martingaletrader:Yet another school tries to make money out of its brand name.
I agree, but the question is whether this is a bad thing ?
I don't know in this case. Historically brands evolved to allow customers to know with confidence that what they were getting was of a defined quality and it's pretty damned clear that finance courses need this. My own model of educstion in the mid 21st century is far fewer universities (say 15% of the present number) and 2-3 times as many people studying at them.
Imagine that you think the Stanford finance program is the best on the planet, but they can only teach a tiny % of those who want to do it.
You are average (lots of people are <= average) so you are forced to do an inferior course
This is grotesquely suboptimal. You don't get the best course, they don't get your money.
If you believe that better education makes the global economy better, that's bad on an epic scale.
Of course there needs to be a filter to stop you trying to study things you won't really understand, but why exactly can't (say) 5,000 people do the Stanford course ?
The technology mostly exists, as of January you can choose to take the CQF on a 10.1 inch tablet computer, or live, or on your PC or some mix. This time next year you will see people watching Paul Wilmott and myself on the train, this is the 21set century, as a geek I see this as cool.
Some parts of teaching are essentially broadcast, so why not video a great lecturer at the top of his game ?
You need to back that up with tutorials and interaction, people want to ask questions or have themselves debugged, but that can scale rather well. Most of the tech is off the shelf, the trick is to amplify the productivity of the best teachers.
Of course that is not yet what I see in university franchises.
I receive anecdotal evidence that the courses simply aren't as well delivered in the franchises as at the "home" university, that lecturers aren't as good and usually aren't the "big names" that the brochures would lead you to expect.
Princeton might be doing it uniquely well, but from what I see, doing it well would make them close to unique.
I believe it is possible that martingaletrader is being too harsh on the Stanford HK course. Firstly I observe that "quant" skills are becoming ever more useful outside classical quant functions, so a bit of quant in a more general finance course could be good, just so long a you don't think you are buying a quant course.
He's right about regulation, but my view is that once this recession is behind us, places like China will liberalise big time, creating a suck for Chinese quants so hard they will disappear from the West as if Star Trek teleporters we real. No, I don't know when.
But even before then, HK and SG have branches of the major firms and do work that doesn't care that they can't do the actual business locally.
I am of course a lecturer in the private sector, so see no problem at all with running education as a business. But the people running an education provider have to be clear whether they are doing it for money or for the common good because the decisions you make are quite different. I personally see education as like a book, if you want to read one of Paul Wilmott's books or one by Nassim Taleb or Steven Shreve, the only test you have to pass is whether you're smart enough to use Amazon, you don't have to write some bullshit essay, you give money, you get stuff, you work on it, you are then wiser.
