Quant Guide 2022: Fordham University (Gabelli School of Business)

New York City, US

 

 

Like many of its fellow high-performing east coast rivals, Fordham University’s Master of Science in Quantitative Finance – highly popular with international students – felt the impact of the coronavirus pandemic last year. Applications fell, as did selectivity. On the other hand, the course reported impressive growth in graduate salaries, and lower tuition fees, to compensate.

Average starting compensation stood at $95,273, up from last year’s $89,812. Tuition fees have been slashed, too. Without accounting for additional costs such as health insurance, the cost of the programme has gone from $75,690 to $51,000. However, the master’s also struggled to keep track of graduates, with unavailable employment data rising from 18% in the last edition to 70% this year.

Course director Qing Sheng says coronavirus was responsible for many of those demographic issues: “During the pandemic, there were fewer employment openings. There were also fewer students in the programme for visa reasons. Knowing that in-person learning and internships are so important, many students delayed acceptance.”

The programme has also been busy hiring, adding no fewer than four new instructors to its roster. They are: data scientist Perry Beaumont, also affiliated with Columbia and Amazon Web Services; Jason MacQueen; Mickey Chadha, formerly of Morgan Stanley; and Walter Prahl, former director of quantitative research at investment manager Lord, Abbett & Co.

Two new modules have been incorporated: a class covering financial uses of cloud computing, and another in environmental, social and governance (ESG) and portfolio management. Three modules are dedicated to programming, with classes in financial programming and computational finance covering C++ and Python respectively. A third programming course, advanced C++ for finance, is also available.

Programming, machine learning and data-related courses are gaining popularity, Sheng says: traditional classes in stochastic calculus and finance theory, less so.

View this institution’s entry in the 2021 guide

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