Quote:
Originally Posted by itsrahul
Hmm. After reading these stats I will have to agree with you on this. It would be great if you could throw some light on interpreting the numbers part.
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I can help all i can
Looking at this link that you posted
The High Price of Admission
The Years to payback has been calculated as Total Cost/ Salary premium
Now, when they say a Duke MBA has 258,689 then they are actually including tution (~80K) + living (~24K yeah living is very cheap in Durham) + lost income (prolly 160K for two years).
But look at the figure for Brigham Young (you can go to their website too), the average class makes pretty less pre-MBA so they arrive at a very low figure of 133,234.
Now we have to understood the concept of total cost as calculated by BW right?
Letz c salary premium. Brigham/ Wisconsin, etc have high premium which basically is postMBA salary - preMBA salary. If you are going in to such university with 45K annual salary but making 90K postMBA then your salary premium is 90-45 = 45K whereas if someone goes to Harvard and his pre-MBA is 130K whereas postMBA is 160K then his salary premium is just 30K. Because his pre-MBA is more then his Total cost would also be more and hence you would find an appx $300k / $30 ~ 10 years.
This is why those figures should be taken with grain of salt.
Now let us take indian guys like us. I am sure any desi engg in US can make upwards of 60K(Cleveland)-110K(NYC). Why should i go to a school that has low postMBA salary. Also, salary depends on location. A 80K in NYC is equivalent to 60K in Dallas, TX.
Hence, there are lot of complications involved when you look into those figures. My suggestions in the following order:
1. Look at the geographical locations the enrolled students are coming from (for example a very urban student community would tend to have higher pre-MBA salary).
2. Now look at avg or median pre-MBA salary for the school.
3. Now look at avg or median post-MBA salary in the function area you are targeting. The premium may be less but is it worth the kind of job you end up getting. May be corporate strategy in Google, Mountainview. How does that sound?
Now after analyzing the above 3 steps, your best bet is to fall in the bracket just below or lower end of the middle 80% pre-MBA salary range and hope for the best range for post-MBA salary. If you are able to succeed (and many graduates do in top 10) then your pay-back would reduce drastically.
Also, being an indian i donot consider my pre-MBA in USD even though i am in US. It makes me feel happy
Hope it helps!