Standards for Reporting Employment Statistics
Owned and copyrighted by CSEA, the Standards are the platform by which business schools can capture, analyze and distribute employment information about graduating students. The purpose of the Standards is to provide business schools with a way to capture, analyze and distribute employment information in a transparent, consistent and comparable way to all internal and external stakeholders.
View updates regarding the 2023/2024 Standards revision process.
School members: click here to provide your feedback about the revisions being considered.
Standards
Why follow the Standards?
- Protect Your School – ensure employment reports are consistent and comparable globally
- Inform Your Market – provide easy-to-use, accurate information to prospective students, employers and the media
- Bolster Your Reputation – externally validate that your data complies with the only global, peer-reviewed standards for collecting and analyzing employment data
Standards Questions & Feedback
CSEA provides ongoing Standards training for members through virtual and in-person workshops and on-demand resources. For questions about the Standards, please contact our Standards Consultant, Beth Ursin.The Evolution of the Standards
In 1994, the year CSEA was founded, MBA career services professionals from around the United States met and expressed their frustration and dissatisfaction with the lack of agreed upon and accepted reporting standards for MBA employment data. They expressed the perception that (a) many MBA employment reports were generated primarily as marketing devices to attract students and employers and to attain media-generated rankings, (b) employment reports did not reflect an accurate representation of graduates’ performance in the job market, (c) salary statistics were inflated by inclusion and/or exclusion of certain populations, and (d) prospective students and employers had no valid way of comparing schools one to another. To address these concerns, the Career Services & Employer Alliance (formerly MBA Career Services Council) developed the original Standards for Reporting MBA Employment Statistics© in 1999.Since the development of the Standards, it has continued to be a priority for the Board of Directors to address the need to improve the reliability, usefulness, accuracy, global accuracy and comparability of reported MBA employment data.
The Standards are revised as needed to ensure they are relevant and aligned with the market. The growth of Specialty Master's and Part-time MBA programs indicated a need for separate sets of standards in order to meet the unique needs of those populations. In 2017, the Standards for Reporting Part-time (Excluding Executive) MBA Employment Profile© and Standards for Reporting Specialty Masters Program Statistics© were created. That same year, the Standards were revised significantly to ensure global applicability.
Read more about the history of the Standards.