Seeking employment

Seeking employment is the CSEA status for MBA graduates who wanted a job and used the market. Placement math is supposed to use this group as the denominator, not the whole class.

If you do not know who was seeking, you do not know the placement rate.

How it is measured

Career offices survey the class. People who say they want a job and are available to start are seekers. People returning to a sponsor, founding a company, continuing school, or postponing a search are not. People the office cannot find are “no recent information,” which is a third pile and a quality problem.

Stanford’s 2024 split was 249 seeking out of 432 (58%). Questrom’s 2025 CSEA table shows the same architecture with smaller numbers. Those percentages are class-composition facts, not success facts.

Example: 100 graduates, 70 seeking, 63 accepted by three months, 7 still looking, 30 not seeking. Placement among seekers is 63/70. A slide that says “93% employed” using 63+30 over 100 is mixing categories.

How it differs

Not seeking employment is the complement by design. Unemployed-and-looking sits inside seeking, not outside the class. “Employed at graduation” as a ranking input should be a seeker statistic; check the footnote.

Common errors

Using the whole class as the denominator. Treating “no information” as placed. Comparing a seeker-only rate at one school with an all-class rate at another.

Work-authorization footnotes live here. US reports often split permanent and non-permanent authorization inside the seeker group because OPT and visa timing change offer rates. A classmate who is seeking but cannot start until February may miss a three-month table and still have a job. Status is a snapshot, not a character judgment.