Quant Guide 2022: University of California, Berkeley (Haas School of Business)

Berkeley, US

Photo: David Schmitz

 

 

UC Berkeley’s Master of Financial Engineering at the Haas School of Business continues its march up the leader board in this year’s Risk.net Quant Guide, beating off stiff competition from east coast rivals to rank third in 2022 – its highest rating yet.

With a large faculty of 37 teaching staff, the programme was nonetheless slightly more selective this year, with 79 new students – previous intakes comprised more than 90. That’s despite the course’s popularity rising for the third year in a row, with 749 applications received and 109 offers made. Offer-holders have high regard for the course: of the 109 applicants that were successful, 82 took up their offers, for a solid offer-holder acceptance rate of 75%. The programme also reports an increase in graduate salaries, with starting compensation reaching $119,297 over the past year.

Programme director Jacob Gallice says that classes in data science topics such as natural language processing and machine learning have proven the most popular among students. New course content has been incorporated, he says, including a new decentralised finance module covering topics such as blockchain tech, smart contracts and decentralised lending.

“Programming is very much woven into the coursework, with the two primary languages being C++ and Python,” Gallice tells Risk.net. “We make available a pre-programme course on C++, and this year added an additional [class] on Python, which students can take to further prepare their coding skills before officially starting coursework.”

Instructors include: Nicolae Gârleanu, formerly of the universities of Melbourne and Tokyo, who researches topics including asset pricing; Ronald Kahn, who is also global head of equity research at BlackRock; and Gert Lanckriet, head of machine learning at Amazon Music.

View this institution’s entry in the 2021 guide

View other universities and a guide to the metrics tables