Consulting · figures from each school’s own report
What strategy consulting is, and what it is not
Strategy consulting answers the questions of a chief executive; at Michigan Ross, graduates hired into management consulting reported $190,000, those in technology consulting $130,000.
Fee for the engagement
$1,920,000
| Consultant-weeks | 40 |
| Fee per week of project | $192,000 |
| Fee per consultant-week, all in | $48,000 |
Firms do not publish their rates: the weekly fee is yours to set from a proposal or a public contract. How this is calculated.
Built by Radif Partners · figures checked · Method · Editorial policy
Strategy consulting is advice sold to the top of an organization on decisions that set its direction: which markets to enter or leave, whether to buy a company, how to price, where to cut costs, how to answer a new competitor. A small team works on one question for a few weeks or months and ends with a recommendation the board can act on. It is the narrow, senior end of management consulting; operations, technology and implementation consulting are larger trades that execute and run what strategy decides. The difference shows in pay. Michigan Ross reports a median of $190,000 for its 19.5% of graduates hired in management consulting and $130,000 for technology consulting; Georgetown McDonough reports $175,000 for general and strategy consulting and $145,000 for technology, marketing and human capital consulting. The buyers are large companies, private equity funds checking a target, and governments.
A definition in one decision
A strategy consulting project starts with a decision someone at the top has to make and ends with a recommendation on it. A food company wants to know whether to launch its brands in Indonesia. A fund is about to buy a chain of clinics and wants to know whether the market will keep growing. A bank's margins keep falling and the board wants to know why. The firm sends a small team, often a partner, a manager and a few consultants, who turn the question into a set of hypotheses and test each one with data, interviews and analysis. The output is a short document and a meeting where the client decides.
That focus on a decision is what separates strategy from the rest of consulting. Work that installs a system, redesigns a warehouse or trains a sales force is also consulting, and it can be very well paid, but its result is a change carried out, not a choice made. Its buyer sits at the top: the chief executive, the head of strategy, a business unit head or the board.
Questions clients bring
Most strategy projects fall into a handful of families. Growth questions ask where the next revenue comes from: a new country, a new customer segment, an adjacent product. Deal questions ask whether to buy, sell or merge, and at what value; private equity funds buy a short version called commercial due diligence before they bid. Profit questions ask why margins fall and what to do about it. Pricing questions ask what a product should cost and how competitors will react. Organization questions ask how to structure a company after a merger or a change of chief executive. Each family has its own type of case interview, because firms test candidates on the work they sell.
Many of the tools of the trade were born in these projects. Boston Consulting Group's history page says its growth share matrix, the grid that sorts a company's businesses by market growth and market share, was created in 1968; it is still taught in business schools. Today's projects lean more on data from the client's systems and less on frameworks, but the shape of the answer has not changed: a recommendation, the numbers behind it and what happens if the client does nothing.
Strategy, operations, technology, implementation
Operations consulting improves how a company works: buying, making, moving and serving. Projects last longer, put more people on the client's site and are judged on costs saved. Technology or IT consulting designs and installs systems, from accounting software to data platforms, and is the largest part of the market by people employed. Implementation consulting stays after the recommendation to carry it out, which is why many strategy firms now sell it too. Human capital and marketing consulting cover people and customers. The large strategy firms do some of all of these; audit networks and IT services firms do far more of the last three.
The school reports show what the split means for pay. Where a school breaks its consulting hires into lines, the strategy and management lines sit at the top. Michigan Ross reports $190,000 for the 19.5% of graduates in management consulting and $130,000 for the 1.8% in technology consulting. NYU Stern reports $188,000 for management consulting and $150,000 for a separate strategy line, a reminder that labels differ between schools. Internal strategy roles at companies, which Kellogg reports at $160,000 for 8.1% of its class, pay less than the large firms and involve less travel.
| School | Job line, as the school labels it | Share of class | Median |
|---|---|---|---|
| Chicago Booth | Consulting | 37.7% | $190,000 |
| Chicago Booth | Corporate Strategy/Strategic Planning | 6.2% | $160,000 |
| CMU Tepper | Consulting - Management/Strategy | 34.2% | $188,000 |
| CMU Tepper | General Management - Strategic Planning/Business Development | 4.5% | $112,700 |
| Columbia | Consulting | 34.4% | $190,000 |
| Columbia | Internal Consulting / Strategic Planning | 5.7% | $170,000 |
| Georgetown McDonough | Consulting - General/Strategy/Management | 21% | $175,000 |
| Georgetown McDonough | Consulting - Finance/Advisory/M&A | 5% | $175,000 |
| Georgetown McDonough | Consulting - Operations/Logistics/Supply Chain | 3% | $175,000 |
| Georgetown McDonough | Consulting - Technology/Marketing/Human Capital | 5% | $145,000 |
| Georgetown McDonough | Corporate Strategy | 5% | $109,000 |
| Harvard | Consulting | 21% | $190,000 |
| Harvard | Strategic Planning | 9% | $160,000 |
| IIM Ahmedabad PGPX | Consulting | 32.8% | ₹3,117,600 |
| IIM Ahmedabad PGPX | Strategy | 6% | ₹3,200,000 |
| Kellogg | Consulting | 38.2% | $190,000 |
| Kellogg | Corporate Strategy/Strategic Planning | 8.1% | $160,000 |
| Michigan Ross | Consulting (total) | 36.9% | $190,000 |
| Michigan Ross | Consulting - Management | 19.5% | $190,000 |
| Michigan Ross | Consulting - General | 13.2% | $180,000 |
| Michigan Ross | Consulting - Technology | 1.8% | $130,000 |
| Michigan Ross | Consulting - Internal | 1.1% | $160,000 |
| NYU Stern | Consulting (total) | 39.4% | $175,000 |
| NYU Stern | Consulting - Management | 28.6% | $188,000 |
| NYU Stern | Consulting - Strategy | 7.8% | $150,000 |
| NYU Stern | Consulting - Business Development/Sales | 2.2% | $128,000 |
| Queen's Smith | Consulting | 17% | CA$117,767 |
| Queen's Smith | Strategy | 6% | CA$110,833 |
| Stanford GSB | Consulting | 12% | $192,000 |
| Stanford GSB | Management Consulting | 11% | $192,000 |
| Stanford GSB | Business Ops / Strategy / Planning | 18% | $170,000 |
| Vanderbilt Owen | Consulting | 34% | $175,000 |
| Vanderbilt Owen | Consulting - Management/Strategy | 29% | $175,000 |
| Vanderbilt Owen | Consulting - Internal | 5% | $140,000 |
| Yale SOM | Consulting (total) | 48.6% | $190,000 |
| Yale SOM | External Consulting | 36.9% | $190,000 |
| Yale SOM | Internal Consulting/Strategy | 11.7% | $150,000 |
Michigan Ross or NYU Stern: the faster payback for you
Higher 10-year value
Michigan Ross
| Michigan Ross payback | 4.2 years |
| NYU Stern payback | 4.7 years |
| Michigan Ross 10-year NPV | $236,467 |
| NYU Stern 10-year NPV | $194,432 |
Who buys it, and why it costs so much
A strategy project is priced by the team's weeks, and the team is senior. The fee reflects the partner's time, the firm's data from other clients in the same industry and the speed: a question that would take an internal team many months is answered in a few weeks. Large companies buy it when a decision is big enough that a better answer pays for the fee many times. Funds buy it when they are about to commit a large sum to a deal. Governments buy it for reforms where they want an outside view. The calculator on this page turns a team size, a length and a weekly fee you choose into the cost of an engagement, so you can see why buyers are few and large.
For an MBA applicant, the practical point is that "consulting" on a school's report mixes these trades. A school with a high consulting share may send most of it to strategy firms or to technology and implementation work, and the salary line tells you which. The consulting rubric ranks schools on the consulting share and salary together, and what consultants do shows a strategy project from the inside.