Salaries alone surged to $88,600, topping the previous record of $85,400 set in 2001. The average bonus paid by an investment bank to a fresh MBA graduate in 2005 was $40,000. Consulting firms and investment banks are again hiring aggressively after cutting jobs sharply during the recent recession.

Banking Industry Leads the Way

The banking industry, led by Goldman Sachs, raised the base salary it offered by $10,000 to $95,000, says Jacqueline Wilbur, director of the career development office at MIT. The big consulting firms also raised their basic salaries by $5,000. Technology companies are back recruiting and paying salaries rather than options.

At Columbia University in New York, Dean Glenn Hubbard says the number of graduates with three or more job offers rose last year. "On-campus recruiting is more robust than even in the late 1990s."

The employment statistics in the Financial Times ranking of global MBA programs back up the anecdotal evidence. In 2002, for example, 12 percent of graduates from the top 10 U.S. schools were without a job three months after graduation. The statistics reported from the top 10 schools in this year's ranking show that just 8 percent were still looking for a job in the same timeframe.

For schools lower down the rankings, the discrepancy was even higher. At Cornell University, only 74 percent of the students who graduated in 2002 had a job within three months and at UCLA the figure was 73 percent. In 2005, the figures were 88 and 94 percent, respectively.

"Steady Growth through 2010"

But as applications begin to roll in for the class that will start in autumn 2006, there is a real sense of optimism, says Beth Flye, assistant dean at the Kellogg School at Northwestern University. "We predict steady growth through 2010."

MBA programs are becoming more international, with many U.S. business schools developing partnerships with foreign institutions. The Smith school at the University of Maryland, for example, is running programs on four continents: North America (College Park), Europe (Zurich), Asia (Beijing and Shanghai) and Africa (Tunis).

"If you want to be a world class business school, you must be involved in the international arena," says Scott Koerwer, associate dean at the Smith School at Maryland. "Institutions that don't begin this process now are going to fail."

It is a message that seems to be getting through to American students. The overwhelming majority of them - more than 98 percent - still apply to U.S. business schools, but a growing number see Europe as a place to study for an MBA. In 2000, 2,305 Americans sent GMAC test scores to European business schools. In 2005 the figure was 3,701, a 62 percent increase.

Paul Villella is President & CEO of HireStrategy, a full-service professional staffing firm providing consulting services, permanent placement, and executive search solutions for companies and career management in the technology, sales, finance and accounting professions. The Washington Business Journal recently named HireStrategy the #1 regional staffing firm in the Greater Washington area, and the Washingtonian named HireStrategy as one of Washington's "Great Places to Work".