“Few MBA classes have ever headed into so much oozing opportunity as the Class of ’98. But their education, it seems, was only beginning, and the hard lesson ahead was that five years, or even 18 months, can seem a lifetime.” So begins a major cover story survey of the Olin School of Business MBA Class of 1998, featured in the nation’s largest circulation newspaper, USA Today.
But the Olin class is a standout. Out of 142 graduates of Olin’s MBA Class of 1998, all but three had job offers at graduation and all enjoy significantly higher incomes with their Olin MBA degrees. Despite a difficult economy the last two to three years, only 14 graduates of the class were laid off since 1998, with only one out of the entire class currently unemployed.
USA Today selected the Olin School of Business for its MBA survey “because it has distinguished itself as a top program. [The Olin School] is among the nation’s leading business schools…and is among The Wall Street Journal‘s top 10 hidden gems: good schools that have gone relatively undiscovered.”
With the help of the Olin School, USA Today was able to contact half the 142 graduates of its MBA class of 1998 by e-mail and/or telephone. Some students remained in St. Louis; others were working as far away as Europe and Asia. Some 16 Olin grads were interviewed in the special USA Today cover story.
Olin School Dean Stuart Greenbaum says the economic conditions in 1998 were as unreal on the upside as the conditions for the Class of ’03 are unreal on the downside.
“It’s unlikely that reality will continue to whipsaw us this way,” Greenbaum says in the USA Today article. It will settle down into some sense of normalcy,” he says, with business conditions not as buoyant as in 1998, nor as depressing as in 2003.
“It’s enormously flattering having people chasing after you, bidding for your services,” he says. “It gives you a tremendous sense of self-importance. The Class of ’98 is an object lesson in humility.”