Although many business schools have started to offer business analytics programs and courses for their MBA students, they lack understanding about how these efforts translate into job market gains for their graduates and whether all business schools have a level playing field. To bridge this gap, we use signaling theory to investigate the impacts that the business analytics breadth (BAB) level and university ranking of MBA programs have on graduates’ future employment success in terms of salary and job placement. We collected and analyzed data on business analytics-relevant courses that the top 89 business schools in the United States according to Bloomberg (bloomberg.com) offered. Our findings show the vital role of university ranking in determining the efficacy of BAB to produce job market gains for students: university ranking moderated the effect of business analytics offerings on post-graduation salary and job placement. These findings provide interesting insights for researchers and business schools interested in understanding the return on investment in business analytics programs
