Getting to NYC from Rutgers is still a bit of a train ride. If by location you mean that you can actually get to NYC, yes, that's the case. But if you mean employers taking the PATH down to Rutgers to recruit MSMFs or FSRM or whatever else, then no. Columbia and NYU and Baruch are easily better than Rutgers, no questions asked. I remember when job hunting last summer that the engineering job search help guy I spoke to gave me the careershift.com website for Rutgers alumni (only valid for a year) and told me that many of the MSMFs were going to him seeking help, and judging from what I saw from what a friend let me see about their job portal, those "MSMF only" jobs are junk that gets posted across the internet anyway, and to top it off, they're not even all that good of quant positions. They're more like actuarial, banking, and other kinds of jobs that look for a "smart" candidate, as opposed to one necessarily with a background in...well...whatever theoretical stuff they teach in that program.
From actually working at a firm that employs quants, I can tell you for a fact that aside from whatever sparse programming backgrounds taught at Rutgers (it isn't much), the rest of those courses really have little bearing on the kinds of work that someone entry-level will be asked to do. IMO, MFE grads could probably do themselves well with a reality check--because if a firm is successful enough to hire you, it's probably successful enough to the point that they don't need a new grad telling them off the bat on how to improve their strategy, so much as they need a new grad to take the data work off of their chests so that those guys can focus on doing the strategizing/modeling, while the new grad learns the business.
Grads don't just get plopped on a quant desk and make the firm go places. And in terms of preparing individuals to do that heavy lifting data work, any course you spend writing in pencil and paper and thinking conceptually about variables and proofs is a course that's going to go to waste.
