Hey
Jen,
So Columbia now has five related programs
MSFE - Dept of IEOR - Gets priority for FE courses
MS&E - Dept of IEOR
MSOR - Dept of IEOR - Flexible curriculum. Eligible to under-subscribed FE courses
MAFN - Dept of Math
MSFE (Financial Economics) - Business School - Business School career services
In terms of teaching, Columbia is impeccable. But as you rightfully suspect, the word on the street is that the competition is fierce among peers. The MSFE program has recently published their placement record and it turned out to be quite impressive. But for the other four programs, I'm not aware of any placement statistics.
psmart is correct that no Columbia students have blatantly come out and criticize the programs so far (and they shouldn't.) But a recent survey of current students can be found
here. A post from 2008 by
financeguy (who was a MSOR student)
here is also quite interesting. This was the time before MSFE had their designated career officer (granted, the officer a current PhD student in psychology with relatively short experience in the financial industry in comparison to Baruch's Jim Gatheral (ex-managing director from Merrill Lynch), Berkeley's Linda Kreitzman (been placing MFE students since 2000), and CMU's three people team all with front office experiences from major banks, but I digress.) The Columbia program(s) have changed quite a bit in the past few years, but those improvements require some time to kick in and change people's perceptions.
With that said, some aspects of the program(s) remain unchanged. Columbia is still one of the most Chinese-friendly schools (so the language/visa problem might be true). Most programs still don't have access to business school career services (except for the
Fin Econ program), and they do not have separate courses for programming. Whether programming deserves separate classes is a matter of public debate and I'll let you (and hiring managers) decide...
