Members of Yale SOM’s MBA Class of 2025 faced another challenging hiring market marked by longer recruiting timelines and slower early job outcomes. Yale photo
If 2024 marked a shock to the MBA job market, Yale School of Management’s Class of 2025 shows what happens when that shock lingers.
Both job offers and acceptances slipped even further from last year’s steep decline, according to the school’s Class of 2025 MBA Employment Report. Within three months of graduation, just 82.1% of 2025 Yale MBAs had received a job offer, down from 84.8% in 2024 and more than 14 percentage points below the post-pandemic peak of 96.1% for the Class of 2022. Job acceptances fell to 79.9% compared with 81.2% last year and 88.4% in 2023.
Those figures place Yale SOM squarely among the schools most affected by the prolonged slowdown in MBA hiring, according to the employment reports Poets&Quants has seen so far. While no school is reporting hiring numbers as high as the peaks of 2022 and 2023, most have begun to show at least modest stabilization in 2025.
“While MBA hiring continued to be robust this year, competition was fierce and the effort required of students was considerable. As a result, more organizations hired as needed as opposed to following traditional on-campus recruiting schedules, as often happened in previous years,” says Assistant Dean Abigail Kies in her analysis of the 2025 report.
“Timelines for searches were longer, and after the official reporting deadline, students continued to share information about received and accepted offers for positions … It’s also important to note that this employment data only reflects individual student choices, not their opportunities. Despite the challenging hiring environment, Yale SOM students had many options this year.”
The percentage of Yale MBAs seeking employment is also down for the second straight year. Just 81.5% of the 2025 class (274 of 336 total enrolled students) sought employment this year, down from 83.2% in 2024 and 91.5% in 2023.
Of those not on the job hunt, 6.5% started their own business, 5.4% were company sponsored, 2.7% postponed their search, and just under 1% were continuing their education.
Yale’s 2025 offer and acceptance rates are based on outcomes for 225 and 219 MBAs, respectively, out of the 274 graduates seeking employment. That distinction matters because schools (like Harvard Business School and UVA Darden) that track employment outcomes for 100% of their graduating classes avoid excluding “no recent information” cases which can artificially inflate placement rates.
Taken together, Yale’s three-month outcomes represent one of the lowest early-cycle placement results the school has reported in more than a decade.
2025
82.10%
79.90%
2024
84.80%
81.20%
2023
91.50%
88.40%
2022
96.10%
93.30%
2021
95.70%
94.10%
2020
90.20%
85.90%
2019
92.40%
91.40%
2018
91.90%
89.80%
2017
93.40%
90.50%
2016
93.30%
89.90%
2015
93.40%
92.20%
2014
93.10%
88.90%
2013
91.10%
85.20%
Source: Yale SOM
Compensation, however, showed signs of stabilization after last year’s sharp reset. In 2024, median base salary fell $15,000 from the year before, wiping out gains of nearly that much over the previous class.
This year, that median rebounded to $175,000, matching the all-time high set for the class of 2023. Signing bonuses held steady at $30,000.
Consulting clawed back some ground lost during the 2024 cycle. The classes of 2020 and 2021 had 36.9% and 34.2% of job-seeking MBAs enter the industry, but the percentage jumped significantly to the mid 40s for the classes of 2022 and 2023. The share plummeted to 31.9% last year during a significant contraction of consulting as whole, while also pulling down Yale’s placement rate.
For 2025, 36.7% of Yale SOM’s job-seeking MBAs entered consulting, earning a median base salary unchanged from last year at $190,000.
Finance remained the second most popular industry at 28.9% of the class followed by technology at 8.3%.
Median Base Salary
$175,000
$160,000
$175,000
$160,110
$140,400
$140,000
$130,000
Median Signing Bonus
$30,000
$30,000
$30,000
$30,000
$30,000
$30,000
$30,000
Median Guaranteed Year-End Bonus
$40,000
$24,000
$30,000
$20,000
$22,950
$20,413
$20,000
Source: Yale SOM
Yale has leaned heavily into diversification within industries and employers. In total, 121 unique companies and organizations hired SOM’s Class of 2025 MBAs.
“While a look at the top-line numbers shows that Consulting and Finance continue to draw the majority of Yale SOM graduates, followed closely by Technology and Retail, students continued to benefit from Yale SOM’s broad network of employers and our deliberate strategy to not become over-reliant on a few organizations to find roles in a broad array of organizations within each industry and sector,” Kies says.
“Across all industries, many Yale SOM students describe the positions they accepted as having a social impact element.”
Consulting placements spanned large strategy firms as well as healthcare, environmental, government, and nonprofit consulting. Finance roles ranged from large and boutique investment banks to private equity, venture capital, hedge funds, commercial banks, and diversified financial services. Technology and retail outcomes included both global brands and early-stage startups.
