Which MBA Will Open The Door to McKinsey, BCG and Bain?

Its one of the cardinal rules of consulting - dont accept opinions and conjecture if hard data is available that can provide the indisputable answer!

So when approached by a prospective MBA student who wanted to establish which schools would open the door for them to pursue a career at McKinsey, BCG or Bain, we counselled them not to rely on hearsay and opinions but to seek the hard facts. Any careers service worth its salt should be able to provide a breakdown of the employers where its recent graduates have managed to secure employment. Or why not leverage the power of social media and conduct your own custom analysis based on querying of the LinkedIn network?

XiaoXiao Ma went away and did just that - and the results above are the fruition of this work. Similar analyses were also conducted for other strategy firms like my former employer Roland Berger Strategy Consultants. But for the purposes of this article we wanted to just share one definitive league table for the schools you should attend if you want to pursue a career with a top-tier strategy consultancy rather than get bogged down in firm-by-firm detail (feel free to contact XiaoXiao Ma if youd like to see the full results).

The data table published above shows how many consultants each firm currently employs who have an MBA obtained from each of the leading business schools. In other words, only profiles for those people who have secured a job with McKinsey, BCG or Bain after having studied for their MBA and who are still with that firm. The important caveats are that this methodology excludes data for people who joined these firms post-MBA and have since left; and similarly includes those people who were with McKinsey, BCG or Bain prior to their MBA, were sponsored through an MBA and now have returned to their employer as part of the sponsorship deal (without having to undergo the MBA selection process). On the latter point firms will only sponsor consultants to go to the schools they hold in the highest regard, so this should have no bearing on the rankings. Whilst on the former point, we see no reason why graduates from a particular school would be more likely to quit consulting than any other school, so wouldnt expect this to have a material impact on the rankings either.

Were very grateful to XiaoXiao Ma for allowing us to share this work with you - and hope it has answered one of the most often-asked and enduring of questions in the consulting community!