The job market for Penn’s Class of 2025 featured familiar destinations — finance, consulting, and graduate school — but not the pay bumps seen in recent years, according to Penn Career Services data released last Friday.
The data — included in Career Services’ annual Post-Graduate Outcomes report — tracked the employment, salaries, and post-graduation education plans for Class of 2025 students. For the first time in years, both the mean and median starting salary saw a slight decline.
Executive Director of Career Services Barbara Hewitt wrote in a statement to The Daily Pennsylvanian that outcomes information is “incredibly important.”
“It allows prospective and current students to have a better understanding of the career options available to them as a Penn graduate, learn what opportunities students have pursued by major, understand the range of compensation for various positions, and discover when offers are typically extended in different industries,” Hewitt added.
For the Class of 2025, the median starting salary decreased by 1.5% from the previous year, going from $105,000 to $103,418, and the mean starting salary decreased marginally from $101,175 to $101,125.
The vast majority of students, 72.5%, entered full-time employment roles after graduating. Another 18.5% decided to continue their education.
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5.2% of graduates in the report were seeking employment, and 1.1% were seeking continued education. Part-time employment was at 2%. Only a few students who graduated last year were not seeking employment — representing 0.3% of total known outcomes — or were in military service and volunteering roles, each of which encompassed 0.2% of surveyed students.
In a statement to The Daily Pennsylvanian, Career Services said they collected direct responses from March through November of last year, but that they also collected supplemental data on the outcomes of nonrespondents through websites such as LinkedIn.
For the Class of 2025, the response rate was 54% and the knowledge rate — which comprises both survey respondents and outcomes found through other sources — was 74%, for a total of 1,938 known post-graduate outcomes.
Career Services defines “first destination” as the “primary post-graduation destination for Penn graduates within the first six months after graduation.” Each reported graduating class is based on the academic year, meaning the Class of 2025 consists of students who graduated in August 2024, December 2024, and May 2025.
Starting salaries showed significant variation across schools. For the Class of 2025, the school with both the highest median and mean starting salaries was the School of Engineering and Applied Science, with a median salary of $122,500 and a mean of $132,508. SEAS has held the top spot since 2021, the first year with available first-outcome data.
The Wharton School followed SEAS with a median of $110,000 and a mean of $111,819. The College of Arts and Sciences had a median salary of $88,000 and a mean of $85,814, while the School of Nursing had a median of $85,280 and a mean of $88,414.
Like in past years, roles in financial services and consulting were the most popular for graduates. Financial services and consulting jobs accounted for 34% and 17% of known employment outcomes, respectively. Among these, the most common specific employment area was investment banking and brokerage, which made up more than 20% of employment outcomes alone in 2025.
The most popular employers for the Class of 2025 were also primarily companies in consulting and financial services, with the Boston Consulting Group, Goldman Sachs, McKinsey & Company, and Morgan Stanley making up four of the top five. Penn Medicine and the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia were also among the top 10.
For students attending graduate school, engineering was the most popular field, representing 30.2% of graduate students. It was followed by medicine at 15.8% and nursing at 10.1%. Engineering and medicine have consistently been the two most popular graduate fields for Penn students in the past five years.
Penn itself was by far the most attended graduate institution with 142 students. This was followed by Columbia University with 19, Harvard University with 13, and Georgetown University and Stanford University with 11 each. 60.2% of students pursued a master’s-level degree, 36.6% pursued a doctorate, and 3.2% pursued another level of degree.
Staff reporter Rachel Kang contributed reporting.
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Jack Guerin leads data and enterprise reporting and can be reached at guerin@thedp.com. At Penn, he studies philosophy, politics, and economics. Follow him on X @JackGuerin_.
