Employment report

An employment report is the school’s public accounting of what a graduating MBA class did for work. Serious full-time reports follow standards from the MBA Career Services & Employer Alliance (CSEA). The report is a first-destination snapshot, not a five-year career study.

Read the footnotes before the median.

How it is measured

CSEA splits the class into people seeking employment and people not seeking employment. The second bucket includes company-sponsored students going back to an employer, founders, people continuing school, and people postponing a search. Stanford’s 2024 report is a clean worked example: 432 graduates, 58% seeking, 42% not seeking, including 12% sponsored and 23% starting a business.

Compensation tables then cover people who accepted jobs and reported pay. Sponsored students and founders are often excluded from those tables. Full-time MBA standards have long used an 85% information threshold for the class. Part-time standards use a lower 70% reliability target and a 70% salary-reporting target among employed graduates. CSEA revised full-time, part-time, and specialty-master standards to take effect with the class of 2026.

Example: a class of 400 has 300 seeking. 270 accept jobs by three months. 240 report a base salary. The published median is the median of those 240, not of 400. If 80 of the 100 non-seekers were sponsored at $200,000, leaving them out of the salary table changes the story a career switcher should tell themselves.

How it differs

Placement rate is one ratio inside the report and is easy to game if the denominator is “people we could reach” instead of “people seeking.” MBA ROI tries to turn these numbers into a personal payback. Rankings ingest pieces of the report and then reweight them.

Common errors

Quoting a median without the reporting percentage. Comparing a part-time report to a full-time CSEA table. Treating “not seeking” as unemployment.