Quant Finance Master’s Guide 2025

Risk.net’s guide to the world’s leading quant master’s programmes, with the top 25 schools ranked

View 2025 full rankings

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Welcome to the latest edition of Risk.net’s guide to the world’s leading quantitative finance master’s programmes, and ranking of the top 25 courses.

Forty-two courses feature in the 2025 edition of the guide, with the top 25 ranked according to Risk.net’s proprietary methodology. Click on an institution’s entry to access its full listing, including programme data and Q&As with course directors. A full list of all featured institutions can also be found here, at the bottom of this page.

Although US courses occupy seven of the top 10 slots, they don’t engulf the rankings as they once did. Eleven of the top 25 entries were drawn from Europe, Canada and Asia-Pacific, and match the high watermark set last year, which was up from just six programmes from outside the US featuring in 2022. The UK, meanwhile, outpaces France this year, with four courses ranking among the top 25; France has three, with one apiece for Austria, Canada, Germany and Switzerland.

Even adjusting for purchasing power parity, however, starting salaries for US grads at an average $118,868 continue to outpace the rest of the world, at $91,208. In fact, several top European institutions saw year-on-year declines in salaries after adjusting for inflation – something that may be attributable to last year’s boom in buy-side quant hiring driving up starting salaries from a Covid-era lull, a trend that has not continued uniformly.

As before, the guide covers only master’s programmes in which the teaching of quantitative finance is central. Courses whose focus is on other subjects – broad finance, management or statistics – that may still feature quantitative finance courses have not been considered here. The list of programmes is non-exhaustive. Several programmes that failed to provide updated statistics were not included in the 2025 edition; the 2023 edition can be found here.

We are grateful for the help of course directors and faculty administrators when collecting data. Risk.net bears no responsibility for exceptions, oversights or omissions. We will gladly consider feedback in this regard: [e-mail]

The guide should not be relied on for advice, but we hope it proves helpful to would-be master’s students, their teachers and their future employers.

Research by Mauro Cesa and Maja Ben. 

Editing by Tom Osborn and Rob Evers.

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Ranking methodology

To compile the ranking of the top 25 programmes, we considered eight metrics. These have been standardised with respect to the total pool of entries, and a weight has been assigned to each to reflect their contribution to the final score. The total score is the sum of the eight standardised metrics. The institution with the highest score takes the top position in the ranking.

The methodology used for this year’s ranking is identical to that used for the 2023 guide. The eight variables and the respective weights are:

5% – Average class size;
10% – Acceptance rate;
10% – Percentage of offer-holders who enrol;
5% – Ratio between students and lecturers;
10% – Number of industry-affiliated lecturers over the total number of lecturers;
30% – Employment rate in finance sector six months after graduation;
5% – Number of citations for the five most cited lecturers in the past four years; and
25% – Average salary six months after graduation, adjusted for the purchasing power conversion factor provided by the World Bank.

The average number of students per class, the ratio between number of students and lecturers, and the programme’s acceptance rate – an indicator of the selectivity of a programme – contribute negatively to the final score, so the lower they are, the higher its final score.

For an institution to be considered for this ranking, it needed to provide sufficient data for the calculation of the final score. Institutions that submitted insufficient data have not been included.

Not all institutions provided the number of citations for their lecturers. Where possible, these figures were sourced from Google Scholar. Where that was not possible, the number of citations is considered as zero. In order to mitigate the effect of the high variability in the citations count, the ranking has been calculated using the logarithm of that variable.

The ranking, as well as the guide, relies on the featured institutions providing accurate figures. Risk.net bears no responsibility for any inaccurate metrics, or their impact on a university’s position in the guide.

 

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North America

Baruch College, City University of New York
Boston University (Questrom School of Business)
University of California, Berkeley (Haas School of Business)
University of California, Los Angeles (Anderson School of Management)
Carnegie Mellon University
Columbia University
Columbia University (Columbia Engineering)
Cornell University
Georgia Institute of Technology
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Lehigh University
New York University (Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences)
New York University (Tandon School of Engineering)
North Carolina State University
Princeton University (Bendheim Center for Finance)
Stevens Institute of Technology
Stony Brook University (SUNY)
University of Washington
University of Toronto
University of Waterloo
Western University

Europe

City, University of London (Bayes Business School)
Imperial College London
University College London
University of Oxford
University of Warwick
Queen Mary University of London
University of Bologna
Collegio Carlo Alberto, University of Turin
University of Florence
Paris-Diderot University
Paris-Saclay University
Paris-Sorbonne University/Ecole Polytechnique
ETH Zurich/University of Zurich
University of St Gallen
KU Leuven
WU: Vienna University of Economics and Business
Technical University of Munich

Asia-Pacific

Monash University
City University of Hong Kong
Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen

View the 2023 guide

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