MBA Concentrations That Pay The Most – In Cash & Happiness

For MBA students, along with choosing the right school to get the best for their career goals, it is equally important to get the concentration that ensures not just the highest pay but happiness & meaning too.

How does one go about deciding what is the right choice? Take a look at PayScale’s recently released annual “College Salary Report”.

The B-School students go to has a big effect on pay and their satisfaction levels. 

The business schools that paid the most were MIT (at career start) and Harvard (mid-career). But those who felt their work had the highest meaning were from Yale.

As critical as the choice of the B-School you decide to go to is, the concentration you chose could influence your pay and happiness equally, if not more.

For the second year in succession, ‘Strategy’ was at the top of the list in both early career pay (median salary for 0-5 years of experience) and mid-career pay (median salary for 10+ years of work experience – with the average respondent being a 44 year-old with 15 years of experience).

This year, MBAs with a strategy specialization earned $93,100 to start, up from the $92,200 that PayScale listed in last year’s report. At mid-career, graduates who held a strategy concentration made $148,000, up $3,000 from 2014.

PayScale had collected the information from its database of 1.4 million college graduates, who provided the details while searching for salary information in their field or region. Data from 232 MBA programs were included in the report.

General and Strategic Management came next to get tied with Computer Science for the second-highest early career pay ($84,000).

Their mid-career pay – $144,000 – also ranks second, just above MBAs in finance and real estate ($143,000). Industrial engineering graduates drew $78,900, corporate finance $75,500 and operations management at $74,300.

Mid-career MBAs in economics ($136,000), finance and economics ($134,000), management ($132,000), entrepreneurship ($131,000), industrial engineering ($131,000), and corporate finance ($130,000) also earn a healthy income by mid-career.

The analysis also found that over the years, the biggest gains have been made by MBAs with a concentration in computer sciences (at least among the 20 highest paying concentrations). Their incomes grew by more than 65% between early and mid-career, from $84,000 to $128,000.

MBAs in industrial engineering (63.6%) and strategy (62.9%) besides operations and supply chain management (62.0%) also had the highest growth over a period.

The least growth was in marketing management (47.2%), business & marketing (48.9%), and management (49.2%).

However, PayScale’s methodology is not helpful in determining exactly what differentiated each concentration. It has also not taken into consideration bonuses or equity, a major income source in the financial and startup categories respectively.

It does not take into consideration student debt, which could eat into a substantial portion of take home pay. The rankings are based on 232 schools, ranging from MIT Sloan to Abilene Christian.

Meanwhile, health care administration at 81% topped three concentrations for high meaning followed by health care management (80%) and business and health care management (66%).

Leadership scored with business management and administration along with organizational leadership each notching up satisfaction rates above 60%.

Payscale probed the happiness quotient of students by posing questions to survey participants questions such as if they considered their work making the world a better place, if they hoped to feel good about themselves and the like.

Ironically, many of the highest-paying concentrations also yielded the lowest marks for meaning & happiness. For example, finance and real estate, where graduates earned the third highest mid-career incomes, had the second-lowest level of meaning at 37% (with strategic management coming in first at 31%).

At the same time, finance and economics and corporate finance MBAs, who were earning more than $130,000 by mid-career, averaged 41% and 42% respectively.

Only 45% respondents in strategy, the highest paid, found meaning in their work.

MBAs involved in economics averaged 46% on the meaning scale despite ranking fourth in mid-career annual income of $136,000.