Salaries Strong for Recent Business Grads

Posted by: Geoff Gloeckler on July 6, 2010

Finding a job for recent college graduates is getting easier, according to the 2010 Sales Compensation Survey of College Graduates and Interns. Of the more than 80 organizations polled, 70 percent say they will either be hiring the same number or more employees than last year. But how much will new hires with business degrees make?

Based on the survey’s findings, business students should fare pretty well. For MBA’s, average starting salaries were around $66,000, with average signing bonuses of just under $8,000 and an average annual bonus of about $7,000. Recent grads with a bachelor’s degree in business, finance, and math earned average starting salaries of about $45,000, with bonus packages worth about $7,000, second highest in the study only to engineering/science/architecture grads, who averaged $53,000. Not surprisingly, pay for business students varied depending on location, with business grads going to work in the northeast earning 17 percent more than those accepting positions in the south.

For internships, salaries in business fields range from as low at $8.50 to as high nearly $30 per hour, depending primarily on the year of the student. But the greatest incentive for interning is the potential for it to turn into a job. This year, nearly 90 percent of corporate respondents plan to offer interns full-time jobs compared to only 60 percent in 2008.

The study, conducted by consulting firm Compensation Resources, Inc., focuses on salary statistics as well as recruiting and hiring trends for new and recent college graduates and interns. Data was collected between March and April from an almost even split of privately held and public companies across the nation. Nearly half of the participants are based out of the Northeast, and about 40 percent report more than $1 billion in revenue.

-By Sommer Saadi