Who's Looking to Hire the First Grads of Johns Hopkins' New MBA Program?

Posted by: Geoff Gloeckler on September 12, 2011

Johns Hopkins University’s Carey Business School will graduate its first class of full-time MBAs at the end of this school year. So when it came to lining up potential employers for the soon-to-grads, the school took no chances — it leveraged the university’s prestigious medical reputation to stack Carey’s corporate advisory board with representatives from companies like Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer, Merck, Quest Diagnostics, and GE Healthcare.

Many companies represented on the board offered Carey students summer internships and are considering candidates for full-time spots this fall, the school reports. “(The Hopkins) name was enough to get us conversations and meetings with employers until our business school is wider known,” says Patrick Madsen, Carey’s director of programs, education and career services.

So far, Carey’s full-time program, which launched in August 2010, has attracted students bent more towards science than finance. Twenty-five percent of the inaugural class completed summer internships in the health care industry and 16 percent in tech. Finance internships tied with non-profit work for third place, each taking 13 percent of the class. To help put that in context, at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, for example, 31 percent of its graduating class took full-time jobs in the financial services industry, 29 percent went to consulting and 18 percent went to tech, according to the most recent stats the school provided to Bloomberg Businessweek.

A leap to becoming a tech feeder school doesn’t seem far off, either, as Carey sent interns this summer to Apple, Microsoft, IBM, and Amazon. School officials also recently made a recruitment pitch to Constellation Energy, and a budding relationship with GE Healthcare is a bridge to other areas of GE, Madsen says.

The most exhausting work for Madsen and his team has likely been linking students with non-traditional MBA job opportunities. Carey staff sees hospitals around the world becoming key employers of its graduates. However, very few hospitals have management-focused summer internships. Carey staff helped create such spots at hospitals this summer.

Still, Carey faces tough competition when it comes to getting its students exposure to health care employers. Duke's Fuqua School of Business has long been an MBA recruiting darling of Johnson & Johnson. Fuqua, along with Harvard and Columbia, is also a top source of business talent for New York Presbyterian Hospital -- one of the few hospitals in the country with an internship program tailored for MBA candidates. All three of those schools also enroll more than 1,500 full-time MBAs each making them efficient campus recruiting stops. Carey's full-time program, on the other hand, had about 90 students in its first class and brought on around 70 more this school year.

Reaching out to NGOs and startups has been another priority at Carey, and the potential to grow recruiting relationships in other health-related fields remains. For example, a few health insurance companies have put out feelers to the school, Madsen says. And, health industry consulting at firms such as Deloitte, McKinsey & Company, and BCG are as of yet, untapped possibilities.

-Erin Zlomek