A thought-provoking article by Sylvain Raines over at Quantnet:
All over the world, it has become fashionable for Universities and Colleges to offer Masters degree programs in quantitative finance or financial engineering (FE), a code word meaning the solution of the Black-Scholes option pricing differential equation in as many ways as possible. To do so, students are taught to use basic techniques in numerical analysis whenever the equation is either non-linear or does not lend itself to the standard analytical solution. As a precursor to this main task, the program usually includes a course in stochastic calculus during which Ito’s celebrated lemma is discussed, proved and used.
In general, the cost and length of such programs are remarkably similar despite the variability in the quality of the teachers and the brand name of the institution. In many cases the FE program is one of the biggest money makers at the University, if not the biggest, enabling schools to charge somewhere between $25,000 and $35,000 for eighteen months of night classes taught by top professionals in the field. Many such people are in fact refugees from bulge-bracket Wall Street firms looking for something to do before heading out to pasture in Florida and Arizona. In addition to being crassly commercial in their approach to knowledge transfer, often resorting to advertising their own former firm in the classroom, they are willing to accept much less in compensation than full-time professors and never become management headaches to the institution. Even Ivy League schools like Princeton University, who swore up and down they would never play this game, are now happily teaching finance and deriving significant incremental income from a fully depreciated curriculum... More
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