Average Salary of an ISB MBA Graduate (Class of 2011)

An important consideration in looking at business schools is the placements on graduation. Therefore, prospective applicants will be well served to take a look at ISB’s recently released the Placement Report for its Class of 2011.

 Profile – Class of 2011

Class Size	569
Average Age	27 yrs.
Average Work Experience	5 yrs.
Average GMAT	709

Source: ISB Placement Report 2011 (available here)

It is interesting to see that while the average domestic offer number has been slowly creeping to its pre-financial crisis high, the average international offer number is still lagging firmly behind the offer number for the Class of 2008. This broadly mirrors the economic scenario domestically vs. globally.

 

Class Year	Class Size	Regd. Companies	Number of Offers	Offer/Student
2007	416	202	584	1.4
2008	422	230	657	1.6
2009	437	326	401	0.9
2010	568	346	541	1.0
2011	569	310	661	1.2

Source: ISB Placement Report 2011 (available here)

Needless to say, the school would focus on the 3^rd and 4^th columns i.e. registered companies and number of offers. However, these numbers, in my view, are misleading unless viewed holistically along with year-on-year change in class size.

To put things in perspective, between 2007 and 2011, the class size increased 8.1% on a cumulative annualized growth rate (CAGR) basis. Even though, the number of companies increased 11.3% on a CAGR basis during the same period, the total number of offers increased only by 3.1% on a CAGR basis, which is significantly lower than the increase in class size. That effectively tells me that, on average, each student is actually worse off in terms of offers available. This intuition is validated if we look at the column Offer/Student in the table above, which shows us that the offer/student declines from 1.4 to 1.2 from 2007 to 2011.

Furthermore, this analysis does not take into account the quality of the incremental offers and additional companies due to the limited information available.

Source: ISB Placement Report 2011 (available here)

Undoubtedly, the school has done well from 2010 to 2011 where it has increased the number of offers while keeping the class size constant. Furthermore, the class size for the recently graduated Class of 2012 was almost constant at 573. Assuming there was not a significant dip in full-time offers this past recruiting cycle, the sentiment should be generally re-assuring for the current and prospective students. For the Class of 2013 and beyond, that’s the silver lining to look at!