Average Salary Is Not a Career Strategy
Business schools should teach students how to read the system behind the pay cheque, not just celebrate the number on the brochure.
Business schools love salary rankings because they are clean, flattering, and wonderfully easy to weaponize in marketing. Look, our graduates earn a lot. Please ignore the tuition invoice currently smoking on the table.
To be clear, there is nothing wrong with earning serious money. Merit matters. Ambition matters. When families pay absurd fees, salary is not a vulgar subject. It is oxygen.
But as the main definition of success? Come on.
Average salary tells us little about whether education worked. Are graduates healthy? Are they doing work they wanted? Did they stay in that sector, or wake up years later wondering who stole their twenties? Are schools measuring everyone, or mainly the shiny alumni who answer surveys and make the brochure look athletic?
The problem is not salary data. The problem is what salary rankings train students to notice. They make the first pay cheque look like the strategy, when it is only one output of a much bigger system: industry structure, company maturity, learning curve, power dynamics, personal fit, and future optionality.
That is the gap I attack in class. First, students learn the tools properly on business cases. Then I ask them to turn those tools back on themselves. If a framework can expose company growth, risk, friction, or power, why would we not use it to evaluate a career move?
Ansoff becomes a personal growth compass. Five Forces helps them read the sector they are entering. Lifecycles show momentum or decay. SOAR, power interest maps, and bug matrices reveal opportunities, stakeholders, friction, and future options.
Most students love the shift because the tools finally click. A former student, now working in due diligence at a top financial firm in New York, recently wrote to me. He had surprised his team by using SOAR and lifecycle maps not only on companies, but on his own career choices.
That is the proposal: publish a graduate usefulness dashboard. Salary, yes. But also learning growth, sector fit, wellbeing, retention, mobility, ethical confidence, and career reinvention.
Business schools should not just prove their graduates got paid. They should prove their graduates learned how to choose work intelligently.
Because a high salary can be success.
It can also be a very expensive trap with better lighting.