← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · madrussian
Thread ID: 18431 | Posts: 5 | Started: 2005-05-28
2005-05-28 16:37 | User Profile
Noticed the blurb about "diversity candidates" and decided to post this here. Are they saying that in the leaner years, "divershitty" candidates get relatively few offers, because the assumption is they got in and through school by virtue of their "shitty" skin?
[url]http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=580&e=6&u=/nm/20050528/bs_nm/mbas_dc[/url]
NEW YORK (Reuters) - When Irene J. Kim got ready to pick up her master's degree in business administration from the Columbia Business School this month, she splurged on a bottle of champagne to share with three classmates at the ceremony.
She could afford it. With jobs aplenty and starting base pay and bonuses breaching six figures, this year's crop of MBA grads have good cause to feel more flush than the classes that preceded them to the podium over the previous four years.
"Miraculously, we all have jobs," said Kim, 28, who described herself as a "career switcher."
She will join Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. sales and trading operations in New York in August. A former health-care consultant, she worked in Boston for four years before going to business school.
Wall Street is hiring more MBA grads from the Class of 2005 than it did last year, when recruiting was leaner. Job offers were sometimes withdrawn in 2001 through 2003 following thousands of layoffs resulting from the dot-com bubble's collapse in 2000, the stock market's three-year slide into bear territory and the shock of the Sept. 11 attacks in 2001.
MBAs ARE BACK, BABY
The Street's bigger appetite for new MBAs this year is reflected in starting pay that's "up at least 10 percent to 15 percent over last year," said Roy Smith, a professor of finance at New York University's Stern School of Business. "Our students are going to work for hedge funds, investment banks, private equity firms ... all the usual suspects."
Starting salary alone is averaging around $95,000 a year on Wall Street for this year's MBAs and a bonus easily pushes that up another $20,000 to $50,000, said compensation experts and placement directors at five of the best U.S. business schools.
"It's the economy. It's better, and MBAs are back, baby," said David Wilson, chief executive of the Graduate Management Admission Council, sponsor of the MBA school admissions exam.
Competition for MBA grads was "much more intense" this year than in 2004, especially for diversity candidates, said Connie Thanasoulis, campus recruiter for Merrill Lynch & Co.
Some have four or five job offers this year, up from one or two just two or three years ago, she said.
Merrill recruits from top-ranked business schools like Harvard, Columbia, the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania, Chicago, Stanford and the Fuqua School at Duke University in North Carolina.
This year, Merrill ramped up MBA hiring in global markets and investment banking, trading and research, Thanasoulis said. "Business has picked up quite a bit."
HUNGRY INVESTMENT BANKS
Among Merrill's MBA hires is Krista Warnick, who will join the mergers and acquisitions group in New York after graduating from the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business.
Her classmate Michael Rosen took a job at Barclays Capital (BARC.L) in New York to trade mortgage-backed securities.
Regina Resnick, Columbia's assistant dean and director of MBA Career Services, said, "Among our top employers, Goldman hired at least 25 students this year, Lehman hired multiples, and Citigroup has, too."
Goldman Sachs managing director Edith Hunt confirmed Columbia's numbers. "They are an increase from last year," she said, with more MBAs hired this year for investment banking, fixed income and equities.
At Lehman, "our numbers moved up this year, as they have consistently over the last few years," said Tom Marino, who was global head of recruiting before moving recently into senior relationship management with top clients. "We never pulled back the way a lot of our competition did."
This year, Lehman hired MBAs for all investment banking, sales, trading, research and investment management.
Caitlin McLaughlin, global head of campus recruiting for Citigroup corporate and investment banking, said her area, known as the CIB, "hired 27 percent more MBA graduates this year than last year."
FATTER PAYCHECKS
Investment banking associates will earn about $150,000 a year in total starting compensation, including salary and bonus, with some commanding up to $170,000, said Hussam Hamadeh, co-founder and co-president of Vault, a publishing company whose Web site, thevault.com, is popular with job seekers and employers.
New MBAs at big management consulting firms are getting about $140,000 a year, he said.
In contrast, a first-year lawyer's salary is about $125,000 a year at the biggest and best U.S. law firms, Hamadeh said.
A chunk of these fatter MBA paychecks, of course, will go toward paying off student loans. At Chicago's business school, for instance, a typical MBA student has about $75,000 in debt at graduation, a spokesman said.
2005-05-28 19:11 | User Profile
While whites compete with each other to get into the best business schools, the best schools compete with each other to get minorities.
"Diversity is our strength -- and your weakness, Whitey!"
2005-05-29 11:58 | User Profile
[QUOTE=madrussian]Noticed the blurb about "diversity candidates" and decided to post this here. Are they saying that in the leaner years, "divershitty" candidates get relatively few offers, because the assumption is they got in and through school by virtue of their "shitty" skin?[/QUOTE] That's not my interpretation of that bit of the story. MBA Programs compete among themselves to attract the 'top' candidates, and when overall applications to MBA programs decline, then there are fewer candidates to go around, meaning the competition gets more intense. So, in the last few years of leanness, the competition among the schools themselves has been cuthroat, especially when it comes to the highly-coveted minority applicant.
2005-05-29 14:26 | User Profile
Ya think they like to lose money?
2005-05-30 02:20 | User Profile
The article begins to talk about MBA's in general and then, further down the page admits that it is really talking about the "big five" MBA schools. I know some MBA's. About half of them are not working in business at all. One very intelligent MBA I know is laboring as a kind of social worker at a private charity, earning in the mid 20's after about 10 years of service.
To the elite idiots at Reuters, MBA's not form the Ivy League or other elite colleges are not even considered MBA's. Unless you are an Ivy Leaguer, you don't even qualify as human.