Masters in Finance School Rankings
Masters in Finance School Rankings
Virtually every university that offers a Master's in Finance degree does so through the business school. In most cases the degree is an MBA with a "major," or area of concentration in finance. Many schools also offer an MBA in Accounting and Finance. At the masters degree level finance is inextricably tied to business and business education. Most business schools do have a Department of Finance within the school that has some degree of autonomy with regard to the PhD program in Finance and that provides the faculty guidance for business majors who are focusing on finance as an area of emphasis. The schools we have ranked as the top institutions in the country come from the annual survey of American universities, colleges and graduate schools published by US News and World Report.
- University of Pennsylvania Wharton School of Business has enjoyed the top ranking in the area of graduate level education in finance for many years. Many journals in the academic world rate the finance faculty at Wharton as the best in the world. Finance is the most popular of the eighteen majors offered in the MBA program at Wharton, in part because of the desire among many MBA students in this top tier school to migrate to Wall Street. Many students also join the ranks with business consulting firms, or pursue careers in corporate finance, focusing on strategic areas such as mergers and acquisitions.
- University of Chicago Booth School of Business offers two MBA majors related to finance, one of which is clearly designed to match the state of the art practices in securities trading, the design of financial instruments and the business practices of hedge funds. That degree is a MBA with an area of concentration in Finance Analytics. Of necessity this choice requires extended study of the software programs and database tools used for the split second trades practiced in financial markets today. There is also a traditional MBA in Finance offered at Booth, preparing the student for a broader range of career options. The Booth MBA program has great flexibility for both full time and part time participation.
- New York University Stern School of Business has twenty three choices for a major in the MBA program and five of them are finance based, reflecting the specialization that is occurring in the business world for this professional area. The MBA in Financial Instruments & Analytics includes a substantial dose of software and IT studies, designed for students who wish to work in the hedge fund and trading house businesses. The MBA in Corporate Finance is for students interested in moving up the ladder to work as a senior financial analyst or CFO. The MBA in Financial Systems and Analytics focuses on overall market structure and the IT tools used for market analysis. There is also the standard MBA in Finance and a MBA in Global Finance.
- Stanford University offers a Masters in Financial Mathematics that is separate from the school's MBA program. The forty five credit course of study includes six elective courses, several of which are taught at the Graduate School of Business. The required courses and most of the electives are in math, statistics, computer science, economics, and management engineering. The MBA program does not offer a major in Finance, but does have a set of second year elective courses for Entrepreneurship that is heavily weighted with finance classes.
- University of California/Berkeley has a MBA program that includes a major in Finance. The school includes finance as one of seven basic areas of concentration and as with many of the eastern schools, finance is the most popular choice of major among incoming MBA students. The degree has some diversity however, as only twenty five percent of the graduates from the Haas School of Business at Berkeley enter the financial services industry.
