Wall Street's Biggest Firms Are Aggressively Recruiting MBA Students

Wall Street job prospects for students at leading MBA schools have rebounded strongly and bulge-bracket banks are aggressively hiring permanent associates and summer interns, a training firm's survey indicates.

Sixty percent of second-year MBA students in the survey have at least one full-time job offer, 76 percent of first-year students have a summer internship offer, and 80 percent are optimistic about their employment prospects after graudation. Training The Street, which provides courses in financial modeling and corporate valuation to junior-level staff at more than 50 banks and other businesses, polled students in the top 25 MBA programs.

The job-offer percentages closely match those of 83 eFinancialCareers users who answered the current poll on the eFC Student Center site. In the training firm's survey, 69 percent reported receiving at least one internship or job offer, and 39 percent reported multiple offers. The corresponding figures for the eFC poll that appeared April 19 are 67 percent and 43 percent.

"Although our survey reflects the views of candidates from the nation's top 25 MBA programs, these findings still bode well for candidates at other schools and financial institutions," says Chirag Saraiya, principal at Training the Street.

Interestingly, 57 percent of respondents say that large financial institutions are the ones most actively trying to recruit them. Forty percent say large institutions are their preferred places of work. A year ago, most large global banks had curtailed their campus recruiting after suffering severe financial losses and taking government bailouts.

A majority of respondents expect starting salaries between $100,000 -$125,000.

Scott Rostan, Training The Street's founder, observes:

MBAs are looking for and being sought after by the larger Wall Street firms, despite the negative press and the pervasive idea that these firms aren't hiring. If anything, these firms are hiring aggressively.