Oxford Saïd MBA Consulting 2025: 22.2% at £90,746 Mean

What MBA consulting took, and what the eight sub-rows add up to

The MBA Employment Report 2024-25, checked 1 October 2026, puts consulting at 22.2 percent of the total jobs reported, a denominator no other program in our set names in those words, as how twenty-six programs report their consulting placement sets out. It then breaks that figure into eight rows, which is unusual enough to be worth reading closely.

Add the eight rows: 1.3 plus 2.5 plus 1.3 plus 5.1 plus 0.6 plus 2.5 plus 7.0 plus 1.9 gives 22.2. The decomposition closes exactly on the headline, which means the school is counting the same population both ways.

Strategy at 7.0 percent is the largest single row and it sits below a third of the consulting total. So two thirds of Oxford's consulting placements are something other than strategy work. A candidate who prepares only for a strategy case has prepared for under a third of the openings his own school reports.

Every table in the report carries the same footnote: "Data represents outcomes at 90 days." That is the measurement window for all of it, and it is short. A graduate who signs in month five appears in no row on this page.

The recovery claim, checked against the school's own five-year series

The consulting section of the report states that placements show "encouraging signs of recovery this year, with sector share increasing by 3.7% compared to last year". The same document prints the series that lets anyone test it.

From 18.5 to 22.2 is a rise of 3.7 percentage points. In relative terms it is 3.7 divided by 18.5, which gives 0.200, so a rise of 20.0 percent. Check it the other way: 18.5 multiplied by 1.20 gives 22.2 exactly. Both readings are true and they describe different things, and the report's phrasing collapses them into one symbol.

The five-year series also shows how violent the swing has been. Consulting fell to 11.4 percent for the class of 2022-23 and has roughly doubled since. Anyone planning a two-year run at a consulting offer should treat one year's share as weather rather than climate.

The report makes a second claim we could not close: consulting average salaries "increased this year by 17% to £90,746". Working backward, 90,746 divided by 1.17 gives £77,561 for the prior class. That figure appears nowhere in the document. The £77,561 is our arithmetic and we label it as ours.

The £135,416 spread inside one salary column

The report publishes four points on the consulting salary column, and the distance between the ends is the part nobody quotes.

From £17,620 to £153,036 is a spread of £135,416. Subtract to confirm: 153,036 minus 17,620 gives 135,416. The consulting mean sits £9,280 above the all-sector mean, and the same column contains an offer within £505 of the lowest base reported anywhere in the class.

Two things follow. A single figure called "the Oxford consulting salary" describes a distribution that runs nearly nine to one. And a mean, in a column shaped like this one, is pulled upward by the top offers and describes almost nobody.

The school does not publish a median for the consulting column. That is the statistic that would say where the middle of the distribution actually sits, and its absence is a choice rather than an oversight, since the school computed a mean from the same data.

Where the money is, and why region beats sector here

This is the table that makes Oxford worth reading and that no summary reproduces. Saïd crosses salary with world region.

Divide the two extremes: 116,827 divided by 40,399 gives 2.892. North America pays just under 2.9 times what Asia pays, in the same class, in the same currency, measured the same way. The maximum in the Asia row, £73,300, sits below the mean in the North America row.

That gap dwarfs the sector gap. Consulting beats the all-sector mean by 11 percent, and moving from an Asian office to a North American one is worth 189 percent. So the first question about any offer is which office it belongs to, and the sector label is the second question.

The parts add to 99 rather than 100 once the unreported 3 percent is included. That is rounding, and we print it instead of quietly fixing it.

Sterling stays sterling, and what happens when you convert it

Saïd publishes in pounds and offers no dollar equivalent anywhere in the report. Among the six schools in this batch that is the cleanest behavior, because a conversion without a stated rate is a number a reader cannot check.

If you need dollars, do the conversion yourself and carry the rate with it. The European Central Bank reference rates for 30 September 2026 give 1 EUR = 1.1355 USD and 1 EUR = 0.85463 GBP. Dividing gives 1.3286 dollars per pound. Verify: 0.85463 multiplied by 1.3286 gives 1.13546, which matches 1.1355 at the rounding.

So the £90,746 consulting mean converts to about $120,565 at that rate and on that date. Three cautions travel with that number. The rate moves daily, so the figure is stale the moment it is written. Purchasing power in Oxford and in New York is not the same, so a market rate answers a different question from a cost-of-living comparison. And the Oxford MBA runs one year full time, against the two years an American program usually takes, so the forgone salary behind the two figures differs by about twelve months of earnings.

Our Cambridge Judge page works through what happens when a school does publish a dollar equivalent and declines to name the method on the page where it prints it.

The 24 MBA consulting employers, and the count withheld

The report lists employers by sector and names 24 in consulting: AlixPartners, Bain & Company, BCG, BearingPoint, Capital for Compassion, Delivery Associates, Deloitte, Horizon TwentyOne, Management partners, McKinsey & Company, Mercer, Metis Strategy, Partners in Performance, Protiviti, Roland Berger, Simon-Kucher, Social Strategy Associates, Sonoran Capital Advisors, Steer Group, SYSTEMIQ, Tomorrow, Trio Advisory, Whiteshield and ZS Associates.

The list carries a legend: "Bolded companies employed more than one MBA graduate in a fulltime role." So the report does distinguish single hires from repeat hires, in typography. Our extraction reads the text of a PDF and loses the weight of the type, so we know the information is in the document and we do not have it. We record that as a gap on our side rather than on the school's.

What the report never gives is a hire count per firm. "How many Oxford graduates did McKinsey take" has no published answer. Multiplying 22.2 percent by a class size would produce a number, and it would be ours.

The report also reports that the employer base grew 14 percent year on year and that the consulting hiring demand rose 25 percent. Neither figure carries a base, so neither can be turned into a count of firms or of roles.

Why the preparation plan is indexed on diagnosis

Saïd publishes no dated recruiting calendar on the pages we could read, and the domain refuses direct requests, so a candidate cannot count backward from a deadline. Diagnose first instead.

Run one short exercise of each type in a single evening, in this order, and write down the dimension each one flags.

1. Math. One timed set, spoken aloud. The question is whether the arithmetic survives being said rather than written.
2. Structuring. Ninety seconds on paper, delivered without looking at the page.
3. Brainstorming. Breadth first, then whether the ideas fell into 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 case returns one impression of the whole performance. Six short exercises return six named causes. Given that strategy roles are 7.0 percent of jobs reported and the other consulting rows are 15.2 percent, the exercises that matter are the ones that transfer: arithmetic under time pressure, and a recommendation that survives a follow-up question.

Accenture publishes the only case duration in our corpus. Its case workbook states that "case interviews typically last from 45 to 60 minutes, with a focus on the case itself lasting 30 to 45 minutes", and that "the cases given tend to be real business situations, often drawn from the interviewer's actual project experience". Both checked 29 September 2026. Time your drills against that window.

Deloitte, which sits on the same Oxford employer list, publishes five named headings for working a case in its case prep tool: "Clear thinking", "Strategic framing", "Practical judgement", "Summary analysis", "Final recommendations". The spelling of the third is the firm's own and stays as the firm writes it. The same page states plainly that the tool is not an assessment and that responses are not tracked.

What the European firms publish about MBA consulting applications

Roland Berger also appears on Oxford's consulting employer list, and its application FAQ answers questions the school does not. Checked 29 September 2026, it gives a timetable: "In general, the process will take around six to eight weeks (from submitting your application to signing the contract) and you should apply four to six months before your ideal start date." That is the only published lead time in this batch, from either side.

It also settles a question every non-business candidate at Oxford asks. The firm writes that "Half of our consultants have backgrounds in engineering, natural sciences, social sciences, or the humanities." Saïd reports that its class spans 63 nationalities and 24 employment sectors, so a large part of any Oxford cohort arrives without a business degree. One firm on the list says in public that this describes half its consultants.

The same FAQ carries a rule that matters more in continental Europe than in Britain: "For us, your personality and qualification are what counts. Hence, please don't include a photo in your application documents." A photographed CV is conventional in Germany and unusual in the United Kingdom, and a candidate applying out of Oxford into a German office would reasonably guess wrong. The firm answers it directly, and no school page in this batch does.

None of these firms publishes a scoring weight. Across our firm research files there is no published rubric anywhere, and that absence is the most reliable constant in the corpus.

Reading your own misses as weighted dimensions

Every weight in the table below belongs to us and is read straight out of src/lib/grading/rubrics.ts. Oxford publishes no scoring scheme and no firm on its employer list publishes one either, so a rubric shown with a firm's logo on it was made up by whoever drew it.

Coverage carries 45 of the 100 points. That encodes a judgment: an answer that misses a whole branch of the problem cannot be rescued by elegance inside the branches it did cover. Concision carries 10 and is scored on whether the answer can be said out loud in one go.

Run the structure drill and the math drill once each and read the flagged dimension. Every rubric and its weights sit on how an answer is assessed, and the drills are open in the tools with no account. What they do not do: no live interviewer, no business knowledge teaching, and none of our six assessment simulators is live today.

What Saïd withholds on MBA consulting, and who holds it

Five things the report leaves out. Each one is held by somebody, and here is who.

1. A hire count per firm. Named employers, no counts. The Career Development Centre holds the underlying data.
2. The consulting median. The school computed a mean from the same records and published only that.
3. Sector crossed with region. Salary is crossed with sector, and separately with region, never with both, so nothing says how many of the 22.2 percent work in London.
4. The prior year consulting salary. The report gives the 17 percent change without the base.
5. A recruiting calendar. Nothing dated appears on the pages we could reach, and the domain returns 403 to direct requests.

One control stays red here on purpose. We hold no first-hand account from an Oxford MBA describing consulting recruiting at the school. The session's search quota was spent before this page was opened, the forum archives refuse our user agent, and the six graduate quotes inside the report are published by the school they describe. The attempts and their dates are written in the research file.

The correction log for this page

1 October 2026. Rewritten after the employment report was opened for the first time. The earlier version was 420 words and stated that it would not report placement figures or name the firms recruiting on campus, because that information belongs 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 15 page report with eleven numbered figures in it. What it does not do is serve that report to a plain request. The direct URL returns 404 with a 19 kilobyte HTML body. The domain returns 403 to every curl. The text proxy returns a Cloudflare challenge rather than the page.

Three refusals in a row read like an absence, and they were not one. The Wayback CDX API found the file in a single query, and the archived copy in id_ mode parsed on the first attempt. Declining to look had been presented to readers as rigor. It was an absence of research, and the correction is the five tables above and the arithmetic under them.

One limit of this rewrite is worth naming while it is fresh. The employer list marks repeat hirers in bold, and a text extraction of a PDF discards the weight of the type. So the report distinguishes a firm that took one Oxford graduate from a firm that took four, and this page cannot. That gap belongs to our tooling rather than to the school, and it is written down in the research file so the next pass knows to open the file visually instead.