Quant Finance Master’s Guide 2023

View 2023 full rankings

Welcome to the latest edition of Risk.net’s guide to the world’s leading quantitative finance master’s programmes, and ranking of the top 25 courses.

Fifty programmes feature in the 2023 edition of the guide, with the top 25 ranked according to Risk.net’s proprietary methodology. Click on an institution’s entry in the table to access its full listing, including programme data and interviews with course directors. A full list of all featured institutions can also be found at the bottom of this page.

New York universities make up four of the top 10 places this year, including the top spot for City University of New York’s Baruch College for the first time. That marks a reversal of last year’s trend, which saw East Coast and West Coast US rivals making gains at the expense of renowned Manhattan colleges.

This appears to be partly a function of the impact of Covid-19 rolling off, as travel bans and restrictions on movement finally end. Covid-19 had an outsized impact on schools with a higher proportion of overseas students, which saw a wave of deferrals and cancellations during the pandemic.

The makeup of the rest of the guide is more diverse, however. Eleven programmes from outside the US are ranked in the top 25 – up from just six last year, and a high-water mark for the guide. France sees three schools placed, with two each for Canada, Switzerland and the UK, and one apiece for Italy and Germany. Many continental European schools boast low fees and generous student support, implying a strong value-add metric for those that also rank highly and boast high salaries and strong employability.

As before, the guide covers only master’s programmes in which the teaching of quantitative finance is central. Programmes whose focus is on other subjects – corporate finance, management or statistics – that may still feature quantitative finance courses have not been considered here. The list of programmes is non-exhaustive. Programmes that failed to provide updated statistics were not included in the 2023 edition.

We are grateful for the help of programme directors and faculty administrators when collecting data. Risk.net bears no responsibility for exceptions, oversights or omissions. We will gladly consider feedback in this regard.

The guide should not be relied on for advice, but we hope it proves helpful to would-be master’s students, their teachers and their future employers.

Feedback and observations are welcomed: quant-guide@risk.net

Research by Mauro Cesa and Tom Osborn. Editing by Daniel Blackburn, Rob Evers, Alex Krohn and Jon Lloyd.

Ranking methodology

To compile the ranking of the top 25 programmes, we considered eight metrics. These have been standardised with respect to the total pool of entries, and a weight has been assigned to each to reflect their contribution to the final score. The total score is the sum of the eight standardised metrics. The institution with the highest score takes the top position in the ranking.

The methodology used for this year’s ranking is identical to that used for the 2022 guide. The eight variables and the respective weights are:

5% – Average class size;
10% – Acceptance rate;
10% – Percentage of offer-holders who enrol;
5% – Ratio between students and lecturers;
10% – Number of industry-affiliated lecturers over the total number of lecturers;
30% – Employment rate in finance sector six months after graduation;
5% – Number of citations for the five most cited lecturers in the past four years; and
25% – Average salary six months after graduation, adjusted for the purchasing power conversion factor provided by the World Bank.

The average number of students per class, the ratio between number of students and lecturers, and the programme’s acceptance rate – an indicator of the selectivity of a programme – contribute negatively to the final score, so the lower they are, the higher its final score.

For an institution to be considered for this ranking, it needed to provide sufficient data for the calculation of the final score. Institutions that submitted insufficient data have not been included.

Not all institutions provided the number of citations for their lecturers. Where possible, these figures were sourced from Google Scholar. Where that was not possible, the number of citations is considered as zero. In order to mitigate the effect of the high variability in the citations count, the ranking has been calculated using the logarithm of that variable.

The ranking, as well as the guide, relies on the featured institutions providing accurate figures. Risk.net bears no responsibility for any inaccurate metrics, or their impact on a university’s position in the guide.

North America

Baruch College, City University of New York
Boston University (Questrom School of Business)
University of California, Berkeley (Haas School of Business)
University of California, Los Angeles (Anderson School of Management)
Carnegie Mellon University
University of Chicago
Columbia University
IEOR at Columbia University
Cornell University
Fordham University (Gabelli School of Business)
Georgia Institute of Technology
Johns Hopkins University
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Lehigh University
New York University (Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences)
North Carolina State University
Princeton University (Bendheim Center for Finance)
Rutgers University
Stevens Institute of Technology
Stony Brook University (SUNY)
University of Washington
University of Toronto
University of Waterloo

Europe

City, University of London (Bayes Business School)
Imperial College London
University College London
University of Oxford
University of York
University of Warwick
University of Bologna
Collegio Carlo Alberto, University of Turin
University of Florence
Polimi Graduate School of Management
Paris-Diderot University
Paris-Saclay University
Paris-Sorbonne University/Ecole Polytechnique
EPFL
ETH Zurich/University of Zurich
University of St Gallen
KU Leuven
WU: Vienna University of Economics and Business
Technical University of Munich
University of Amsterdam

Asia-Pacific

Monash University
University of Technology Sydney
City University of Hong Kong
Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen

View the 2022 guide