January 19, 2026 | Lindsay Ellis
Business-school grads face monthslong searches and consider pay cuts
Just how difficult is it to get a foothold in today’s professional job market? It is taking many of America’s most credentialed business-school graduates months to land and accept offers.
With companies scrutinizing every white-collar hire, the job market for M.B.A.s has sputtered for more than a year. That is weakening a reliable catapult into executive-track jobs that can pay hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Though there were hiring rebounds at some of the most elite programs—including Harvard and Columbia universities—hiring from many top-tier business schools remains below prepandemic levels. At Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business, for instance, 21% of job seekers were still looking for work three months after graduation last summer. About 15% of those at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business remained on the hunt.
Those rates are similar to 2024 but sharply higher than 2019, when many employers couldn’t hire enough white-collar professionals. Just 5% of job-seeking M.B.A.s graduating from Duke then were still looking for work three months postgraduation. At Michigan that year, it was 4%.
John Bush, 33 years old, earned his M.B.A. in May from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He initially sought finance jobs in New York but widened his net to banks in Charlotte, N.C. He is now also considering luxury retail after spending time in Paris.
One role he applied for in retail had an annual salary of $80,000, less than what he earned before going to business school. “It might be worth it,” Bush said.
The U.S. added an average of about 49,000 jobs a month in 2025, the lowest pace of growth in more than two decades outside the two most recent recessions. Most were in health services—not what business-school graduates widely pursue. And graduates faced steep competition, as layoffs drew hundreds of thousands of workers 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 connected graduates with one another and with coaches to strategize on searching.
Companies often set M.B.A. hiring targets months before graduation season and make offers long before graduates will join the payroll. That advanced planning was especially challenging this past year, employers and campus career officials said, as companies contended with an on-and-off-again global trade war and the implications of artificial intelligence.
At Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business, a quarter of M.B.A.s were still looking for work three months after graduation, up from about 16% the year before and 8% in 2019.
Two factors especially didn’t help, said Christine Murray, managing director of the career center. More than half of the school’s 2025 M.B.A. graduates were international students, many of whom faced visa uncertainty. And the Washington, D.C., labor market was flooded following federal cuts.
“The last two years have just been really terrible,” she said. This fall, the school is rolling out a new curriculum emphasizing career readiness, shaped with input from employers.
Some business schools say dialing up networking efforts and training students in artificial intelligence improved their hiring outcomes this past year.
At Columbia Business School, 10% of graduates were still looking for jobs three months after graduation—down from recent years. A surge in hiring from Boston Consulting Group, JPMorgan Chase and Amazon contributed to the decrease, school data show. So did more than 200 companies hiring from the school for the first time.
Harvard Business School said it is deploying AI—to help match its M.B.A.s with openings from multiple job-search sites and with alumni who work at those companies. That, plus leaning on alumni and faculty to coach students in their searches, helped M.B.A.s get hired, said Tsedal Neeley, chair of the M.B.A. program.
Fewer HBS graduates were looking for work three months after graduation compared with the prior year—16% versus 23%—though at a higher rate than before Covid-19.
“It’s a changing world, and we need to mobilize to support students,” Neeley said. By late November, all but 10% had accepted jobs, and half of those graduates had received offers, the school said.
HBS graduate Daniel Alves do Quental said he networked extensively and asked professors to connect him with former students or colleagues working at the consulting firms he was targeting.
“Top schools open doors, but they don’t walk you through them,” the 29-year-old from Portugal said.
He joined BCG in New York after graduation, pitching himself as a no-brainer hire who had won promotions before and wanted to stay in consulting long-term: “I’m not just selling only on potential, I’m selling on performance.”
Alexis Rooney, who graduated from HBS last spring, said she leaned on a six-person virtual job search team with fellow grads that HBS organized. One helpful tip she picked up from someone in the group: Write a case study or other 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 is pursuing product marketing and marketing-strategy jobs and while she has gotten interviews they haven’t turned into offers. It has been hard to compete against job candidates who were recently laid off from that exact position, she said.
Heather Byrne, managing director of the career-development office at Michigan’s Ross School, said some students are finding more opportunity at smaller or midsize companies. Once bigger companies understand how AI will impact their organizational charts, she expects their hiring uncertainty to ease. But that could take years, she said.
“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.
