geographical advantage(close to Wall Street) might lead to a easier access to internship?
What? This is absurd. How on earth would that make a difference? They are both in NYC. People flying all the way from San Francisco can get a job, I don't see why being in Morningside Heights is going to be a disadvantage. Interviewers don't care if you walked to interview or took a train or a plane or whatever. If you mean you would have more opportunities for informal encounters, like having coffee or lunch with people working there, that might depend more on your networking skills than your location (in NYC at least).
Columbia offers a more solid (or hardcore?) curriculum and the faculty in Columbia is renowned oversea.
Columbia's courses are the closest to "regular" university courses, in the sense that they are semester-long instead of "minis" like in CMU or "terms" like in UCB. Does that mean they are more "solid" or "hardcore"? I don't know. I suppose you would have a bit more time to digest the material. Since I don't think anybody would have experience with both programs, I guess we'll never know. As for the faculty, I don't know but it may be true.
The question is: people say that Columbia's career service is bad, but its career placement is better than CMU on the contrary. Then how exactly is CMU's career service better than Columbia?
This a bit perplexing to me as well. I suppose it means that they are more involved in helping you.
Also, I saw people say that CMU's classes are "watered down" CS and Finance. Is that true that CMU's curriculum and staff that overrated?
Can you elaborate on this? Do they mean that they are easy? Or that they are superficial?
If so, why does it rank #1 in Quantnet?
Columbia is pretty close (99 vs 100). But dig into the methodology to learn more:
Peer Assessment Score (20%): Each program was asked to rate the 30 programs in the 2017 QuantNet MFE Programs Rankings from 1 (marginal) to 5 (exceptional).
Here CMU (4.3) beats Carnegie (4.0). It could be a reverence to CMU being the oldest and the pioneer program, but I tend to think people in academia are relatively objective.
Placement Success (55%)
- Employment Rate at Graduation (10%)
- Employment Rate Three Months after Graduation (15%)
- Starting Salary (20%)
- Employer Survey Score (10%)
Apart from the "employer survey" the other info is mostly public. I think Columbia wins in the first two, and they tie in the third one. In any case, CMU does worse than the first 6 according to the "aggregate" score provided by Andy.
Student selectivity (25%)
- GRE Scores (15%)
- Undergraduate GPA (7.5%)
- Acceptance Rate (2.5%)
This is in my opinion the most controversial part of the ranking. You'd have to ask Andy why he choose it this way. GRE is pretty useless, GPA can never be an homogeneous measure, and acceptance rate has too little weight, and in any case it could almost be a measure of "popularity" rather than quality (although it is almost a tautology that people like selective institutions). Here supposedly, CMU fares marginally better than Columbia, I am guessing pulled mostly by the GRE scores.
It is worth noting that in the
other avilable ranking, Columbia is second and CMU fourth. The
methodologies are very similar, except they don't include a "peer assessment" score, nor an "employer survey".