The Elephant in the Room of FE Programs
NYU-Poly FRE: The Elephant in the Room of Graduate Financial Engineering Programs
By Philip Maymin
Assistant Professor of Finance and Risk Engineering at NYU-Polytechnic Institute
How should we rank financial engineering programs? They have different names (quantitative finance, computational finance, mathematical finance), are housed in different schools (math, business, engineering), and for the most part are relatively young, so there is not a lot of history.
We could rank them by research, perhaps by the number of downloads of research papers as tracked by the industry-standard Social Science Research Network. By that measure, the NYU-Poly FRE would be top of the list. With more than 51,000 downloads, it dwarfs just about any other program. It even surpasses many entire schools; for example, thats more downloads than for all of the faculty in all of the departments of Carnegie Mellons Tepper School of Business, across its entire lifetime.
We could rank them by admitted class size, to distinguish large programs from small. By that measure, NYU-Poly FRE would be an order of magnitude above the rest. While most financial engineering programs graduate about 25-35 students per year, we average about 350.
We could try to split the problem into smaller groups and rank programs within the same type of department, for example all quantitative finance programs, then all computational finance programs, and so on. Here, NYU-Poly FRE is a bit lonely, because there is no one else in our group. No other department incorporates
risk engineering into its financial engineering program.
Having a department of both finance and risk engineering is a unique and important distinction. Indeed, it was one of the reasons mathematician, trader, and best-selling author Nassim Nicholas Taleb decided to leave NYU-Courant last year to come to NYU-Poly as a Distinguished Professor of Risk Engineering: he wrote that he only did so after he verified that there was not a single economist in our entire building. Insurance and finance have recently started to merge in the real world but we have been preparing students for the convergence for over a decade, largely due to the efforts of Department Head Charles Tapiero, who has personally published over 350 papers and thirteen textbooks in topics of finance, insurance, and risk.
NYU-Poly FRE was the second financial engineering program in the world when it launched in 1995, and the first to have its curriculum certified by the International Association for Financial Engineers (the IAFE no longer certifies FE programs). By any objective measure, we are off the charts. We really are the elephant in the room of financial engineering programs.
Yet we are routinely excluded from rankings of financial engineering programs. Why? Perhaps because it is hard enough to compare the little programs to each other. Its one thing to compare grapes to grapes, but what do you when theres a watermelon?
Well, how about counting the number of Google hits? If we search for the name of the institution offering the degree and the name of the department, we can rank the programs based on how many matches Google finds. That table is presented below, for data as of October 2009.
Code:
[B]Count Google Search Term[/B]
122,000 NYU Polytechnic Institute "Finance and Risk Engineering"
95,400 NYU Courant Institute "Mathematics in Finance"
77,700 Columbia University "Mathematics of Finance"
41,600 Stanford University "Financial Mathematics"
35,600 Princeton University "Financial Engineering"
29,700 Columbia University "Financial Engineering"
20,200 University of Michigan "Financial Engineering"
18,100 Cornell University "Financial Engineering"
17,000 University of California at Berkeley "Financial Engineering"
14,700 Boston University "Mathematical Finance"
14,400 Claremont Graduate School "Financial Engineering"
12,500 Carnegie Mellon University "Computational Finance"
10,800 University of Toronto "Mathematical Finance"
9,790 University of Chicago "Financial Mathematics"
9,480 University of Southern California "Mathematical Finance"
8,430 Rutgers University "Mathematical Finance"
7,430 Baruch College "Financial Engineering"
7,340 Rutgers University "Quantitative Finance"
5,600 Georgia Institute of Technology "Quantitative and Computational Finance"
5,310 Florida State University "Financial Mathematics"
5,180 Kent State University "Financial Engineering"
5,130 North Carolina State University "Financial Mathematics"
3,780 Purdue University "Computational Finance"
For more information see the Quantnet Wiki on NYU-Poly FRE:
NYU Poly - QuantNetwork Wiki
An easier-to-read PDF version of this document is attached below.
