Menlo Coaching Industry Reports Research Methodology

Menlo Coaching has analyzed 51,991 student profiles (and counting…) to give you information about the pre-MBA backgrounds and post-MBA job outcomes of students at top MBA programs.

This information is gathered strictly from public sources, including publicly posted lists of students, such as virtual graduation announcements, and social media profiles on sites like Facebook and LinkedIn.

Wherever possible, we create a data set including the following attributes for each student:

Errors and omissions in this data are corrected by a mix of automated and manual processes. For example:

This list is meant only to illustrate the types of corrections we make and is not an exhaustive list of the steps we take to produce accurate data.

Why are we creating this data?

Although MBA employment reports published by business schools are a great starting point, they do not answer all of the questions that applicants have about each MBA program’s career placement.

First, per-employer data are not consistently available across all MBA programs, which makes it tough to compare all of your target business schools. We applaud the MBA programs that do publish per-employer stats, but this is not yet a universal practice.

Second, even at MBA programs that do publish the number of students hired by each top employer, applicants still have important questions that remain unanswered. Questions like:

The MBA is the most important career decision that most young professionals will make, and applicants deserve answers to these types of questions.

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What are the potential issues with data from public sources?

Without human intervention, the post-MBA industry from the above profile might be classified based on employer data associated with the 1 year position as a “Scholar in Residence.” And in a certain sense, this automated classification would be correct. That is the first position the graduate accepted after MIT Sloan.

Nonetheless, a human evaluating the profile would probably know that, in the context of an MBA degree, the investment banking job is the “real” post-MBA job. This specific case underscores a general truth regarding the public profile data of MBA students: some degree of ambiguity is unavoidable.

How does this data compare to the employment reports published by MBA programs?

Employment reports are based on survey results. These are generally accurate, but:

We would assume that specific factual claims about the numbers of students employed at named firms are correct if included in MBA employment reports. However, we prefer to use public data across all programs to create an apples-to-apples comparison between schools that do disclose per-employer stats and schools that do not disclose per-employer stats.

In general, employment reports are based on MBA CSEA standards, which dictate the breakdown structure for region, industry and function. We capture data at a lower level of granularity by recording the exact city (not just the region) the exact employer (not just the industry) and the exact job title (not just the function).

Our data is also updated on an ongoing basis rather than being based on surveys at specific points in time and may therefore capture students who accepted their first jobs with some delay after graduation.