentage range. **Estimate.
Admission Stats New York Columbia
Average GMAT 717 713
GMAT Range 680-760* 680-760*
Average GPA 3.45 3.5
Selectivity 0.145 0.149
Yield 58%** 72%**
