Top 20 Business Schools In The U.S. Whose Graduates Earn The Highest Starting Salaries, 2015

It’s not a surprise, Harvard Business School (HBS) emerged as the No. 1 business school in the U.S. whose graduates earn the highest starting salaries, according to a new league table from StartClass 2015 rankings. Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business, its nearest competitor, ranked 2nd best.

UPenn’s Wharton School of Business and University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, took third and fourth, respectively, while Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley ranked fifth.

Rounding out this year’s top ten are No. 6 MIT Sloan School of Management, No. 7 Columbia Business School, No. 8 Dartmouth College’s Tuck School of Business, No. 9 University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business, and No. 10 Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon University.

To compile the list, StartClass went through business school rankings of The Economist, Forbes, Business Insider, The Financial Times, Businessweek and U.S. News to create a list of best MBA programs with a weighted average of all the publications. Among the main factors in the list was average post-graduation salary.

The top 20 business schools in the U.S. whose graduates earn the highest starting salaries, 2015

1. Harvard Business School
Boston, Massachusetts

Average Post-Graduation Salary: $125,000
Acceptance Rate: 11 percent

2. Stanford Graduate School of Business
Stanford, California

Average Post-Graduation Salary: $125,000
Acceptance Rate: 7.1 percent

3. University of Pennsylvania Wharton Business School
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Average Post-Graduation Salary: $125,000
Acceptance Rate: 20.7 percent

4. University of Chicago Booth School of Business
Chicago, Illinois

Average Post-Graduation Salary: $120,000
Acceptance Rate: 23.5 percent

5. UC Berkeley Hass School of Business
Berkeley, California

Average Post-Graduation Salary: $120,000
Acceptance Rate: 13.2 percent

6. MIT Sloan Business School
Cambridge, Massachusetts

Average Post-Graduation Salary: $119,639
Acceptance Rate: 13.8 percent

7. Columbia Business School
New York, New York

Average Post-Graduation Salary: $119,400
Acceptance Rate: 18.2 percent

8. Dartmouth College Tuck School of Business
Hanover, New Hampshire

Average Post-Graduation Salary: $117,860
Acceptance Rate: 22.1 percent

9. University of Michigan Ross School of Business
Ann Arbor, Michigan

Average Post-Graduation Salary: $115,315
Acceptance Rate: Unavailable

10. Carnegie Mellon University Tepper School of Business
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

Average Post-Graduation Salary: $114,000
Acceptance Rate: 31.2 percent

11. Northwestern University Kellogg School of Management
Evanston, Illinois

Average Post-Graduation Salary: $113,000
Acceptance Rate: 23.2 percent

12. University of Virginia Darden School of Business
Charlottesville, Virginia

Average Post-Graduation Salary: $112,257
Acceptance Rate: 26 percent

13. NYU Stern Business School
New York, New York

Average Post-Graduation Salary: $112,096
Acceptance Rate: 18.1 percent

14. Duke University Fuqua School of Business
Durham, North Carolina

Average Post-Graduation Salary: $111,000
Acceptance Rate: 25.1 percent

15. UCLA Anderson School of Management
Los Angeles, California

Average Post-Graduation Salary: $111,000
Acceptance Rate: 17.8 percent

16. Cornell University Johnson Graduate School of Management
Ithaca, New York

Average Post-Graduation Salary: $110,900
Acceptance Rate: 30 percent

17. Yale School of Management
New Haven, Connecticut

Average Post-Graduation Salary: $110,000
Acceptance Rate: 23.7 percent

18. Southern Utah University School of Business
Cedar City, Utah

Average Post-Graduation Salary: $109,740
Acceptance Rate: 94.9 percent

19. UNC Chapel Hill Kenan-Flagler Business School
Chapel Hill, North Carolina

Average Post-Graduation Salary: $109,390
Acceptance Rate: 38.8 percent

20. University of Texas Austin McCombs School of Business
Austin, Texas

Average Post-Graduation Salary: $107,272
Acceptance Rate: 28.5 percent