Students on the best cheap quant masters are earning $25k per month on their internships
There's a fierce debate around whether a Masters in Financial Engineering (MFE) will actually get you a good job in quant finance. Recent surveys suggest that a third of MFE graduates don't have jobs, but there are a lot of different courses and very few truly elite ones. It just so happens that one of the best is also one of the cheapest.
Baruch College in New York charges just under $29k in tuition fees for its full MFE program. It recently released graduate and intern employment figures for its 2024-25 class, which show you can potentially make that back in just over one month's worth of work before you even graduate. It placed all 23 of its first year students into summer internships, paying more than $25,000 per month at the upper end. Average (mean) monthly pay for Baruch MFE interns was $16.3k; students interned at banks like JPMorgan, hedge funds like Point72, and high-frequency trading (HFT) firms like Tower Research.
Graduates are similarly well compensated. They earned an average of $244k in total compensation (TC), while top graduates earned over $300k. Graduates took jobs at Goldman Sachs, Millennium, Citadel and more. A report from Baruch in May said that, within four years, more than 20% of MFE graduates had already entered management roles with some managing more than five people. At the top end, Baruch graduates can earn $1m in a hedge fund, or $900k in a bank within five years.
What makes Baruch so special? Insiders say the course has a strong French influence, and is the postgraduate degree of choice for Grandes Écoles graduates. Baruch professor Dan Stefanica, speaking to us in 2022, said the course also attracts a lot of Chinese students who "come to us because they want to start their careers in the U.S. financial markets." Despite the foreign influence, he noted that one of our best ever students was American." Baruch MFE students speaking via QuantNet say its small cohort size allows you to "engage directly with brilliant professors," and that it has "unparalleled career support."
In yearly rankings from QuantNet and Risk.net, Baruch is often declared the number 1 MFE course. Last year's top spot, however, was given to the much pricier Master in Finance available at Princeton. Its most recent report showed that graduates earned an average TC of $260k... although total tuition fees of the course are almost $100k more than that of Baruch.
It's an especially tough market for quant grads as of late. Recruiters have told us that roughly one in 100 graduate CVs are accepted for quant jobs. Baruch had a 100% placement rate for its graduates.
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