In this in-depth analysis of the Berkeley Haas MBA Salary and Placements outcome for the 2025 graduating class by job function, we cover:
- Berkeley Haas MBA Placements in Consulting: 2025 Hiring Stabilized as Firms Prioritized Implementation Over Strategy Design
- Berkeley Haas MBA Placements in Finance / Accounting: 2025 Compensation Shifted Toward Bonuses as Deal Activity Reopened Selectively
- Berkeley Haas MBA Placements in General Management: 2025 Hiring Held Steady as Firms Shifted Focus to Internal Execution
- Berkeley Haas MBA Placements in Information Technology: Hiring shifted to product, data, and AI delivery
- Berkeley Haas MBA Placements in Marketing & Sales: Data-first marketing lifted demand for analytics-savvy MBAs
- Berkeley Haas MBA Placements in Operations / Logistics: Automation and resilience investments translated into selective, higher-skilled ops hires
1. Berkeley Haas MBA Placements in Consulting: 2025 Hiring Stabilized as Firms Prioritized Implementation Over Strategy Design
Consulting accounted for 27.5% of Haas MBA placements in 2025, with a median base salary of $190,000 and signing bonuses of $30,000, resulting in $220,000 in total compensation. The defining shift occurred between Q4 2024 and Q2 2025, when consulting firms materially reduced discretionary strategy work and redirected hiring toward execution-heavy mandates. These included AI system rollouts, operating-model redesigns, regulatory response programs, and post-merger integration tied to deals closed earlier in the cycle. Firms did not rebuild consultant benches; instead, they hired smaller cohorts expected to own workstreams immediately, which explains why compensation held firm while hiring volumes remained capped.
How Berkeley Haas MBA Curriculum assist in Consulting Placements?
Haas’s consulting outcomes align closely with this execution bias because of how the curriculum builds problem-framing and delivery skills rather than pure strategy abstraction. Core courses such as Problem Solving with Data and Analytics and Strategic Leadership train students to structure ambiguous problems, quantify trade-offs, and defend recommendations, skills central to implementation-focused consulting work in 2025. Experiential courses like Haas@Work, International Business Development, and Social Sector Solutions replicate consulting engagement conditions by requiring students to scope ill-defined problems, work with real clients, and deliver under fixed timelines.
Structural Limitations of Haas MBA Curriculum
A structural limitation is that Haas does not embed consulting recruiting into a rigid academic track. Students must self-select into consulting-relevant electives and experiential courses, which favors candidates who are proactive and execution-oriented but can discourage those seeking a highly prescriptive consulting pathway. This helps explain why the Haas consulting placement is stable but does not expand aggressively during recovery cycles.
2. Berkeley Haas MBA Placements in Finance / Accounting: 2025 Compensation Shifted Toward Bonuses as Deal Activity Reopened Selectively
Finance and accounting roles accounted for 19% of placements, with a median base salary of $160,000 and a median signing bonus of $50,000, producing $210,000 total compensation. The structural change occurred between Q3 2024 and Q1 2025, when capital markets reopened unevenly. Large-cap M&A, infrastructure finance, and private credit transactions resumed, while IPOs and mid-market deal flow remained constrained. Employers responded by holding base salaries constant and using signing bonuses to compete for execution-ready candidates, rather than expanding associate classes.
How Berkeley Haas MBA Curriculum Supports New Demand in Financial Services
Haas’s finance curriculum supports execution-ready professionals by emphasizing skill development around decision-making under capital constraints rather than transaction volume.
Core courses in Financial Accounting and Corporate Finance establish valuation, capital structure, and cash-flow analysis fundamentals. Advanced electives such as Valuation, Mergers & Acquisitions, and Financial Statement Modeling map directly to the skills required for deal execution roles that dominated 2025 hiring.
Role of Student-Managed Fund in keeping Haas MBA Graduates Execution Ready
Beyond coursework, student-managed platforms like the Haas Investment Fund and Sustainable Investment Fund give applied exposure to portfolio construction, risk assessment, and capital allocation decisions, skills aligned with selective finance hiring in 2025.
Where Haas differs from finance-heavy programs is scale.
No Exposure to Large Transactions
The curriculum does not emphasize repetitive transaction training at volume, which limits exposure to large IB associate pipelines but aligns well with corporate finance, structured finance, and hybrid strategy-finance roles. This structural choice explains the 2025 outcome: resilient finance placement with strong bonuses, but less upside dispersion than schools designed primarily for investment banking throughput.
Question 1: What makes you feel alive when you are doing it, and why? (300 words maximum) (Video Essay)
Question 2: What are your short-term and long-term career goals, and how will an MBA from Haas help you achieve those goals? Short-term career goals should be achievable within 3-5 years post-MBA, whereas long-term goals may span a decade or more and encompass broader professional aspirations. (300 words max)
Question 3: Distance Traveled: At Berkeley Haas, we consider "distance traveled" as the contextual information that helps us understand the unique circumstances, challenges, or influences that have shaped your personal and professional journey.
We invite you to share aspects of your background, personal circumstances, or significant experiences that have meaningfully impacted who you are today and how you've reached this point. Please tell us how these experiences have influenced your perspectives, decisions, and aspirations, and how they contribute to the person you are becoming. (300 words max)
3. Berkeley Haas MBA Placements in General Management: 2025 Hiring Held Steady as Firms Shifted Focus to Internal Execution
General management roles absorbed 15.7% of the Class of 2025, with a median base salary of $153,500 and signing bonuses of $20,000, resulting in $173,500 total compensation. The stability of hiring share in 2025 contrasts with modest salary softening and reflects a broader corporate shift during Q2–Q4 2024. As firms paused external expansion, they increased demand for managers capable of driving internal execution, cost discipline, and cross-functional coordination, rather than launching new growth initiatives.
How Berkeley Haas MBA Curriculum Builds General Management Skills
Haas’s curriculum is structurally aligned with this type of general management demand. The integrated core, particularly Leading People, Ethics and Responsibility in Business, Operations, and Strategy, emphasizes managerial judgment, organizational decision-making, and trade-offs across functions. Applied courses such as Corporate Strategy Practicum and Applied Innovation place students inside operating environments where they must balance financial, operational, and human considerations simultaneously. These formats directly support the kind of internally focused general management roles that remained open in 2025.
Limitations of Berkeley Haas MBA General Management Placements
A notable constraint is that Haas does not channel students into large, formal rotational leadership programs at scale. As a result, general management outcomes skew toward mid-sized firms, innovation-driven organizations, and west-coast corporates, where responsibility comes earlier but compensation growth is more incremental. This structural alignment explains why general management hiring held steady while salaries did not rise dramatically in 2025.
4. Berkeley Haas MBA Placements in Information Technology: Hiring shifted to product, data, and AI delivery
In 2025, Haas IT placements reflected a clear pivot: employers hired fewer general entry-level devs and more product-oriented, data, and AI-adjacent roles that could translate models into revenue or embed automation into operations. That explains why median base pay rose to $163,000 while firms used signing bonuses to secure scarce technical-product hybrids.
The pivot was visible by Q4 2024 when tech firms paused broad engineering expansion and, from Q1–Q2 2025, prioritised hires who could deploy AI pilots into production and manage cross-functional product launches, a pattern documented in multiple 2024–25 tech hiring trackers that show surging AI job titles and growth in product/AI architect roles.
How Berkeley Haas MBA Curriculum Builds Product Skills
Students who landed these roles typically combined core analytics with product- and engineering-adjacent electives.
Data and Decisions (MBA200S) and Data Science & Data Strategy provide the statistical and strategic framing; Product Management, Managing the New Product Development Process, Introduction to Coding for MBAs, and applied projects like Haas@Work or Startup Lab give the execution skills employers want, roadmapping, stakeholder management, and minimally viable product delivery.
The curriculum, therefore, matches employer demand for product managers who can interpret models and partners who can operationalize them.
ML and Systems Engineering Gap In Berkeley MBA Curriculum
A practical gap remains: for 2025 roles requiring deep ML engineering or systems-level infrastructure work, Haas MBAs relied on cross-registration (Engineering) or short technical electives rather than a dedicated, deep-engineering sequence, adequate for product/PM roles but limiting for hires aimed at low-level ML systems engineering. That explains why many firms paid premium bonuses to attract MBAs with prior engineering experience or supplementary technical credentials in 2025.
With employers laying off middle managers at scale, the pre-MBA engineering skills will be valuable to integrate both skills to operate as an effective product person.
Essay Editing - Consult with Atul Jose (Essay Specialist, F1GMAT)
The skills that a writer/editor brings to the table are different from what a former admissions officer or a consultant who has limited writing skills brings
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As F1GMAT’s Lead Consultant and Essay Specialist, I will help you structure the essay by:
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I will help you find unique life experiences that would differentiate you from the highly competitive Berkeley Haas MBA application pool.
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I have developed a keen sense of storytelling from over a decade and a half of editing essays and writing essay examples for F1GMAT’s Essay Guides.
The skills that a writer/editor brings to the table are different from what a former admissions officer or a consultant who has limited writing skills brings
Review Skills # Writing Skills
Movie Critics # Movie Directors
It is easy to comment, but it is tough to structure the essay from the perspective of the applicant and turn the essay into a winning application essay.
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A big part of editing and guiding applicants is in educating them about the culture of the school
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If you don’t highlight them and lean towards general leadership or cultural narratives, the essay won’t work.
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5. Berkeley Haas MBA Placements in Marketing & Sales: Data-first marketing lifted demand for analytics-savvy MBAs
Marketing hiring at Haas in 2025 concentrated on data-driven growth, martech, and product-marketing positions rather than classical mass-media brand roles. From Q3–Q4 2024 firms, shifted budgets from broad above-the-line campaigns to personalization, lifecycle automation, and measurement systems; by Q1–Q2 2025, CMOs prioritized hires who could translate analytics into unit-economics improvements and revenue lift.
Industry analysts documented this shift: Gartner and Deloitte reported growing CMO investment in personalization, measurement stacks, and AI-enabled customer orchestration as top 2025 priorities, creating demand for marketers fluent in analytics and experimentation.
9.20% of Berkeley Haas MBA graduates joined Marketing as a job function with an impressive $35,000 bonus, taking the total compensation to $186,125.
How Berkeley Haas MBA Curriculum Builds Marketing Skills
Haas’s applied marketing curriculum had a notable role in encouraging 10% of the class to join Marketing. Core Marketing plus electives such as Marketing Analytics, Growth Marketing, Customer Insights, Strategic Brand Management, and applied courses like Managing the New Product Development Process and Corporate Launchpad teach A/B testing, cohort analysis, pricing experiments, and GTM strategy, the exact skills recruiters require in 2025. The CMO Insight Speaker Series and industry clubs further expose students to real martech stacks and vendor selection questions, which shortens employer onboarding time.
Where gaps appeared in 2025 was at the intersection of full-stack digital execution and deep ad-tech engineering: employers seeking in-house media engineers or advanced attribution platform builders still favoured hires with specialist ad-tech or engineering backgrounds, which is why bonuses were used to secure MBAs who paired analytics coursework with prior hands-on digital marketing experience. This dynamic explains the moderate base pay but notable signing-bonus profile in 2025.
6. Berkeley Haas MBA Placements in Operations / Logistics: Automation and resilience investments translated into selective, higher-skilled ops hires
Operations and logistics hiring in 2025 was driven by two measurable forces concentrated in Q4 2024 to Q2 2025: corporate moves to de-risk supply chains after pandemic and geopolitical shocks and an acceleration in logistics automation (warehouse robotics, TMS visibility, IoT sensor analytics) as firms shifted capex from inventory build to automation. Reports and market trackers in 2024–25 show a marked increase in logistics-automation investment and an expanding vendor ecosystem (sensors, visibility platforms), producing demand for MBAs who could combine supply-chain strategy with digital transformation skills.
The above 5% representation while maintaining a $150,000+ base salary is impressive. The Signing bonus of $14,000 was the only big drawback.
How Berkeley Haas MBA Curriculum Builds Operations and Supply Chain Skills
Haas prepares students for that demand through Operations (MBA204), electives such as Supply Chain Management, Business & Sustainable Supply Chains, and applied courses like Haas@Work and Corporate Launchpad, focused on implementation. These courses teach process analysis, bottleneck management, inventory optimization, and vendor selection, competencies recruiters sought when moving pilots into scale in 2025. In practice, the best-placed candidates paired operations electives with Data and Decisions or Data Science & Data Strategy to be credible on the analytics and IoT-driven elements of modern supply chains.
Prior Engineering Experience Valued in Operations and Logistics
A structural limit surfaced in 2025: firms scaling robotics and edge-data initiatives often required specialized engineering or systems-integration expertise. Where Haas MBAs lacked that depth, employers either hired small cross-functional teams (one MBA paired with engineers) or paid sign-on premiums for MBAs with prior technical/project-engineering experience. That explains why operations hiring remained selective (5.9%) but commanded reasonable base pay and modest bonuses tied to program-critical projects.
Function | Percent of Hires | Median Base Salary | Median signing bonus | Total Salary |
| Consulting | 27.5% | $190,000 | $30,000 | $220,000 |
| Finance/Accounting | 19% | $160,000 | $50,000 | $210,000 |
| General Management | 15.7% | $153,500 | $20,000 | $173,500 |
| Information Technology | 15% | $163,000 | $35,000 | $198,000 |
| Marketing/Sales | 9.2% | $151,125 | $35,000 | $186,125 |
| Operations/Logistics | 5.9% | $152,500 | $13,913 | $166,413 |
Final Verdict
The Good
1. General management roles absorbed 15.7% of the Class of 2025, with a median base salary of $153,500 and signing bonuses of $20,000, resulting in $173,500 total compensation at a time when General Management offers were on a decline in Peer Schools
2. Consulting represented 27.5% of Haas MBA placements in 2025, with a median base salary of $190,000 and signing bonuses of $30,000, resulting in $220,000 total; as competitive as any offer in M7 and T3 schools
3. 9.20% of Berkeley Haas MBA graduates joined Marketing as a job function with an impressive $35,000 bonus, taking the total compensation to $186,125.
4. For candidates entering IT, median base pay rose to $163,000; a competitive salary in a down market
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