Recent MBA grads are increasingly looking west to big companies like Apple, Google and especially Amazon when searching for post-business school employment.

Elite MBA talent is being heavily recruited by tech firms, especially at a few target schools, like Northwestern's Kellogg School of Business and MIT's Sloan School of Management, according to new analysis from Poets and Quants, a news website that covers business schools.


One eye-popping factoid from the report : Over the past five years, Amazon hired 49 MBAs from Columbia Business School - nearly as many as the 51 MBAs Morgan Stanley hired over the same time period. (Morgan Stanley is a much more traditional choice for recent Columbia MBA grads.)Another illustration of how big tech firms are increasingly recruiting MBAs is from Chicago's Booth School of Business. Five years ago, Google only hired four graduates from Chicago's elite business school. But last year, Google tripled its take to 12 graduates.

Finance and consulting are still the top fields that newly-minted MBAs are choosing, but schools are increasingly exposing their top students to Silicon Valley. "Some schools long ago saw the need to travel to the coast to get a sense of the Silicon Valley-Bay Area ecosystem; more and more are following their lead, making such pilgrimages de rigeur for the best programs," according to Poets and Quants.


Some students are even using the MBA as a credential to break into the technology industry. Median base salaries in tech for MBA graduates from certain schools can reach as high as $125,000 per year.

Here's a chart that shows just how many MBA grads have headed to big tech companies over the last five years from certain elite schools:


Read the entire report over at Poets and Quants

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