MBAs in US still favour bulge bracket firms

Despite redundancies and falling bonuses, MBA students in the US still want to be bankers, as long as they can work for top firms.

Goldman Sachs was ranked as the second most desirable employer for 2003 by MBA students in a survey by Universum, a graduate research company. Nearly 12% of the nearly 3,000 respondents put Goldman in their top five places to work.

The next most popular bank was Citigroup, ranked 5th, followed by Morgan Stanley in 16th place and Merrill Lynch in 21st.

JPMorgan Chase, Lehman Brothers and UBS Warburg ranked 24th, 36th and 50th respectively.

The most popular destination for US MBAs was Mckinsey, the management consultancy. The Central Intelligence Agency was one of the students' preferred employers for the first time, coming in at number 30 in the list of 50 organisations .

Accountancy firms were notably absent from the list. Universum will release similar figures for European MBA students this month.