The placements at Princeton MFin in the last couple of years have lagged. Most of the prestigious roles are outside the US and the ones in US that are highly sought after are 1-2. I don't think the ORFE department places a lot of its students at Wall Street or in Quant in general. They do place a few put the relative % of placements aren't significantly greater than say, a Stanford PhD Engineering or a Gatech IE PhD.
Most of our candidates this year are already placed. By my recollection we have in my class placed at 5 at GS, 3 at Citadel, at least one, maybe 2 at AQR out of a class of 25 2nd year students, all in front office roles. One student took a year off for a ~$500-600K/year opportunity after his internship. There are other great programs out there, but it's hard to look down on those stats.
On Asia, we had three people go back to work for the Government of Singapore's Sovereign Wealth Fund last year, but that is part of the deal if Singapore is paying your tuition. We have a dating couple going to Hong Kong, but that's by choice and with two nice offers- one to MS and one to GS (both with no prior sellside experience.) One turned down an NYC Portfolio Strategy offer to be with the other; the other was initially pursuing roles in Hong Kong to be closer to his family. (Both are from HK and have family there)
A last note on Asia is that the intern recruiting season starts and ends about a month earlier there. At least from what I've seen, it's hard to categorize the people who took Asian offers as being unable to find work in the US. You might be able to argue they were uncertain about their ability to get a better offer in NYC, but given the schedule of the recruiting process, it's impossible to claim they failed in NYC/US recruiting and had to go to Asia. One might even make the other point that people who get front-office offers from Asia with similar pay that might be closer to their families or culture don't really need to recruit in the US.
An MBA is not about learning leadership personally. Its about building a strong professional network, learning basic managerial frameworks and theories and most importantly signalling to the employers that you are really serious about a career in a managerial role and are willing to bear a huge cost in the process (skin in the game analogy from Economics) to avoid moral hazard issues.
Of course. But what better place to do that than a small program filled with finance people? Princeton offers just enough free time and stuff to do and just a small enough program to make connections with a lot of people going into finance- and not necessarily going into hardcore quant roles.
I really don't think you need event after event after event to do that, and courses filled with case studies are a waste of a structured learning environment if you're just trying to get smart accomplished people to collaborate. You just need a lot of homework, a *reasonable* homework collaboration policy or a grouped project in at least a couple classes, and a lot of students living in the same building. Why teach business cases when you can teach something like GARCH models or noise trader models- they are just as practical but are difficult to teach outside of a classroom.
There are lots of students who end up at HSW for their MBA who are really good at Math but just happen to be interested in the strategic, managerial or non-esoteric finance roles.
I really do think that the situation you describe is a bit of a lost opportunity. At the very least, it's a negative signal for a great deal of quant roles and arguably many technology roles. Meanwhile, a technical master's degree is hardly a negative signal for managerial roles.
From what I've seen from my time in banking, it's better to be a rank-and-file employee earning $X than a manager earning $X, and if you are a manager, it's better to be someone managing employees who earn $X than to be a manager earning $X. Finally, it's better to be working in a group where your manager needs to be as smart as you and have similar credentials. Rank and file employees have options and a great deal of freedom, but managers don't.
Unfortunately, not everyone can pursue this strategy of trying to move into a role where the rank-and-file employees need a lot of technical expertise and earn a lot of money. Fortunately, most people who are reading this forum probably can pursue this strategy.
So why sell that call so cheaply with an MBA? I would argue that an MFin gives you the same kind of a network- but for hedge funds, asset management, and quant research. And it's 40% less expensive.
We wind up having students place into PE roles and IBD associate roles, often having HBS and Stanford MBAs at the same level as them at some pretty tough to land firms. Whether or not you claim we compete against them directly or not, we have prima facie evidence that HBS students and Stanford GSB students apply for and take these same roles. It seems to be a reasonable assumption that if over a period of 10 years enough seats get filled by Princeton MFins, and Harvard MBAs could have also filled those roles, the Princeton MFins beat out the Harvard MBAs for that job.