Best MBA for working in Europe

Europe is a dozen job markets

A single Europe line adds markets with different languages, salary levels and work permit rules. The ranking below takes the share of each class placed anywhere in Europe, continental countries and the United Kingdom together, and ranks on it alone: very few schools give a salary by region, and requiring one would leave almost nobody in the table. 15 of the 16 ranked schools sit in Europe, and CEIBS is the only one outside it.

Where Europe takes at least 50% of the class, the school-wide salary stands in for a European figure and carries an asterisk. 7 ranked schools have no salary at all in the table, so the payback is blank for them. At the bottom of the ranked list, CEIBS still places 5.6% of its class in Europe.

The British line and the continental line

Schools split Europe differently, and the split says which market a program feeds. This breakdown gives, for the first schools of the table, the share placed in the United Kingdom and the share placed in continental Europe:

A London school with half its class in Europe is mostly a British pipeline; a school on the continent with the same total sends its graduates to Paris, Munich, Amsterdam or Zurich. In the ranking, Imperial, Alliance MBS, Oxford Saïd, LBS, Warwick and Cambridge Judge place more graduates in the UK than on the continent. If you know which side of the Channel you want, read the column, not the total.

The split also changes the money. Salaries in London sit above most continental cities for the same job, and a school that sends its graduates mainly to Germany, the Netherlands or Belgium reports a lower school-wide figure without its graduates being worse off once rent and taxes are counted. That is one more reason the European ranking leaves salary out of the score: converted to dollars, it would mostly measure the city.

ESMT Berlin: where the class went

Industry, segment or regionWorking in Europe, UK included

Share of the class

94%

Salary reported	$111,880 (school-wide)
Graduates, about	n/a
Payback with that salary	n/a

Reference person earning $90,000 before the MBA.

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Short programs, local classes

13 of the ranked schools run a program of sixteen months or less. Short programs cost less in salary given up, and their students often come from the region and go back to it, which lifts the Europe share. The trade-off is time: with no long summer internship, a career switcher has a few months to find a European employer, and a student who needs to learn a language has even less. Schools with campuses in several countries report one Europe figure for the whole class, so the share does not tell which campus their European hires came from.

Schools under the threshold

Columbia (4%), Harvard (2%), HKU (2%), Queen's Smith (2%), IIM Ahmedabad PGPX (1.5%), MIT Sloan (1.3%) and 5 more schools report a Europe line under 5% of the class, too small to rank. 8 of them are American, which matches what the reports say in general: an MBA in the United States leads to a job in the United States for nearly the whole class. A European candidate who studies in America and wants to return is a small group in those reports, and the alumni network at home will be thin.

What the table cannot show

Work permits in Europe are national. A graduate from outside the European Union may stay to look for work in some countries and not in others, under rules that change and that no employment report measures. Salaries vary as much across Europe as between Europe and America, so a school-wide salary for a class spread over ten countries describes no single city. Hiring follows national cycles too. Use the ranking to see which schools feed the European market, then read the country lines and the employer list on each school page, and compare two schools with the comparison tool.