Jack Black
When the Class of 2010 enrolled in college four years ago, majoring in business seemed the best route to securing a plum job at graduation. Seniors were graduating with two and three job offers, starting salaries averaged close to $50,000, and big signing bonuses and benefits packages were typical. Then came the Great Recession. Students returned from summer internships without job offers. And those lucky enough to land a position had to settle for lower salaries than they had expected.
Many 2009 graduates were still searching for work long after they stored their caps and gowns in their parents' attics. Now, as the Class of 2010 prepares to follow them into the workforce, the job market continues to deteriorate. "This year isn't going to be particularly strong," says Edwin W. Koc, director of research at the National Association of Colleges & Employers. "It may be even slightly worse than last year."
Anxiety about jobs, and students' dissatisfaction with the help they are getting from school placement offices, are reflected in Bloomberg BusinessWeek's fifth annual ranking of undergraduate business programs. Only 38% of college seniors majoring in business who responded to our survey in January reported having a job offer in hand. That compares with 46% in 2009 and 56% in 2008. Of the 27,317 student respondents, 58% voiced concern about their job searches and 38% reported they are considering alternatives, such as graduate school or the Peace Corps.
At the top of our ranking is the University of Notre Dame's Mendoza College of Business. In a year when unemployment was at the forefront of student concerns, Notre Dame fared well, thanks in part to a large alumni base willing to lend a hand to young job seekers. At No. 2 University of Virginia's McIntire School of Commerce, students lauded the intense core curriculum taught by teams of professors from different disciplines. Rounding out the top three is the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Sloan School of Management, up four spots from 2009. More than 90% of Sloan students boast summer internships, and its graduates' median starting salary, $62,000, is the highest in the ranking.
Bloomberg BusinessWeek used nine measures to rank these programs, including surveys of senior business majors and corporate recruiters, median starting salaries for graduates, and the number of alumni each program sends to top MBA programs. We also calculated an academic quality rating for each program by combining average SAT scores, student-faculty ratios, class size, the percentage of students with internships, and the number of hours students devote to classwork.
While student satisfaction is down 14% from 2009, the level of discontent varied widely from school to school. Schools that performed well in the ranking pulled out all the stops to help students find work—enlisting faculty and alumni, using social media, and developing talent pipelines to local businesses.
One school that worked hard to find jobs for students was No. 16-ranked Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, where a course designed to provide students with hands-on training is also giving them exposure to prospective employers. When Miami University senior Sarah King, 21, returned to campus after an internship at General Electric (GE) without a job, she was terrified. "Even the best and brightest students weren't getting hired," King says. "It was scary." She enrolled in a class called Human Capital Metrics, which pairs groups of students with corporations to help solve problems the companies are facing. King was paired with Nestlé. As her team's liaison with the company, King was in weekly contact with Laura Warren, a Nestlé recruiter.
Throughout the semester, Warren observed King's work habits and business skills. "I got to see the quality of Sarah's work," Warren says. "We had three months with her, not just a 30-minute interview."
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