Why even top quant graduates are still struggling to get jobs
As we've reported in the past, times are tough for graduates in quantitative subjects who want quant jobs in financial services. Recruiters have told us that 1 in 100 graduate CVs they send are actually accepted.
Christos Koutsoyanis, CIO of Atlas Ridge Capital, is also and an adjunct professor for NYU Courant's Mathematics in Finance program. Speaking at the Quant Strats Europe conference today, he said "many of [his] good candidates are finding it very hard to get internships."
According to official masters in financial engineering (MFE) employment figures aggregated by forum QuantNet, just 40% of students studying Courant's MFE in 2025 were employed at graduation, while 49% were employed after three months. That's down from 80% and 97% respectively in 2024, and the course's lowest employment rate since 2021.
Where are these students going wrong? Speaking at the same conference, Budha Bhattacharya, a Goldman Sachs alum and current head of quantitative strategies at private bank Lombard Odier, said that "specializing in unique areas will be quite important" for graduates applying to top jobs in quant finance and engineering. This can include different types of machine learning, or hardware engineering. Some of these niche specialities are covered in MFE courses, but others require more extensive schooling and, sometimes, PhDs.
Bhattacharya said "creative elements" also benefit students in quant subjects. It helps, for example, to study philosophy.
This is something that senior hedge fund technologists have been hinting at for some time. Speaking at the University of Miami last year, Millennium's Miami head of technology, Olga Naumovich, said that "every educated person must know arts, literature and history. It’s not debatable."
The nature of quant roles is shifting as AI becomes more competent at lower level technical tasks like coding. Also speaking at Quant Strats, David Shelton, a managing director at Bank of America, said the bank is "using coding assistants more and more," which is having the positive effect of "speeding up ideation... it will change our ability to get algos performing." Fellow panelist Amadeo Alentorn, head of systematic equities for Jupiter Asset Management, said AI replaces the "quality time" spent on these tasks so you can instead use it for "the generation of insight using our human creativity."
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