MBA or EMBA: Which one is right for you?

Discover hidden MBA programs with higher job placement rates than Harvard or Stanford. Explore schools offering strong employment outcomes without the elite price tag.

Hidden MBA Gems: Business Schools with Better Employment Rates Than Harvard or Stanford University

When you think about MBA programs, you automatically assume that graduating will land you a better job than the one you already have. So it may come as a surprise that the two giants of MBA education, Harvard Business School and Stanford Graduate School of Business, lag behind a whole host of business schools in placing their most recent graduates in jobs.

In fact, a narrow majority of schools - 51, to be exact - in U.S. News' top 100 MBA programs last year had better placement rates within three months of graduation than Harvard Business School, and 44 of the top 100 had more of their MBA graduates placed in jobs than Stanford. Many of the schools that outperformed HBS and GSB are not necessarily the highest-ranked programs. Rather, they are schools that are often overlooked and underestimated by many MBA candidates.

For example, who would have ever thought that Texas State University's McCoy College of Business or Iowa State University's Ivy College of Business would overshadow Harvard and Stanford in job rates? Yet, in the midst of the pandemic last year, 100% of McCoy's MBAs had a job three months after graduation, while at Iowa State University, 96.6% of MBA graduates were employed at the same time.

MBA Job Rates That Leave Harvard and Stanford Far Behind

And how did employment rates compare to Harvard and Stanford? At HBS, only 82.5 percent of MBAs had a job three months after graduation - 17.5 percentage points below Texas State and 14.1 percentage points below Iowa State. At Stanford, where 85.3% of the Class of 2020 had a job, McCoy MBAs had a 14.7 percentage point lead in job placement, while Ivy MBAs had an 11.3 percentage point lead over GSB. Let's not forget that Stanford is located at the epicenter of Silicon Valley's still booming tech industry, far from San Marcos, Texas, or Ames, Iowa.

Sure, the jobs MBAs take at these hidden gems aren't as high-paying, but these graduates also didn't have to dig deep into their pockets to pay Harvard and Stanford tuition. In some cases, the cuts in starting salary and bonus aren't even that big, especially at business schools like Emory, Georgetown, Washington, Vanderbilt, or Rochester.

And yes, companies like McKinsey, Bain, Boston Consulting Group, or J.P. Morgan and Google don't conduct Zoom interviews with MBA graduates from most of these schools. Nevertheless, if the goal of an MBA is to get a job within a reasonable period after graduation, then there are many schools that place their students better than HBS and GSB.