Top MBA Graduates Face Extended Job Searches in Tough Market
Finding a professional job has become incredibly difficult. Even graduates from America's most prestigious business schools are struggling. Many take months to land and accept job offers. This situation weakens what was once a reliable path to high-paying executive positions.
Hiring Remains Below Pre-Pandemic Levels
The job market for MBAs has been sluggish for over a year. Companies are carefully examining every white-collar hire. While some elite programs like Harvard and Columbia saw hiring rebounds, many top-tier business schools still report numbers below pre-pandemic levels.
Consider these specific examples from last summer's graduating class. At Duke University's Fuqua School of Business, twenty-one percent of job seekers were still looking three months after graduation. About fifteen percent of graduates from the University of Michigan's Ross School of Business remained on the hunt.
These rates are similar to 2024 but show a sharp decline from 2019. That year, employers struggled to find enough white-collar professionals. Only five percent of Duke's job-seeking MBAs were still looking three months post-graduation in 2019. At Michigan, the figure was just four percent.
Personal Stories Highlight the Struggle
John Bush, a 33-year-old who earned his MBA from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in May, illustrates the challenge. He initially targeted finance jobs in New York but broadened his search to banks in Charlotte, North Carolina. He is now even considering luxury retail after spending time in Paris.
One retail role he applied for offered an annual salary of $80,000. This is less than what he earned before attending business school. "It might be worth it," Bush said, reflecting the difficult compromises graduates face.
Economic Factors Create a Challenging Environment
The broader economic context is tough. The U.S. added an average of about 49,000 jobs per month in 2025. This represents the slowest pace of growth in over two decades, excluding the two most recent recessions. Most new jobs were in health services, a sector not widely pursued by business school graduates.
Graduates also faced intense competition. Layoffs pushed hundreds of thousands of experienced workers back into the job market. "Students were having a rough time," said Teri Parker de Leon, Fuqua's executive director for its career-management center. The school responded by connecting graduates with each other and with coaches to strategize their searches.
Advanced Hiring Planning Proves Difficult
Companies typically set MBA hiring targets months before graduation and make offers well in advance. This advanced planning was especially challenging last year, according to employers and campus career officials. Companies dealt with an on-and-off global trade war and the implications of artificial intelligence.
At Georgetown University's McDonough School of Business, a quarter of MBAs were still job-hunting three months after graduation. This is up from about sixteen percent the previous year and just eight percent in 2019.
Christine Murray, managing director of the career center, pointed to two major factors. More than half of the school's 2025 MBA graduates were international students, many facing visa uncertainty. Additionally, the Washington, D.C., labor market was flooded following federal budget cuts. "The last two years have just been really terrible," she said. In response, the school is launching a new curriculum this fall that emphasizes career readiness, developed with employer input.
Some Schools Adapt and See Improvement
Some institutions report better outcomes by adapting their strategies. They dialed up networking efforts and provided training in artificial intelligence. At Columbia Business School, ten percent of graduates were still seeking jobs three months after graduation. This is down from recent years.
School data shows a surge in hiring from Boston Consulting Group, JPMorgan Chase, and Amazon contributed to this improvement. So did more than two hundred companies hiring from the school for the first time.
Harvard Business School is deploying AI to help match its MBAs with job openings from multiple search sites and with alumni at those companies. Tsedal Neeley, chair of the MBA program, said this approach, combined with leveraging alumni and faculty to coach students, helped more MBAs get hired.
Fewer HBS graduates were looking for work three months after graduation compared to the prior year. The rate was sixteen percent versus twenty-three percent. However, it remains higher than before the Covid-19 pandemic. "It's a changing world, and we need to mobilize to support students," Neeley said. By late November, all but ten percent had accepted jobs, and half of those still looking had received offers.
Networking and Persistence Are Key
Graduates emphasize that networking is crucial. HBS graduate Daniel Alves do Quental said he networked extensively and asked professors to connect him with former students at his target consulting firms. "Top schools open doors, but they don't walk you through them," said the 29-year-old from Portugal. He joined BCG in New York after graduation, pitching himself as a proven performer.
Alexis Rooney, another HBS graduate, leaned on a six-person virtual job search team organized by the school. She learned to write a case study or work sample to get another look even after a rejection. "The rejection is just a no—you could turn it into a yes," Rooney said. She continues to pursue product marketing jobs, facing competition from candidates recently laid off from similar positions.
Adapting Expectations for Future Success
Heather Byrne, managing director of the career-development office at Michigan's Ross School, noted some students are finding more opportunities at smaller or midsize companies. She expects hiring uncertainty at larger firms to ease once they better understand how AI will impact their organizational structures, but this could take years.
"The people who are patient and who continue to network and are appropriately flexible and adaptable with their expectations will be the ones who do well," Byrne said. The message is clear: persistence, adaptability, and strategic networking are essential in today's challenging job market for even the most credentialed graduates.
