Can you really earn more in finance by studying at French universities?

Before you think about shelling out £67.7k for an MBA at London Business School, or pat yourself on the back for getting a position at Oxford or Cambridge University, consider this – you will earn more if you went to a French university.

Or at least that’s the suggestion of a new study released by salary benchmarking website Emolument.com, which says that Ecole Polytechnique graduates earn more (in salary) than anyone else working in the financial sector.

Graduates from Ecole Polytechnique working in finance who gained their stripes after 2011, earn £74k, it says, compared to £66k at LBS. French graduates from these elite schools are generally very quantitative and often go on to staff up the equity derivatives desks of investment banks in the City.

However, LBS’s MBA programme still accounts for around a third of all MBAs being hired into investment banking. What’s more, it’s latest employment report suggests that once sign on and year-end bonuses have been taken into account, the average earnings of its MBAs going into finance were actually £116.7k

Meanwhile the average salary for graduates of SDA Bocconi’s MBA programme this year was £77.4k.