Quant Guide 2021: King’s College London

London, UK

 

 

In a year short on good news, prospective students considering the Financial Mathematics MSc at King’s College London would have been glad to see that the programme’s fees for the 2020–21 academic year had been substantially reduced.

Full-time fees were cut to £10,500 for local and European Union students, and £23,460 for students from elsewhere ($14,300 and $31,900 respectively), says academic director Roxana Dumitrescu. In the previous academic year, tuition costs were £29,850 for all full-time students.

Dumitrescu notes that teaching is now fully remote: “We are still able to offer the same unrivalled facilities – for example, Bloomberg terminals can be used remotely.”

However, for the 2021–22 academic year, fees are set at a higher £31,350 for all full-time students.

The programme’s average graduate can expect to earn $59,866 within six months of successful completion. That is the second-highest salary among UK programmes, with only the graduates of the equivalent course at Imperial College London earning more.

Since the 2020 Quant Guide, the average number of students in mandatory classes in the King’s programme has fallen sharply, to 37.5 from a high average of 103 reported last year.

Other changes, Dumitrescu says, include an overhaul of the timetable to accommodate students outside the UK, many of them in China. Most classes now take place before 1pm UK time.

Remote exams had to be organised at short notice, with misconduct committees set up to prevent cheating, and dissertation work is supervised virtually, Dumitrescu adds.

Lecturers on the course have industry experience, having worked at Goldman Sachs, Winton Capital Management and Bank of Finland among other places. There are two industry-affiliated teaching staff, and the course also includes regular practitioners’ lectures.

There is a good range of optional modules, including machine learning, exotic derivatives and C++ for financial mathematics.

The programme at King’s can be completed in a year of full-time study or in two years part-time, although there are no part-timers in the latest cohort.

View this institution’s entry in the 2020 guide

View other universities and a guide to the metrics tables

Update, January 6, 2021: The article and table have been updated with 2021–22 fees.

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