@Andy Nguyen - thank you for the side-by-side.
(edit 1: to add more context; edit 2: clarify Baruch in Math dept, dedicated career staff)
It's also been an absolutely terrible year. Consider for the administration threatened for most of the year to curtail the H1B Visa program many MFE student rely on to pursue their careers. Once the pandemic did set in, there was a concerted attempt to prevent international students from returning. The policy was challenged and overturned by a consortium of schools, with Harvard and MIT at the head.
The response of each school matters, and we should ask about it. At the same time, COVID infection rates and local responses were far from uniform across geographies and time.
- Investment in distance learning probably turned out to be a pretty important factor in each school's response to the pandemic and civil unrest.
- The program's department relationship may also have been a factor. It seems joint programs or programs affiliated with cash generating business schools would be well positioned to make adjustments.
- Dedicated career services, or at least a close faculty relationship to industry likely contributed to mitigating the decrease.
- It's also worth considering school's hiring trends; there are a lot of risk management jobs out there, more than there are strats / prop trading jobs. Risk management also did quite well. A school connected to the risk pipeline likely faired better than schools feeding into buyside quant for example.
Context is going to matter more for these results than ever before.
Change in Employment at Graduation / Department / Dedicated Career service
University of Chicago: 7%| Mathematics | FM career dev office
Baruch: +6%| Math | Dedicated staff
NYU Tandon: +1% | Engineering | FRE Career Team
CMU: -1% | Joint Business, Math, Stats, CompSci | MSCF Career team
Princeton -8%| Joint (Bendheim) | (Small class, pre-selects for placement)
UCB -12% | Business | (Linda K is a legend)
Cornell -18% | Engineering | Dedicated
ColumbiaMFE -24% | Engineering | IEOR Career Staff
NYU Math Fin -36% | Mathematics | Not clear
