2006 MBA Programs

The High Price of Admission
This year both the costs and benefits of attending B-school surged. For our top 30 schools, tuition and fees alone were up 15% on average, and the pricetag for a Wharton MBA now approaches $90,000, up nearly $20,000 since 2004. Good thing salaries for grads increased, too. New 2006 MBAs could expect first-year paychecks of about $95,000 on average, an increase of 47% from their pre-MBA days and a huge increase over the 29% MBA pay premium that 2004 grads received. But in narrow economic terms, it may not pay to attend one of the top-ranked schools; a midtier school is a better bet. That's because the likes of Wharton and Harvard tend to attract high earners, making it harder to get a big salary bump at graduation and recoup the investment in an MBA. How hard? For Harvard grads, the breakeven point won't come until 2020, or about 20 years shy of retirement.

Click column heading once to reorder from highest to lowest. Click twice to reorder from lowest to highest.
SCHOOL
TOTAL COST, $
SALARY PREMIUM, $
YEARS TO PAY BACK
MIT 324,305 21,49915.08 
Stanford 328,062 22,35114.68 
Harvard 345,401 23,92114.44 
Wharton 328,748 25,77512.75 
Berkeley 291,805 24,23912.04 
Columbia 315,780 26,61011.87 
Northwestern 289,054 27,18210.63 
Dartmouth 289,633 28,40410.20 
Babson 236,821 23,31810.16 
Chicago 289,473 28,69110.09 
UCLA 258,551 26,7949.65 
Texas-Austin 241,956 25,1939.60 
Minnesota (Carlson) 236,680 25,3219.35 
Boston College 215,587 23,8049.06 
Virginia 262,517 29,0989.02 
Vanderbilt 240,596 27,0898.88 
NYU 267,153 33,2868.03 
Cornell 253,543 31,9407.94 
Duke 258,689 32,9917.84 
UNC 239,337 31,0567.71 
USC 240,557 32,0527.51 
Georgetown 236,903 32,0587.39 
Boston University 214,904 29,1957.36 
Rice U. 230,115 31,8697.22 
UC Irvine 215,201 30,4777.06 
Carnegie Mellon 251,735 36,3936.92 
Michigan 251,437 36,3716.91 
Indiana 211,064 31,7976.64 
Yale 245,708 38,1516.44 
Ohio State U. 195,848 31,5076.22 
Maryland 202,029 35,3195.72 
Washington U. 205,518 36,3985.65 
Emory 225,737 42,4715.32 
U. of Washington 193,626 36,7955.26 
Rochester 199,447 38,5685.17 
Notre Dame 190,241 37,6525.05 
Buffalo 109,153 21,8395.00 
Wisconsin (Madison) 186,799 42,3434.41 
South Carolina (Darla Moore) 165,283 37,6754.39 
Michigan State University 161,904 40,8043.97 
Brigham Young 133,234 35,0683.80 
FOOTNOTES:
Data: BusinessWeek.
Note: Domestic schools only. Schools with fewer than 50 survey responses excluded from analysis.
Total cost includes two years tuition and fees, student-reported living expenses, and forgone pre-MBA salary.
Salary premium based on student-reported pre- and post-MBA salaries only; does not include signing or performance bonuses, annual pay increases, stock options, or other compensation.