You don’t go into marketing to make the big bucks. Just look at the highest-paid graduates – Stanford GSB. Their $149,723 packages would rank 26th across all occupations and schools. Aside from no schools cracking the $150K average mark, just 10 programs produced graduates who earned $130K or more in Marketing. Among the surprises, Washington Foster and Carnegie Mellon Tepper ranked 5th ($136,426) and 6th ($133,961) respectively for average base pay here – ahead of Chicago Booth, the Wharton School, and Northwestern Kellogg, no less. That’s not to say MBA marketers can’t score a big payday in their first year. One Berkeley Haas MBA collected $250,000 in base alone after graduating in 2021. And individual graduates from Virginal Darden, Harvard Business School, and Stanford GSB made $200K or more as well. In fact, there were 21 MBA programs with graduates making $160K or more in base alone, including Washington Foster, Texas McCombs, and Rochester Simon. At the same time, Washington Foster and Michigan Ross graduates saw their pay increase by over $19K and $14K respectively over the past two years.