MIT Sloan Consulting: BCG 21, McKinsey 17, Bain 10

The named MIT Sloan counts, and what they are shares of

From the school's MBA employment report, checked 30 September 2026. The document notes that the list is "grouped by parent company" and "includes only accepted offers from seeking population; sponsored and returning are not included".

The first three add to 48, because 21 plus 17 is 38 and 38 plus 10 is 48. The school reports 289 graduates seeking employment in that class, so those three firms account for 16.6 percent of the seeking population between them.

Set that against the 32.1 percent the school reports for consulting as an industry. Roughly half of Sloan's consulting placement sits at three firms, and the other half is spread across everything else in the sector. That is a useful planning fact, because a candidate targeting only those three is competing for about 48 seats rather than for the whole 32.1 percent.

Read the bottom of the table too. Deloitte, EY-Parthenon and PwC each report 3, which is the floor the school prints. Firms below that threshold do not appear at all, so the visible list understates how many consultancies hired here.

Two three year MIT Sloan series that disagree about direction

Sloan publishes consulting on both axes with three years of history, and the two lines move opposite ways.

The industry series fell 2.5 points then recovered 0.9. The function series fell 1.0 point then fell another 1.6. So over three years the industry share is down 1.6 points and the function share is down 2.6 points, and anybody quoting one series as the trend has a 50 percent chance of describing the wrong direction for the most recent year.

The gap between the two axes also narrowed, from 4.6 points in 2022 to 3.6 points in 2024. Consulting as a function counts people doing consulting work inside companies that sell other things, so a narrowing gap suggests fewer graduates taking internal strategy roles while consultancy hiring held roughly flat. The school does not explain the movement and we will not invent a cause for it.

A signing bonus with no spread at all

The compensation tables publish three points on each distribution, and the consulting bonus row is the flattest figure in this whole batch of schools.

Read the last row across. The 25th percentile and the 75th percentile are the same number, so the middle half of consulting hires received exactly $30,000. The mean is $30,183, which is $183 above the median, and that tiny gap is the whole evidence of any variation at all.

The practical reading is about negotiation. When the middle half of a distribution is a single value, the bonus is posted rather than bargained, and time spent researching what to ask for is time wasted. The 18.4 percent who received no signing bonus are the group that figure does not describe.

The two base salary rows share a median and differ at the bottom. The function row's 25th percentile of $160,750 sits $14,250 below the industry row's $175,000, which means the lower-paying consulting work at Sloan is the internal kind rather than the firm kind.

Only 289 of 418 were looking

The employment profile is the table most summaries skip, and it changes what every percentage above means.

Thirty percent of the class was not on the market. Forty two people started a business, which is one in ten of the whole class, and 54 returned to a sponsor. So the 32.1 percent consulting share describes 289 people rather than 418, and applying it to the full class would overstate the count.

The arithmetic matters when comparing schools. A school reporting a consulting share against a class that includes sponsored returners is measuring a different denominator, which is exactly the problem we set out on our Columbia recruiting page, where the school counts sponsored students in one table and excludes them from the next, and the denominator problem across MBA employment reports carries the full list of bases.

Internships, and the monthly figure that cannot be annualized

Sloan publishes internship compensation as a monthly base, which is the honest format and the one most easily misread. For the Class of 2025, consulting took 23.4 percent of internships with a monthly median of $15,738 and an interquartile range of $14,000 to $15,833.

The internship firm counts run BCG 25, McKinsey 11, Bain 9, Deloitte Consulting 4 and Strategy& 3. BCG's 25 interns is the largest single number anywhere in the document, above its own 21 full-time hires.

Two warnings before anybody builds on that. Those are two different classes: the internship counts are the Class of 2025 and the full-time counts the Class of 2024. The report does not link an individual across them, so no conversion rate can be computed and any figure presented as one has been reconstructed. The document also states that "first-year LGOs are assigned to internships with LGO partner companies and their internship data is not reflected in this report", which removes part of the cohort from the internship tables entirely.

On the money: $15,738 a month multiplied by twelve is $188,856, which is 99.4 percent of the $190,000 full-time median. That is an annualized monthly rate rather than what an intern is paid, because the school publishes no internship length. Treat it as a statement about the rate and not about the sum.

What the Sloan MBA consulting club holds, and who spoke to it

The MIT Sloan Management Consulting Club reports 17 officers and 215 members. It is the club in this batch that states plainly that "members also receive a copy of the Sloan Casebook", and it runs a peer matching scheme, the Pilot Program, that pairs recruiting members with students who already landed consulting offers.

Its FAQ bounds its own role: "we work in partnership with the MIT Sloan Career Development Office (CDO), and do not provide any duplicative services." The club tells its members to use the career office first and calls itself supplementary.

MIT's consulting club also published an interview with a Bain interviewer on a university domain. His line on the case is the sharpest thing in this batch about how to use a case book: "A strong opening structure is probably the most important thing - having an organized plan of attack that is not derivative, and clearly the interviewees own invention."

Characterize that correctly. One individual account from 2017, uncorroborated, published by a student club. It is a source for what that person listened for, and not for any rule his employer published. What the document and the file actually contain is worked through on our MIT Sloan case book page.

What the firms publish on MBA consulting, and what Sloan does not

Sloan publishes outcomes in more numeric detail than almost any peer school. It publishes nothing at all about what happens inside a case interview. The firms do, and the volume is larger than most candidates realize: across seven firms we count 65 separate published instructions and 43 practice cases that open without an account.

Accenture is the only firm in that set that puts a clock on the exercise. Its own workbook states that "case interviews typically last from 45 to 60 minutes, with a focus on the case itself lasting 30 to 45 minutes", checked 29 September 2026. That single sentence is more useful for scheduling practice than any amount of advice about how long to prepare, because it fixes the unit of work.

None of the seven publishes a weight. Across forty-four firm research files we hold, zero contain a published scoring scheme, and that absence is the most reliable constant anywhere in the corpus. So any page showing you a firm's rubric with numbers attached is showing you a fabrication, and the numbers in the last section of this page are labeled as ours for exactly that reason.

A plan sized to a 48 seat target

The counts above set the plan better than a calendar would, and Sloan publishes no dated recruiting calendar on the pages we read. Three firms, 48 seats, one autumn.

Diagnose before drilling. Run one short exercise of each type in a single evening, in the order below, and write down the dimension each names as its first correction. Six readings in one sitting is the entire cost.

1. Math. One timed set, spoken aloud rather than worked in silence.
2. Structuring. Ninety seconds on paper, delivered without looking down.
3. Brainstorming. Breadth first, then whether the ideas landed in named buckets.
4. Exhibits. One chart read cold, with the caption covered.
5. Synthesis. One recommendation, answer first, with a risk attached.
6. Market sizing. One chain, with the unit stated before every product.

A full mock returns one impression of the whole performance. Six short exercises return six named causes. Then work the weakest for a fortnight and re-run the diagnostic, so you have a comparison rather than a feeling. The club's Pilot Program is the right venue for the mocks once the weak dimension has a name.

The dimension behind a Sloan miss, and who set the weights

One last set of numbers, and these are ours. The weights in the table come from src/lib/grading/rubrics.ts in our own code. No consulting firm publishes a scoring scheme anywhere, so any weight presented as a firm's has been made up by whoever printed it.

Coverage takes almost half the structuring score. That encodes a judgment about which mistake costs most: losing a whole branch of the problem is not recoverable by being precise inside the branches you did cover. Concision takes the smallest share, and it is scored on one thing only, whether the answer can be delivered in a single breath.

The structuring drill and the math drill each return one flagged dimension rather than a score, which is the form a diagnosis has to take to be useful. All six rubrics and the reasoning behind each weight are laid out on how an answer is assessed, and everything in the tools opens without an account. The limits are worth stating too. There is no live interviewer in any of it, none of it teaches business content, and none of our six assessment simulators has shipped, which the assessments page says in its own words.

What Sloan withholds, and who holds it

Five gaps, and the holder of each.

1. The conversion rate from a consulting internship to a full-time offer. Both populations are published, for different classes, with no link between them.
2. The length of a summer internship. The compensation is monthly and the duration is absent, so no total is derivable.
3. A dated recruiting calendar. Nothing dated on the pages we read. The Career Development Office runs the schedule.
4. Firms that hired one or two graduates. The top employer list floors at 3, so the sector is wider than it looks.
5. What the Sloan Casebook contains. The club reserves it for members. We have not read it, and we do not open copies hosted by third parties.

We also decline to list alumni to approach. That belongs in the school's directory, and the club's Pilot Program exists precisely to make that introduction to somebody who has just been through the process. A list assembled by a stranger from a blog post is the weakest version of the same idea.

One more absence deserves a name. Nobody publishes how many applications a consulting offer took, at Sloan or anywhere else in this batch of eleven schools. Any page that gives you an application count has invented it, and a candidate planning around such a figure is planning against nothing.

What changed on the Sloan page, and what we removed

30 September 2026. Rewritten after the school's employment report PDF and the club's four public pages were read for the first time. The earlier version ran 372 words and told readers it would not report placement figures or name recruiting firms, because that belonged to the careers office and we had no way to verify it.

That was false in the way our process warns about most sharply. The school publishes a 693 line report as a free PDF with named hire counts, three year series, an employment profile and internship compensation. Declining to look was presented to readers as rigor. It was an absence of research, and the correction is the five tables above.

One control stays red on purpose. We hold no first-hand account from a Sloan student describing their own consulting recruiting. This session's search quota was spent before the page opened, the forum archives refuse our user agent, and the one first-hand source we do hold is an interviewer rather than a candidate. Those attempts and their dates are written into the research file.