Consulting firms that hire MBA graduates, counted school by school

How we counted

Every school on this site publishes an employment report, and 56 of them include a list of employers: sometimes the top employers by hires, sometimes an alphabetical sample, sometimes a full list. We read each list and looked for 19 consulting firms, with their usual variants (BCG and Boston Consulting Group, EY and EY-Parthenon, PwC and Strategy&). A school counts once per firm, whatever the number of lines. The count measures how widely a firm recruits across business schools, not its size, its quality or its pay.

We do not use the firm rankings published by career guides or magazines. Those are built from surveys of consultants that we cannot check; this count can be checked by anyone with the schools' reports, which are linked from each school page.

The count

McKinsey & Company and Boston Consulting Group sit at the top, close together, followed by the large audit networks and Bain. The list then thins quickly: below the first ten, firms appear in a handful of lists, often at schools in one region. On average a school's list names 4.5 of the 19 firms we track, a sign that consulting is among the first employers of most programs.

Chicago Booth: where the class went

Industry, segment or regionConsultingFinance, all segmentsTechnologyHealthcareConsumer goods and retailEnergyManufacturing and industrialsInvestment bankingPrivate equityVenture capitalAsset and investment managementWorking in the United StatesWorking in Europe, UK includedWorking in AsiaWorking in the Middle EastWorking in Latin AmericaWorking in CanadaJob: consulting or strategyJob: product managementJob: general managementJob: marketingJob: corporate financeJob: operations and supply chainJob: business development and salesJob: analytics and data

Share of the class

36.7%

Salary reported	$190,000
Graduates, about	233
Payback with that salary	3.5 years

Reference person earning $90,000 before the MBA.

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Names versus volume

A firm named in a list hired at least one graduate; it may have hired fifty. 8 schools publish hires per consulting firm, all of them American, and they show how concentrated consulting recruiting is. At Chicago Booth, the consulting firms in its list account for 146 of the 206 hires it attributes to named employers, and McKinsey, BCG and Bain take 117 of them. The hire column of the table sums those counts: it favors firms strong at those 8 schools and says little about Europe or Asia, where almost no school publishes counts.

That is why the leader by names, McKinsey & Company, and the leader by hires, Boston Consulting Group, are not the same: one recruits more widely, the other more heavily where it recruits. The MBB page sets the three strategy firms side by side, and Big 4 consulting covers the audit networks, with their own published figures.

Outside the United States

27 of the employer lists come from schools outside the United States. The strategy firms are just as present there, but the rest of the list changes. Roland Berger appears in 6 lists outside the United States against 1 list inside; Accenture in 16 lists against 4 lists. In India and China, the lists also name technology and analytics firms that do consulting work under other labels. For an applicant aiming at one region, the firms named by the schools of that region are a better guide than the global count; each school page lists the employers its report names.

Using the count

Start from the firms you want, then check which schools name them and how much of the class goes into consulting. The finder at the top of this page ranks schools on the consulting share, the consulting salary and the ten-year value of the degree for your salary. A school that names every firm on your list but sends a small share of its class into consulting is a weaker pipeline than one that names fewer firms and sends a third of the class; the consulting ranking shows both figures together.