If as the article implies it is something to do with placement rates, this change is a bit of mystery to me.
From where I sit, I see no particular change in the reputation of the program either up or down. I'm not saying it hasn't changed but the signal is below my ability to detect.
Also there is a long lag between anything you do on the program and placement rates, and it worries me that a finance school doesn't know that much better than I do. When even a headhunter patronises your grasp of labour economics, you are screwed.
There are a few tricks one can do to improve placement rates, and of course curricula need to keep up with what the market wants. However, I'm pretty forgiving when people get that a bit wrong because you are in effect predicting the markets one to three years in advance, which most people see as quite difficult.
There is a tension in business schools between volume and quality, and I wonder if that is the issue here ?
Fights over funding and resource allocation in academia can make equivalent discussions at banks look gentlemanly and polite.
As Andy cites, MFE Students are indeed becoming more discerning, this exactly retraces what happened with MBAs. Long ago MBAs were few and inherently elite, but now they are common, and programs are having to compete.
They care about placement rates of course, people do quant finance as a career move.
But speaking as a professional placer, I see any short time dip as having relatively little to do with what the academic staff do at all. Some schools have excellent careers staff, others are dross. What sort you get appears not to correlate with anything, it's just luck.
One school that really thinks of itself as 'top tier' has academics with whom I am on first name terms, but whose careers staff flatly refuse to speak to me ever since they discovered that I didn't work for a bank. With all due modesty, any careers staff for a quantish program who don't know who I am, probably aren't really on the leader board.
One careers office managed to somehow lose the details of a non-quant internship I donated which ought to have had every single person in that school applying for it (it's one of the best drama internships in Europe, you're not interested or qualified)
I think the current clusterfuck is showing up which parts of the training & education market do their job well and who does not. The granularity is not by school, but by person and group.
Although I dimly recally meeting Tim at a conference I'm not in a position to judge his competence or record, but if Chicago wants to improve it's placement rates, he just isn't the place to start.
