Queen's MBA Class of 2008 "preliminary" placement statistics

These are preliminary numbers. The official ones will be published on the Queen's Business Career Center website very shortly.

Percentage of students placed (6 months after graduation) 93%

• In Canada 77%
• Outside Canada 23%

Locations in Canada:

• Vancouver, BC
• Calgary, AB
• Edmonton, AB
• Toronto, ON
• Ottawa, ON
• Waterloo, ON

Locations outside Canada:

• India
• United Arab Emirates
• UK
• USA

Employment by sector, average salary:

• Finance 35%, $78,000
• Management Consulting 20%, $94,500
• High Tech/Telecom 25%, $74,500
• Manufacturing 4%, $80,000
• Bio-Pharm 2%, N/A
• Other 14%, $77,000

Salary Info:

• Average $80,000
• Median $81,000
• Top $122,000

Placement by citizenship (some cases by region of origin and not citizenship):

• Overall 93%
• Canadian 88% (note: this is lower because of a trend for Canadian students to take a period of time to "decompress" after the program prior to looking for work)
• Indian 100%
• Chinese 100%
• African 100%
• European 100%
• South American 100%

Pre-Study: MBAS 860 Acquisitions and Analysis of Information for Management (a.k.a. Statistics)

Received some more pre-study material from Queen's regarding preparation for a Module 2 course called MBAS 860: Acquisition and Analysis of Information for Management. This will will be background for a subsequent course called MBAS 861: Business Decision Models and for other Finance and Accounting courses.

The material is in a letter from Jeff McGill, the instructor, and encourages students to prepare for the course by reviewing some basic statistics and statistical functions of Microsoft Excel so they get the most out of the course. A link to an Excel tutorial spreadsheet is provided and students new to, or experienced with, Excel are encouraged to work through it to either familiarise themselves with Excel, or to have a refresher while gaining a stronger understanding of what will be expected.

The letter also explicitly states that, "the course will emphasize the application of statistical techniques in the following areas:"

1. use of descriptive statistics to explore data;
2. elements of probability (including Normal, Binomial, Uniform, and Exponential distributions);
3. statistical inference: estimation of means and proportions, Hypothesis Testing on means and proportions;
4. models of association: correlation, and simple and multiple regression models;
5. time-series analysis and forecasting.

It goes on:

This is an extensive agenda for a single course; however, our interest will be in the use of these techniques to model and solve business decision problem rather than on theoretical development. The course text is not available for this mailing, but if you have access to text materials from a previous statistics course that you have taken or can obtain such materials from friends or colleagues, we encourage you to spend time reviewing the ‘basics’ in items 1), 2) and 3), above. We will cover these items in class, but we will move quickly! A relatively inexpensive alternative is the following 'outline’ text that contains many solved problems: Kazmier, Leonard J. SCHAUM'S OUTLINE OF BUSINESS STATISTICS, McGraw-Hill, New York, NY (latest edition). This book is available in most campus bookstores, or can be ordered online. [Warning: Schaum's Easy Outline of Business Statistics is not adequate.] The more preparation you can do ahead of time, the better. If you are concerned about your preparation for quantitative analysis in your MBA program, we can also recommend an online quantitative analysis preparation package offered by Harvard Publishing. The price for this course with an academic discount is approximately $65.00 . Here are some instructions from Harvard regarding logging in to the site.

Please register at http://elearninghome.hbsp.org/. Click on the ‘Sign up here link’ under New Users and fill out all required information to be properly associated with the Queen’s account.

Organization ID#: XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

Organization Name: XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

New User Information: HE

Once you are registered, it may take up to 2 business days for you to have access to the course. If you experience technical difficulties, please e-mail techhelp@hbsp.harvard.edu, or call (800) 810-8858.

I will definitely be pulling out my old engineering statistics textbook and looking over these topics, but I don't think I need to try to complete the extra Harvard course since being an engineer I have a fairly good grounding in Excel, math, and statistics. Besides, I don't have the time. Between packing, doing the other pre-study material, working, and meeting up with family/friends one last time I am finding ALL of my time is taken up.

Employment: Interperting Placement/Employment Statistics from Universities.

I have encountered several people researching and exploring MBA programs. Inevitable "placement" statistics enter into the discuss and I am surprised how little most people know about what is being put in front of them. Therefore, I am posting this excerpt from a document I found on the Queen's Career Centre website. Hopefully it will help people to start asking the right questions about what is being presented to them. Statistics can be very useful, but they can also tell many different versions of the "truth"; some of them misleading.

Reporting Guidelines and Statistics – a few comments.

1. READ INFORMATION CAREFULLY - ESPECIALLY THE FINE PRINT!

Many schools may report information on their web sites differently from the guidelines set out by the MBA CSC – this is perfectly acceptable as long as the institution clearly sets out for you the basis of their reporting.

2. What does the placement (employment) rate mean?

Placement or employment rate is the percentage of students in the class with employment at a given date.

It is the percentage of students with offers of employment based on the number of students reporting back to the university and actively looking for work. This means that if there are 100 students in the graduating class, 80 have reported back to the university and 60 of the 80 have job offers, the placement rate is 75%, not 60%.

Active job seekers -Further to the above, if 20 of the 80 reporting back are continuing to further their education, not in an active job search or otherwise not looking for work (extended travel for instance) then the placement rate is 100% : 80-20 = 60 of which 60 are reporting having received an offer.

Offers count as placement. If a student receives a bona fide offer for a suitable MBA level job but declines it, they are nonetheless considered placed as they had the opportunity to accept meaningful work.

3. Timing of placements;

a. At Graduation – means offers received on or before the official graduation date at the school.

b. Within three months of graduation means offers received on or before the three month anniversary of the official graduation date at the school.

c. Placement reports can include dates beyond three months depending on the type of program and profile of the average graduate. Graduates with more work experience often are more targeted in their job search and may elect to take longer than three months to search for the right job.

4. Source of placements:

Placements facilitated by the University are not just those offers received through formal on campus recruitment programs. University-facilitated placements may include offers received as a result of networking events, alumni connections or other university sponsored, arranged or facilitated sources.

5. Timelines and transparency:

Look for schools that report several years’ worth of data. Economic conditions play a significant role in placement and salary statistics. You should want to see how well an institution fares in both strong and weak conditions. Further, consider how stable and how consistent the salaries are from year to year. Some years a few outliers may take the numbers look very good but may not reflect the total picture of salaries over a long run.