RSM MBA: cost, salary and payback

Industry, not strategy firms

Manufacturing and industrial companies hired 27% of the class at an average of €87,573, a larger share than at any other school in our data. The employers RSM names include ASML, Siemens, Airbus, Unilever and Danone. Consumer goods and retail took 21% and financial services 19% at €73,996. Consulting, the largest industry at 21 of the 57 schools in our data that publish shares, took 4%, and no other school among the 54 that report it places a smaller share there. For a candidate set on a strategy firm, that is the most important line of this report.

The report groups its small sectors into an "other" line with an average salary of its own, and gives sector salaries only for the larger groups. Consulting is too small a group here to get a salary line, so the calculator cannot test that path on RSM figures.

A salary to read with care

RSM reports its salaries in dollars adjusted for purchasing power, a unit that makes pay in cheaper countries look higher than it is in cash. We convert the figure back into euros with the World Bank factor for the Netherlands, which is the right unit for a graduate who stays there but still an average, not a median, and base pay only. On that figure the gain over the reference salary of $90,000 is small, which is why the payback runs to 15.6 years and RSM ranks number 37 of 40 on the overall model. Someone earning less before the program sees a much shorter payback in the calculator above.

An international class that settles in Europe

The class of 2027 is 99% international, from 28 nationalities, 31 years old on average with 8 years of experience. 80% of graduates took a job in Europe, most of them in the Netherlands, number 3 of 16 in our Europe ranking; 10% went to Latin America, number 3 of 9 for that region. Almost all of them changed region to work, so access to the Dutch and European job market is a large part of what the fee buys.