Drop out rates at MFE programs?

[purplyboy]

Does anyone know of any dropout rates at MFE programs? I'm curious how many get in and can't graduate.

 

[Jayanthan]

I would be more curious, if you add "dropout MFE become billionaire or strike out on their own "

 

[Jayanthan]

If I were you, I wouldn't try to make it look as such a legendary thing. An MFE doesn't make you a billionaire. Maybe a PhD in Operations Research or some other highly analytical discipline does. If you are a finance person, and you have true passion for it, try to continuously question the value of things.

Man, I thought MFE was very analytical . To become billionaire, you've got ot be creative, haven't u? How Phd program make u billionaire, if you r not creative

 

[darth]

And since we are talking drop-out rates, maybe people that drop out are smart enough to know that maybe they don't need an MFE at all...

So if they figure that they don't need an MFE after enrolling in the program and paying their tuition fees....by what measure will you call them smart...

 

[Jayanthan]

So if they figure that they don't need an MFE after enrolling in the program and paying their tuition fees....by what measure will you call them smart...

I guess, you need to try too many different things to find out the one thing u love above all. If that is true, what s wrong being in MFE and walk out with a great idea ( of course to execute)

 

[darth]

Without generalizing it too much, if they drop out, they must at best have a strong reason to do that. If people find a better way to achieve their goals, than going through the questionable education of a "Master" of Financial Engineering degree, they are undoubtedly smart.

Reason could be anything from not being able to cope up with the demands of the program to their girlfriend complaining of less time..So it need not be necessarily strong.

And they should find better ways to achieve their goals before joining to qualify as smart ...The point is MFE is not a 4-5 years course where you drop out 'coz of a better alternative , remember it's a one year course... By the time you have an epiphany that this is not for you..its already 6 months and then it makes all the more sense not to quit as only few months remain.

 

[darth]

I guess, you need to try too many different things to find out the one thing u love above all. If that is true, what s wrong being in MFE and walk out with a great idea ( of course to execute)

Remember your life span is limited so you can not try endless things... And thing you love right now may not be the same after 4-5 years. And you need to spend time with something to decide whether you love it or not... You can not just enrol in a program claiming you love FE in your essays and walk out after 2-3 months...With this attitude the person will keep on jumping between things and doing nothing in his entire life.... You have time beforehand to decide whether you should apply to MFE or not and if you do decide to apply you should give time to it and can not decide so fast that you hate it

 

[purplyboy]

When I mean drop out, I meant that they flunk out or decide that they can't do it.

 

[Jayanthan]

When I mean drop out, I meant that they flunk out or decide that they can't do it.

I guess, everyone understood your questions.

 

[DMD]

Without generalizing it too much, if they drop out, they must at best have a strong reason to do that. If people find a better way to achieve their goals, than going through the questionable education of a "Master" of Financial Engineering degree, they are undoubtedly smart.

I'm curious why you put such little value on an MFE degree? Why don't you think the degree is all it's cracked up to be?

 

[Andy Nguyen]

Does anyone know of any dropout rates at MFE programs? I'm curious how many get in and can't graduate.

You won't find it published anywhere on their websites.
Majority of international MFE students will complete the degree because dropping out is a violation of their immigration visa. Dropouts mostly are domestic part-time students who can not keep up with the pace of the programs while working.
There is little incentive for them to keep going since their tuition is partly paid (and fully paid in good times) by their employers.

This is nothing like Bill Gates dropping out of Harvard so don't assume they drop out because they found a new company. The mentality and demographics of MFE students are very different.

 

[Jayanthan]

Andy Nguyen is right. Most international student believe in conventional wisdom. By the time they figure out, american culture and how things work here, they will be having their degree.

 

[sgmfof]

education is a big industry in the US

 

[Sushant]

Without generalizing it too much, if they drop out, they must at best have a strong reason to do that. If people find a better way to achieve their goals, than going through the questionable education of a "Master" of Financial Engineering degree, they are undoubtedly smart.

The "at best" in the first sentence coupled with the "undoubtedly" in the second sentence makes it logically inconsistent and semantically incoherent. Consequently, I don't get your point.

As an undergraduate, one semester I had the chance to enroll in a graduate course on Fixed Income Securities, which was, in fact, part of the Financial Engineering program. My classmates were Computer Scientists, Mathematicians, and Engineers, and some of them had already published papers in their fields. It was impressive how smart they were, but unfortunately, I have to say that they had no clue about what was going on in that course, because none of them had studied finance before. At the end of the semester, after the final exam, the professor had to lower the required average for an A. People that had averaged 75 in the course basically got A's. That is not the way things should be.

So, they were smart people but hadn't studied finance before? How is that bad? They were beginning now, doesn't everyone have to begin some time or the other? And it'd be fun, I guess, to use this logically befuddling sentence now: You hadn't studied finance before either when you began studying finance. I think it's all very well.

Of course, as you say, an MFE doesn't make you a billionaire. But neither does a PhD in Operations Research*, as you conjecture. Neither does any other degree/program. You, the person, make yourself a billionaire**. An MFE can become a billionaire; and so can an MA Psychology guy (Michael Marcus). I use the example of Michael Marcus because he made it big in the financial world#. Outside of finance, I'm sure I can show you many more MA History and MA English people too who've made it very, very big.

My point being, no degree will make you a billionaire - MFE, PhD or MA. And also that that is a rather unjustified and sad expectation to have from your degree.

Also, MFE being a professional (or commerical, as you say) degree does not make it any bad. Chartered Accountants and Lawyers also do "commercial/professional" degrees and play a very important role in society, and let's not even speak about MBAs. Isn't MBA a professional degree? So does that make it necessarily bad? There are a great number of MBA billionaires, in case it matters at all.

*If it did, it would have a hundred thousand applicants*** every year, considering the world is big big place.
**if you want to, I must add; since it would be naive to assume that everyone wants to make himself/herself a billionaire.
*** At least.
# Yes, I know, he is not a billionaire, but still rich enough for me to make the point I was making.

 

[Barny]

In my opinion, based on what I've studied and what I've seen so far, an MFE degree represents the worst kind of education that we see today, the commercial education. It doesn't require a very advanced scientific understanding of things to see that the MFE degree teaches theories without explaining why they work the way they do, it teaches math without providing proofs to the methods that are used, and lastly, although it is named Financial Engineering, it is related to Finance in the same way that studying Physics is related to writing an essay about Shakespeare.

As an undergraduate, one semester I had the chance to enroll in a graduate course on Fixed Income Securities, which was, in fact, part of the Financial Engineering program. My classmates were Computer Scientists, Mathematicians, and Engineers, and some of them had already published papers in their fields. It was impressive how smart they were, but unfortunately, I have to say that they had no clue about what was going on in that course, because none of them had studied finance before. At the end of the semester, after the final exam, the professor had to lower the required average for an A. People that had averaged 75 in the course basically got A's. That is not the way things should be.

There is something that Financial Engineering people don't understand, I believe. It's all about Finance, forget other disciplines. If you truly want to be successful, study Finance first, understand the psychology of the market, and then learn the analytical tools that you need to capture the value that you are looking for. Time has showed that this has been, and will always be true.
In fact, your current profile picture indirectly leads to the same philosophy

There has been severe criticism about the "physics envy" exhibited on wall street. One could say that they teach too much mathematics with proof than without, so your first paragraph is complete garbage and your physics - Shakespeare analogy is horrible.

You also fail to see the utility of financial engineering students. There are people who live and breath finance, and sometimes they want to get some data and get it cleaned and get it plotted by someone who has spent the time to learn how to program. The boss doesn't particularly care whether the worker understands wtf he's doing, just that it gets done.

And your comment about course grading is a little naive too. Grade scaling happens all the time, in every course. Otherwise all the middle-class students who are paying $50k a year for their education will write to the dean and complain that the exam they got set was really hard and it's not fair that they didn't get an A because they worked so, so hard...

 

[Sushant]

An MFE doesn't make you a billionaire. Maybe a PhD in Operations Research or some other highly analytical discipline does.

albo

This was what I was replying to. Anyway. Thanks for the 'taboo' caution, really appreciate that.

I have been looking at curriculum of various MFE programs of late, and I genuinely think that they pack in a lot of substance. The curriculum in Finance is invariably deeper than an MBA, and there's quite a lot of 'useful' statistics and programming too. If you're creative, you could really use just the programming and stat you learn during your MFE to do wonderful things. I am inclined to think that the MFE degree, by design, is to be 'useful' to industry, not to learn the maximum possible from a given sum of dollars. And yet, it has the potential to teach you a lot. True that the learning is more applied than pure, but not everyone goes to university to become an academic. There should be programs to cater to all kinds of students (academia-oriented as well as business-oriented), and meet all kinds of needs (research-needs as well as industry-needs). Inasfar as you think what I just said is fair, you would agree that there's a place for MFE programs in the world, and there are those who'd be happier and wiser doing this than doing a PhD in Theoretical Physics or something.

On a sidenote: for someone who dislikes the MFE degree so much, you spend an astonishing amount of time on a website called "Quantnet - Resources for MFE"

 

[Ken Abbott]

albo, Barny, please stop bickering or take it to another medium.