Baruch maintains top spot in 2025 Quant Master’s Guide

Sorbonne reclaims top spot among European schools, even as US salaries decouple

The Risk.net Quant Finance Master’s Guide 2025 will be published on December 23

Baruch College’s Master of Financial Engineering ranks first in the 2025 edition of Risk.net’s Quant Finance Master’s Guide, holding on to the top spot it clinched last year, amid strong demand for the exclusive programme’s graduates among buy-side firms and non-bank market-makers.

Despite European universities making up a majority of the guide’s 42 courses this year, US programmes maintain their dominance in the top half of the table, accounting for seven of the top 10 places and 14 of the top 25, which are ranked according to Risk.net’s proprietary methodology.

The Master in Finance at Princeton, the top-ranked programme in several previous years of the guide, comes in a close second, followed once again by the University of California, Berkeley’s Financial Engineering master’s, at the Haas School of Business. North Carolina State’s programme, meanwhile, continues to punch above several Ivy League universities, ranking fifth.

[The course’s direction and material are] driven by our alumni, who are connected to the cutting-edge trends from the financial industry

Dan Stefanica, Baruch College

The storied Master’s in Probability and Finance course, hosted by the Paris-Sorbonne University and Ecole Polytechnique, reclaims its crown as the top-ranked European programme, in fourth place overall this year, ahead of the ETH Zurich/University of Zurich’s joint master’s. And the Technical University of Munich’s Master’s in Mathematical Finance and Actuarial Science jumps five places on last year, entering this year’s top 10.

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, where the average is $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.

Whether US exceptionalism continues during a second Donald Trump presidency remains to be seen. Risk.net understands that some US institutions have urged overseas students to return to the US before Trump’s January 20 inauguration, to counter the slim likelihood of a day-one executive order that affects student visas.

That doesn’t seem to have dented demand among international students. Many east coast colleges continue to draw a large proportion of their applicants from overseas. Princeton’s master’s received more than 1,000 applicants this year overall, giving it the most exclusive acceptance ratio among programmes surveyed in the guide, at just 4%.

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Baruch sees a somewhat higher ratio of students lucky enough to win a place taking up their offers, however, at 93%. It also benefits from an excellent ratio of 1.42 students to every lecturer, and an average class size of just 17, among the very smallest in the guide.

Dan Stefanica, long-serving master’s director at Baruch, argues that his students’ success depends on the course’s “very supportive and close-knit alumni community”: “Our alumni mentor and offer career guidance to our current students even before students join the programme.”

Having a well-connected alumni network also creates a virtuous circle in informing the programme’s curriculum, Stefanica suggests, with course direction and material “driven by our alumni, who are connected to the cutting-edge trends from the financial industry”.

Baruch also benefits from a faculty boasting some of the most distinguished names in modern quant finance, with Andrew Lesniewski, co-author of the stochastic alpha beta rho (SABR) model, serving as curriculum director, and quant legend Jim Gatheral also on the staff. Its Current Topics in Financial Engineering course was last taught by Julien Guyon, this year’s Risk.net Quant of the year. New lecturers for this year include Luca Capriotti and Misha Boroditsky.

Unsurprisingly, the master’s has added a number of courses focusing on machine learning and data science, including a deep learning and natural language processing course – something that Stefanica says the programme prides itself on taking a practical approach to.