The top quant MFE course getting students $260k Jane Street salaries
Historically, the place to go for a master's in financial engineering (MFE) course was Baruch College in New York. In 2025, a new university may rule the roost.
Click here to follow our new WhatsApp channel, and get instant news updates straight to your phone 📱
Quantnet has released its 2025 rankings for MFE courses at US universities, and Princeton's Master in Finance, through the Bendheim Center for Finance, ranks top. Though the name suggests it's closer to an MBA, the course says it teaches students "financial economics, data analysis and technology, financial engineering, and computational methods."
Princeton's course ranks far above every other course for base pay (salary plus sign-on bonus). 2024 graduates earned $259.9k on average; pay for Baruch grads averaged $200.2k, making it the only other MFE course to average graduate pay above $200k. Quantnet founder Andy Nguyen says Princeton's average is an "all-time high for the program."
Getting in the course is hard. Princeton enrolled just 35 students in 2024 with an acceptance rate of 4.3%. Courses at Berkeley and Columbia, for example, both accepted over 18% of candidates.
Students on the course have achieved internships and graduate opportunities at a number of top firms in 2024. We've seen students intern at Millennium and IMC Trading this year, while 2024 graduates have received full-time offers from Jane Street, Squarepoint Capital and BNP Paribas.
Pasquale Chiacchiari, a graduate of the course in 2016 and Citadel alum, says it has a "stellar reputation on Wall Street." A 2024 student reviewing the course on Quantnet says it is great for career services, but is "not as intense as Carnegie Mellon or Baruch if you really want to specialize in the computer science or machine learning aspects."
Have a confidential story, tip, or comment you’d like to share? Contact: Telegram: @AlexMcMurray, WhatsApp: (+1 269 237 3950). Click here to fill in our anonymous form, or email editortips@efinancialcareers.com.
Bear with us if you leave a comment at the bottom of this article: all our comments are moderated by human beings. Sometimes these humans might be asleep, or away from their desks, so it may take a while for your comment to appear. Eventually it will – unless it’s offensive or libelous (in which case it won’t.)
