MBA Pay: Top B-Schools, Top Dollar

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"The differences might not seem like a lot now, but over time, it will be very hard to recoup that lost income," Dorf says. "Over 20 years, the difference will grow exponentially."

Variations Among Industries

At Dartmouth, starting salaries dropped 7.5 percent, to $124,000, compared with last year. Similarly, at Wharton—the program with the highest average salary at graduation—the median compensation of MBA graduates fell 5.5 percent, to $137,000. "These are schools known for investment banking and consulting, areas where salaries have dropped off a bit," Lee says. The news is more positive for MBAs further along in their careers. In fact, overall, MBA grads at the 20-year mark actually experienced a 2 percent increase in pay compared with last year.

The main pay differentiators among B-schools are the kinds of jobs grads are looking for. "Industry is everything," says Andy Chan, vice-president for career development at Wake Forest University (Wake Forest Full-Time MBA Profile). "If you look at the [mix] of industries that schools like Stanford (Stanford Full-Time MBA Profile), Harvard, and MIT send students into compared with everyone else, it accounts for the biggest difference in salary." At Wharton, 80 percent of MBA grads go into finance and consulting jobs at such companies as McKinsey and Bain. Similarly, 76 percent of MBA grads from Columbia get jobs in the same two industries, pushing the school's median starting salary to $119,000.

On the other hand, graduates from the Michigan's Ross School—ranked 5th overall in Bloomberg Businessweek's 2008 ranking of full-time MBA programs—brought home a median salary of $107,000, according to PayScale, 22nd among the top 45 programs. At Michigan, nearly as many students go into marketing and sales positions as finance, with large numbers of students signing on at companies such as Amazon.com (AMZN), Kraft Foods (KFT), and Procter & Gamble (PG).

Regional Premiums

Location also plays a role in the compensation differences, or what Tepper's Dammon calls a "New York premium." While MBAs from Wharton and Columbia tend to flock to Wall Street, where a cost-of-living premium further boosts salary numbers, most Ross grads stay in the Midwest. The same is true at Southern Methodist University's Cox School of Business (Cox Full-Time MBA Profile). While 45 percent of Cox MBAs go into finance-related positions, three out of four grads remain in the Southwest, where salaries pale in comparison with those offered to MBAs in the Northeast. At Cox, recent MBA grads earned a median salary of $77,200, significantly lower than the $90,860 average median across all 45 programs.

According to PayScale's Lee, a hiring year hasn't been good for MBAs since 2007. But there are signs of hope: Nine of the 45 top MBA programs experienced small upticks in starting salaries in 2010, including Notre Dame's Mendoza College of Business (Mendoza Full-Time MBA Profile) and Boston University (Boston Full-Time MBA Profile). While the increases—only a few hundred dollars, on average—aren't enough to usurp any of the top earning B-schools in the near future, for the MBAs entering the workforce, a small increase this year could mean a much larger payoff 20 years down the road.

Gloeckler is a staff editor for Bloomberg Businessweek in New York.

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