You’d expect Stanford to dominate here. The school is just a five minute drive to Sand Hill Road (or 45 minutes to San Francisco). In reality, the pay gap between Stanford and Harvard is much smaller on the west coast than the east coast. Not that Stanford minds. In 2016, Stanford students who stayed out west made $138,772, up nearly $6,000 over the previous year. They also widened their lead over HBS, whose 2016 grads finished at $136,082. The real story, however, is the region’s health across the board. 37 MBA programs had graduating classes that earned $100,000 on average to start, tying the mighty northeast for top honors. At the same time, 28 of these schools also reported higher pay than the previous year. Better yet, it is a more level playing field with 20 programs producing at least one student who averaged $150,000 to start. That includes lower-ranked programs like BYU Marriott ($240,000), Boston College ($180,000), Indiana Kelley ($170,000), and UC-Irvine Merage ($165,000),