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Cornell Johnson MBA Employment Report: Latest Trends in Salary & Job Function

Cornell Johnson MBA Employment ReportCornell Johnson MBA Employment report has been released. Employers find specialist more valuable than generalist. It is evident in the salary difference for Cornell Johnson 1-Year and 2-Year MBA programs.

The Cornell Johnson 1-Year MBA program is targeted for candidates with considerable years of experience, and those who are looking to make career progression with a management degree. For career switchers, significant time should be invested learning and applying new knowledge. This goal can be reached with a 2-Year MBA program.

The mean salary for 2-Year MBA program in 2012 was $106,100 whereas 1-Year MBA program led students to earn $113,720. Interestingly, the mean sign-in bonus for 1-year MBAs was $19,620, six thousand dollars less than what was offered to 2-year MBAs. On an average, both stream of MBAs earned between $132,000 and $133,000. But if you dive deep into the salary break up based on job function for each program, some interesting trends emerge.

For 2-Year MBA students, Finance was the most popular job function with 43% of the MBAs opting for this function, followed by Consulting (26%), and Marketing and Business development (13%).

For 1-Year MBA students
, Finance was the least popular with 15% opting for this job function while Marketing and Business development (35%) was the most popular followed by General Management (31%), and Consulting (19%).

It is interesting to see how MBAs with background in specialist programs prefer General Management while generalist prefer specialist program like Finance – a case of opting for experiences that are completely different from their pre-MBA job functions.

Consulting remains the best-paid job function
with both the 2-Year and 1-year MBAs earning in the range of $120,000 to $140,000 per year. After the financial crisis, MBA in Finance has yet to reach the high bonus-base salary of the pre-recession job market. MBAs with Finance received offers with the annual salary in the range of $123,000 to $131,000.

Some of the top recruiters at Cornell Johnson MBA programs
are A.T. Kearney, Accenture, Amazon, American Express Company, AT&T, Bain & Company Inc., Bank of America,  Merrill Lynch, BNP Paribas, Boeing, Boston Consulting Group, Cisco Systems, Inc, Citi, Deloitte Consulting LLP, Ernst & Young, Fidelity Investments, General Electric Company, Goldman Sachs Group, Inc., Hewlett Packard Company, IBM, J.P. Morgan, Johnson & Johnson, Mars Inc., McKinsey & Company, Microsoft Corporation, PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP, Procter & Gamble Company, Samsung, TCS : Tata Consultancy Services, UBS, United Airlines and Verizon.

The class size of 2-Year and 1-year MBA is significantly different with the former housing 282 graduates while the shorter version accommodating just 35 graduates. Even though switching industries is not easy, MBAs still offer graduates with ample opportunity to switch job function – the most popular post-MBA goal.

Learn more about Cornell 2-Year MBA Program

Learn More about Cornell 1-Year MBA Program

About the Author 

Atul Jose

I am Atul Jose, Founding Consultant of F1GMAT, an MBA admissions consultancy that has worked with applicants since 2009.

 

For the past 15 years I have edited the application files of admits to the M7 programs: Harvard Business School, Stanford Graduate School of Business, the Wharton School, MIT Sloan, Chicago Booth, Kellogg School of Management, and Columbia Business School, together with admits to Berkeley Haas, Yale School of Management, NYU Stern, Michigan Ross, Duke Fuqua, Darden, Tuck, IMD, London Business School, INSEAD, SDA Bocconi, IESE Business School, HEC Paris, McCombs, and Tepper, plus other programs inside the global top 30.

 

My work covers the full MBA application deliverable: career planning and profile evaluation, application essay editing, recommendation letter editing, mock interviews and interview preparation, scholarship and fellowship essay editing, and cover letter editing for funding applications. Full bio with credentials and admit history is here.

 

I am the author of the Winning MBA Essay Guide, the best-selling essay guide covering M7 MBA programs. I have written and updated the guide annually since 2013, which makes the 2026 edition the thirteenth.

 

The reason I still write and edit essays every cycle: a good MBA essay carries a real applicant's voice. Writing essays for F1GMAT's Books and Editing essays weekly is how I stay calibrated to what current admissions committees respond to.

 

Contact me for school selection, career planning, essay strategy, narrative development, essay editing, interview preparation, scholarship essay editing, or guidance documents for recommendation letters.