Undecided - 03-29-2025 | Clear Admit DecisionWire

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March 29, 2025 9:18am ET

Enrolled: Undecided

Admitted: USC / Marshall $

$156000

, UVA / Darden

Applied: USC / Marshall, UVA / Darden

Entering Year: 2025

Post MBA Career: Consulting

GMAT: 730

Like (2)

Show Comments (5) Last: March 31, 2025

alexbr4 Verified User. Likes Earned: 1751 That’s a big difference in scholarship money! What are your geographic preferences, post MBA? (1)

s12 Likes Earned: 0 I have no preferences on the location. Just want to understand if Darden is worth the 156,000 that I will have to let go of. (0)

s12 Likes Earned: 0 USC's last employment report of 2024 also doesn't look too good. Hence the confusion (0)

eliot Verified User. Likes Earned: 1944 Darden clearly has a great track record with consulting/MBB job placement. In addition, you can afford to repay student loans with a consulting career. On the other hand, Marshall is a good program and they are offering a very large scholarship. Marshall has particularly strong ties to the business community in LA/Southern California. If you are open to living and working in Southern California and you are willing to work at a non MBB consulting firm, then Marshall is an attractive option. If MBB job placement is very important to you, then Darden would have the edge over Marshall. (0)

anon10646 Likes Earned: 816 Need to consider the reasons for the USC report and if it applies to you. Darden and Marshall when viewed as a whole have different class and employment profiles. Marshall employment report is not all that different from Anderson's Y/Y, so it more a LA/California employment market issue than something specific to USC. Darden is heavily finance and consulting, with nearly no Tech; both recruit early in year at internship and FT and fill mostly from interns. Marshall is more spread in placements and includes a lot more to Tech and tech-related things like video games or FinTech. Those industries have always been more 'just in time' hiring and tech (esp Big Tech) was going through an employment market correction and 'year of efficiency' so hiring would be down and even more delayed than typical. Then Marshall also has a much higher International student %. In a tighter MBA hiring market employers may not feel they need deal with sponsorship to get quality candidates and may be less forgiving of any mistakes Intl candidates make navigating US networking. Combined with general slowdown of MBA hiring and begins to paint why offers by graduation were way down, but decent by 3 months after graduation. If you're not international or looking at Tech as another option, you may feel less concerned. Main thing you care about is the consulting outcomes. Marshall supposedly did a consulting recruiting push years ago to diversify their placements and seems to help them do decent, albeit it's going to be more T2 than somewhere like Darden. They changed consulting subgrouping a bit between 2023 and 2024 reports, but you can generally see Management Consulting took a bit of a hit, probably more non-strategy consulting placements and less MBB placements. All schools took a consulting hit on reports, but it's going to be felt harder as you go down rankings. As noted, Darden will be a far easier MBB path and T2 as a fallback. I'd be reaching out to Marshall consulting club/students to figure out how consulting recruiting went last cycle for someone with your profile as assuming it may be similar for next summer. Then you can determine if it's worth paying sticker at Darden. (0)