Wharton MBA Salary: By Job Function (2025) (Analysis)

In this in-depth analysis of the Wharton MBA Salary and Placements for the 2025 graduating class by job function, we cover Consulting & Strategy, Investment Banking, Private Equity and Venture Capital (Investor Roles), Investment Management & Portfolio Roles, General & Project Management, Product Management, Business Development, Legal Services, and Product & Brand Marketing.

Trend 1 - Consulting & Strategy: Wharton’s consulting placements Recovered

Trend 2 - Investment Banking: Wharton Fetched a Higher Base Salary than Peers

Trend 3 - Private Equity & Venture Capital: Recovery from the 2024 Low

Trend 4 - Investment Management & Portfolio: Selective Growth Amid Fee Compression

Trend 5 - General Management & Project Management Hiring at Wharton: Reflects Structural Shift

Trend 6 - Product Management: A Declining Function But Competitive Salary at Wharton

Trend 7 - Business Development: M&A Driven Demand

Trend 8 - Legal Services: Complexity Premium

Trend 9 - Product & Brand Marketing: Declining Function at Wharton
 

Trend 1 - Consulting & Strategy: Wharton’s consulting placements Recovered 

Consulting and strategy roles accounted for 31.4% of Wharton MBA hires in 2025, making it the largest functional destination. Historically, Wharton’s consulting placement has oscillated: hiring rose from 27% in 2021 to 28.8% in 2023, before dropping sharply to 25.2% in 2024 as discretionary client spending tightened. 

The rebound in 2025 reflects the preparedness of Wharton MBA to changing market demands.

Demand for Complex Integration Work: Hands-on Experience Prioritized in Consulting

Between Q3 2024 and Q2 2025, consulting demand was driven less by new growth initiatives and more by AI-linked execution, post-merger integration, and operating-model redesign. Global M&A deal value rose by roughly 23% year-on-year in Q2 2025, but deal counts declined. 

Fewer transactions generated more complex integration work per deal. This directly increased demand for consultants capable of managing cross-functional execution, technology harmonization, and integrated value creation. 

Strategy roles were deprioritized. 

Median Base Salary Below the HSW (Harvard-Stanford-Wharton) Scale of $190,000

The median base salary of $183,976, slightly below the industry’s headline $190,000, reflects two countervailing forces: consulting firms preserved compensation discipline while prioritizing internal AI-driven productivity gains. MBAs were hired into selective roles with shorter project cycles and tighter ROI accountability. 

How Wharton MBA’s Curriculum helped Consulting Recovery

Wharton graduates were competitively positioned for this execution-heavy consulting market because the curriculum had already shifted students toward applied problem-solving. 

Courses such as Strategic Management, Decision Models, Operations Strategy, and Managing Organizational Change directly align with the integration and transformation work that dominated consulting pipelines in 2024–25. 

Experiential components like the Management Consulting Practicum and Global Modular Courses exposed students to live operational challenges, reducing firms’ training burden in a year when consulting margins were under pressure. 

Trend 2 - Investment Banking: Wharton Fetched a Higher Base Salary than Peers

Investment banking employed 13% of the Class of 2025, broadly consistent with Wharton’s long-run average and slightly below the 15.2% peak reached in 2024. This moderation is best understood through the structure of the banking recovery rather than headline deal numbers.

AI-led Automation of Due Diligence: Affected Wharton MBA IB Hiring 

From Q4 2024 onward, U.S. investment banking activity rebounded in deal value, not deal volume. 

Sponsor-led carve-outs, refinancing mandates, and select mega-transactions dominated activity, including large healthcare and infrastructure deals concentrated in North America. This raised fee pools but did not require proportional analyst or associate expansion, particularly as banks increasingly deployed AI-enabled modelling and diligence tools.

The $180,982 median base salary is higher than the $175,000 standardization observed in M7 and Top 15 MBA programs. 

Clearly, Employers were willing to pay higher for Wharton MBA hires. 

How Wharton MBA’s Curriculum helped Boost Investment Banking Base Salary 

Wharton’s curriculum prepared students for deal execution.   

Courses such as Corporate Finance, Mergers and Acquisitions, Advanced Corporate Valuation, and Financial Statement Analysis emphasise transaction mechanics, capital structuring, and modelling under uncertainty, exactly the skill set required in a market dominated by complex, sponsor-driven deals over high-volume issuance. 

The curriculum did not insulate students from banking selectivity, as evident in the marginal drop in hiring volume, but it ensured strong compensation, indicating that employers valued deal execution skills.

Trend 3 - Private Equity & Venture Capital: Recovery from the 2024 Low

Private equity and venture capital investor roles together accounted for 13% of Wharton MBA hires, rebounding from the 10% trough in 2024, when exits slowed sharply. The recovery is directly traceable to how the PE market evolved across 2024–2025.

AI and PE’s Selective Hiring

Between Q3 2024 and Q3 2025, global PE deal value reached record levels, with Q3 2025 alone exceeding $530 billion, driven by fewer but larger transactions and a strong concentration in healthcare, infrastructure, defense, and AI-adjacent assets. 

However, fundraising remained weak, exits were uneven, and LP pressure around DPI intensified. This forced PE firms to hire selectively, prioritizing candidates capable of portfolio operations, sector-specific underwriting, and AI-enabled value creation.

The $188,879 median base salary reflects this scarcity dynamic. Firms paid more for fewer seats, particularly for MBAs who could contribute immediately to operating improvements rather than pure deal sourcing.

How Wharton MBA’s Curriculum helps PE/VC placements

Wharton’s ability to maintain PE/VC placements in this environment is directly connected to the experiential depth offered in the curriculum. 

Courses such as Private Equity, Venture Capital, and the Finance of Innovation, Distressed Investing, and Applied Investment Management, combined with the Private Equity and Venture Capital Lab, exposed students to live deal evaluation, portfolio diagnostics, and investment committee processes. 

In a market where firms were unwilling to train hires from scratch, this experiential readiness became a decisive differentiator.

Trend 4 - Investment Management & Portfolio: Selective Growth Amid Fee Compression

Investment management roles comprised 6% of hires, remaining below early-decade levels but stabilizing relative to 2024. 

Between Q3 2024 and Q2 2025, traditional equity managers continued to face fee compression and passive outflows, while capital flowed disproportionately into private credit, infrastructure, and AI-themed funds.

How Wharton MBA’s Curriculum helped Investment Management placements

Managing the volatility of the funding ecosystem required strategies with specialized analytical judgment, which explains both the limited hiring share and the $190,917 median base salary, among the highest across functions. 

Wharton’s offerings in Investment Management, Advanced Topics in Portfolio Management, Behavioral Finance, and Fixed Income Securities align with these niches.

Trend 5 - General Management & Project Management Hiring at Wharton: Reflects Structural Shift

General management and project management roles accounted for 10.2% of hires, reflecting a structural shift. As firms across consulting, technology, and healthcare reduced headcount growth, they placed greater emphasis on execution discipline, cross-functional coordination, and cost control.

The $152,169 median base salary signals that these roles are not premium-priced, but are increasingly central to how organizations operate in highly volatile environments. This function absorbed talent displaced from growth-oriented roles, particularly in technology and consumer sectors.

How Wharton MBA’s Curriculum helped General Management placements

Wharton’s Leadership: Foundations of Teamwork and Leadership is the foundational core course that builds the leadership perspective while Management Communication: Speaking and Writing refines communication skills essential at all stages of a candidates’ career. But it is the majors that accentuate the readiness of Wharton MBA graduates, starting with the Business Analytics major, which helps candidates integrate analytics and AI to monitor trends and make timely and relevant recommendations. 

In a market where operational efficiency was valued the most, the Operations, Information, and Decisions major offered the most value in consulting engagements for manufacturing and supply chain management.
 

Trend 6 - Product Management: A Declining Function But Competitive Salary at Wharton

Product management roles made up 5.9% of hires, continuing a multi-year decline from the 19% tech-heavy peak in 2021. The decline reflects Wharton’s limited influence in retaining strong technology placement numbers when competing against technology heavyweights like Stanford, MIT, Berkeley, Haas, and UCLA Anderson. 

Location had a huge influence on retaining employer relationships in the technology industry.

AI Ecosystem: Fewer Product Management Roles

Between Q3 2024 and Q2 2025, technology firms invested heavily in AI infrastructure, semiconductors, data centres, and energy systems, areas that require fewer classical MBA product managers and more technical specialists. 

Product roles that did exist were concentrated in enterprise, B2B, and monetization-linked functions, explaining the relatively high $179,721 median base salary despite modest hiring volume.

How Wharton MBA’s Curriculum helped Product Management placements

Wharton’s courses in Product Design, Technology Strategy, Leading Teams, and Operations Strategy positioned students for enterprise and execution-oriented roles, but the employment data clearly show that the courses were not sufficient to reverse the declining placement trends.

Trend 7 - Business Development: M&A Driven Demand

Business development roles accounted for 4.2% of hires, attributed to the resurgence of strategic M&A and partnership activity. As firms pursued bolt-on acquisitions and ecosystem partnerships, BD roles focused on deal evaluation, integration planning, and partnership management.

The $171,989 median base salary reflects the hybrid nature of these roles, straddling strategy, finance, and operations.

Trend 8 - Legal Services: Complexity Premium

Legal services hired 2.8% of graduates, but offered a $218,125 median base salary, underscoring extreme role scarcity.

Regulatory complexity around AI governance, financial regulation, and cross-border transactions intensified during this period, particularly in the U.S. and EU. 

Firms hired very few MBAs into legal-adjacent roles, but paid a premium for those capable of operating at the intersection of law, finance, and technology.

Trend 9 - Product & Brand Marketing: Declining Function at Wharton

Product and brand marketing roles declined to 2.3%, reflecting continued pressure on consumer-facing sectors even though the median base salary of $155,333 was competitive.

Reference

• Wharton MBA Employment Report