Getting Paid: Highest MBA Salaries in San Francisco
San Franciso means many things to many people. Equal parts counter-cultural mecca, ground zero tech hub, haven for diversity, and real estate development nightmare, SF conjures images of Silicon Valley introverts and Haight-Ashbury hippies, as well as the high-earning Facebook employees who displace them.
To say the Bay Area identity is multifaceted would be an understatement. The diversity of the metro’s inhabitants is one of its primary selling points. More than most iconic cities of its ilk, San Francisco’s constituent parts seem to naturally feed into one another. But unlike many other large American cities, much of the friction in SF appears to come from a not-so-typical source.
A lot of ink has been spilled about the tech industry’s wholesale colonization of the city but less so about the people and history that inspired those early tech pioneers to gravitate to the Bay Area in the first place. Particularly for the city’s most vulnerable populations, San Francisco’s history—and future—appears in jeopardy in the wake of what many describe as a large-scale housing crisis, which the city has been slow to rectify.
The flip-side to the debacle is the tension that makes the San Francisco Bay Area such a compelling place to pursue an MBA and beyond. The region’s revolutionary spirit appears alive and well at business schools like Stanford and Berkeley-Haas, where social innovation and corporate responsibility are placed at a premium.
Let’s take a closer look at highest San Francisco MBA salaries:
Stanford Graduate School of Business
Graduates from Stanford Graduate School of Business‘ 2016 MBA class posted record employment numbers for the school, with an average starting salary of $140,553 with a $25,000 signing bonus. According to an overview the school published, 95 percent of 2016 MBAs landed positions within 120 days of graduation. The most popular industries to attract Stanford graduates were technology (33 percent), finance (31 percent), consulting (24 percent), and marketing/sales (27 percent). Entrepreneurs made up 15 percent of the class of 2016.
UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business
According to employment stats from the Class of 2016, the average starting salary for Berkeley-Haas graduates is roughly $122,488. The top three industries that employ Berkeley-Haas graduates are within technology (38.8 percent), consulting (19.1 percent), and financial services (12 percent). Berkeley-Haas graduates who opt for careers in technology can expect starting salaries of around $122,948, with grads in consulting earning around $133,762, and financial services employees earn around $1115,581. Top employers of recent Berkeley-Haas’ classes include Adobe, Amazon, Bain & Company, CitiGroup, Deloitte, Google, Microsoft, and Nike, among others.
Santa Clara University’s Leavey School of Business
Graduates from the Leavey School of Business 2016 MBA class posted an average starting salary of $62,400 and a mid-career median pay of around $124,000, as we previously reported—a fact that places Leavey 4th in the nation when it comes to the earning potential of its graduates.
University of San Francisco School of Management
University of San Francisco School of Management graduates earned an average starting salary of around $89,077 with a $5,500 signing bonus, according to recent class statistics. Top employers of USF graduates include Cisco, Gap, Bank Of America, United Nations, Mckesson, Airbnb, Kaiser, Sungevity, Gartner Consulting, Wells Fargo, Pandora, Genentech, Lyft, Silicon Valley Bank, Salesforce, and Discovery Digital Network. Financial services, technology, government, and healthcare are the top four industries to employ USF graduates.
San Francisco State University College of Business
Offering one of the best salary-to-debt ratios in the Bay Area, according to CNBC, San Francisco State University College of Business graduates can expect to start their careers earning around $94,000, on average.
About the Author
Jonathan Pfeffer
Jonathan Pfeffer joined the Clear Admit and MetroMBA teams in 2015 after spending several years as an arts/culture writer, editor, and radio producer. In addition to his role as contributing writer at MetroMBA and contributing editor at Clear Admit, he is co-founder and lead producer of the Clear Admit MBA Admissions Podcast. He holds a BA in Film/Video, Ethnomusicology, and Media Studies from Oberlin College.
