2011-2012 Quantnet Ranking of Financial Engineering (MFE) Programs

[darth]

I have been following this website for many years now...QI ( quantnet index) has hit lower circuits for the past few days in this thread... Regular members who have been very rational and helpful to people all these times are just refusing to see any logic which may contradict with Andy's or which may be against Baruch....They are going tong and hammer against anyone who has a contradicting view. Guys there are numerous people reading the threads while there are very few active posters on this community ...
your coming in bunch and silencing everyone who may seem anti-baruch or anti- methodology of ranking is just making Quantnet hit the nadir.I am a trader based out of India and Quantnet is the website on which I spent most of my time and love reading the posts.
Only yesterday there was a talk in my Pantry about how this website should be named baruchnet.com and I seriously don't like those comments. So all I request is some open-mindedness from people , please don't wield a knife at anyone who asks for a bit transparency and disclosure of any potential conflicts of interest.

 

[CN Chen]

Perhaps he overlooked it this year. A signed contract is a signed contract, and Andy risks his credibility with the individuals from each school which provided him with data by breaking the contract he had with them.

However, I would imagine next year's rankings will take into account user feedback. Perhaps some sort of scores will be released then. Only Andy has any intuition behind what the true distance that he can push programs for information is.

In the mean time, this seems like a circular argument: Several users requesting more disclosure, Andy saying he can't give any more because of promises made to the institutions that provided him data that he cannot in good faith break, the same individuals going back and complaining that fuller data was not revealed, Andy repeating himself, etc.

Guys, sorry to break it to you, but Andy seems like a man of his word. And I guess hindsight is 50/50... or then again, none of us were the ones contacting these schools for information to rank them with.

Just to clarify my request, I wasn't asking to see any of the numbers that the schools provided - rather I am more interested in seeing the final tallies, which Andy used to rank the programs. I think it would be useful to see if say the top X programs are all within a close range, and then there is a big dropoff after that. My understanding is that these numbers should not be off limits from contracts with the schools and they should be prepared already (as they were used to form the rankings order) but it's really Andy's call. Only one or two other QN members have asked to see this besides myself, so I will just let it drop and hope that it shows up on next time's rankings.

 

[friend]

Just to clarify my request, I wasn't asking to see any of the numbers that the schools provided - rather I am more interested in seeing the final tallies, which Andy used to rank the programs. I think it would be useful to see if say the top X programs are all within a close range, and then there is a big dropoff after that. My understanding is that these numbers should not be off limits from contracts with the schools and they should be prepared already (as they were used to form the rankings order) but it's really Andy's call. Only one or two other QN members have asked to see this besides myself, so I will just let it drop and hope that it shows up on next time's rankings.

Actually I wanted to see those numbers too. There are three clashes, which we can see from rankings and if two programs differ by a score of just one or two (Correct me if I am wrong... the final score is an integer), then they are pretty close, which must be mentioned somehow in the rankings. It would be helpful if we know how close or far two adjacently ranked programs are from each other.

 

[friend]

** five clashes... not three

 

[pruse]

Conditional probabilities, people, conditional probabilities! All too often people forget to condition!

 

[FallSky]

Let me ask you the following:
From what I've seen, it seems the majority of personal attacks have been directed at people who have themselves made personal attacks on others. I have not seen a case where somebody makes a level-headed criticism of the ranking and gotten attacked as a result.

Other people's bad behavior in NO way justifies your bad behavior. Eye for eye, tooth for tooth is NOT for civilized citizens.
I am sure you learn that when you go on the street and random person is belligerent, the best way recommended by police is to ignore.
Otherwise you basically equate yourself to him, if not worse.

 

[Yike Lu]

Other people's bad behavior in NO way justifies your bad behavior. Eye for eye, tooth for tooth is NOT for civilized citizens.
I am sure you learn that when you go on the street and random person is belligerent, the best way recommended by police is to ignore.
Otherwise you basically equate yourself to him, if not worse.

You missed my point here.

Let's play judge, jury, and executioner here, and to make things concrete, let's cut out the charade and acknowledge that we're discussing EMalu and the people who responded to him. If you want there not to be any emotionally biased personal attacks, let's go through and pick out and delete those posts that contained emotionally biased personal attacks, at least hypothetically. Whose message gets censored the most?

EMalu's actually. And as I recall you were kind of trying to protect him... here:

A pattern I sensed here is as soon as someone raises a different voice, a pack of attacks swarm together to shut up the heresy mouth, just like what medieval churches did.

So my point is: if you simply censor posts with personal attacks, nobody here has attacked anybody who would have made it past the censor in the first place.

Having everybody avoid personal attacks in order to let e.g. EMalu be heard would have silenced him in the first place since most of his posts contained personal attacks.

So what would you like? Free speech or lack of personal attacks? We are all human, so you can't have both.

 

[FallSky]

I simply pointed out what the proper behavior I think should be . Not a police and can't force anyone to follow. It is your choice if you don't. But be aware of others' perception and interpretation.

 

[Yike Lu]

I agree, but then it's easy to say we should all act civilized. A much harder question is what should we do when somebody doesn't act civilized.

 

[Aditya Chitral]

It just amazes me how easily (thanks to a very small group of people) the thread can be thrown off-topic. I believe great managers prevent that very effectively and hence are paid millions .

 

[Eugene Krel]

Actually, I'm interested in the question previously raised of who is helped by these rankings.

I'm curious if anyone else in this thread who does hiring feels they will be influenced by the results. ...
. So really I guess what I'm asking is whether anyone would make an interview / not-interview decision differently on the basis of this information. I sort of doubt I would.

Given two excellent candidates of equal strength, this would be a tie breaker if I remembered about it while choosing.

 

[rohitv]

good job Andy! but it woud be great If we could get a new set of reviews to go with the new rankings
Many of them are 2yrs+ old

 

[nesense]

Where can I see the Baruch placement stats.

Also, is it true that most of the students in the Baruch program are working and take the course part-time?

 

[MRoss]

Not sure about "most", but many would certainly be accurate.

Placement: http://mfe.baruch.cuny.edu/employment-stats/

 

[nesense]

Thanks MRoss for the link.

How many hours a week do Baruch students attend classes, because if many of them are working full-time, the Baruch program should be classified under part-time MFE. By including it in the rankings for full-time programs , it misleads prospective students who are looking for a full-time MFE program.

Also, isn't it erroneous to compare the tuition of a part-time program versus other full-time programs that are on the ranking list.

 

[Sanket Patel]

Thanks MRoss for the link.

How many hours a week do Baruch students attend classes, because if many of them are working full-time, the Baruch program should be classified under part-time MFE. By including it in the rankings for full-time programs , it misleads prospective students who are looking for a full-time MFE program.

Also, isn't it erroneous to compare the tuition of a part-time program versus other full-time programs that are on the ranking list.

The Baruch MFE is designed with flexibility in mind. The class schedule caters to both full-time and part-time students. The program hasn't been designated a full-time or part-time status - it's simply an MFE program that happens to provide students with flexibility.

 

[Andy Nguyen]

good job Andy! but it woud be great If we could get a new set of reviews to go with the new rankings
Many of them are 2yrs+ old

The main focus going forward for me would be to get more students to write reviews of their programs. It has not been an easy task.

because if many of them are working full-time, the Baruch program should be classified under part-time MFE. By including it in the rankings for full-time programs , it misleads prospective students who are looking for a full-time MFE program.

Also, isn't it erroneous to compare the tuition of a part-time program versus other full-time programs that are on the ranking list.

Some programs will list the number of PT/FT students in each cohort.
Example http://www.tepper.cmu.edu/master-in.../application-process/class-profile/index.aspx
http://mfe.baruch.cuny.edu/admission-stats/

I wouldn't necessary categorize a program that has 3:1 ratio of FT/PT students the past 2 years as part-time MFE.
Of the 22 programs in the 2011 ranking, 12 of them are FT/PT so it's incorrect to interpret the ranking is for FT only programs.
The tuition is usually calculated per credit hour, so it will cost roughly the same to complete the credits required for a degree, regardless of whether you do it FT or PT. The tuition listed on the ranking is called TUITION FOR DEGREE for this reason.

 

[nesense]

Wow Andy, you need to relax. After you've been preaching about being civil on the forum and saying you want to discuss the rankings and it's methodology, do you just want people who ONLY agree with your rankings to post on this forum ??? Maybe you should have indicated that when you posted the ranking.

Also, haven't you been saying that you can't release the data, where would I get an understanding of the data?

It's just hard for me to believe a program like Baruch could be ranked higher than MIT , STANFORD, Berkeley, Cornell, Columbia ?? You shouldn't have posted the rankings if you can't stand people discussing their views.

 

[anujjain]

It's hard to believe when you probably don't consider that these are MFE rankings and not Universities/College rankings in general and/or if you believe that anything MIT is best even if it was started just 2 years ago.

 

[darth]

It's like....... say if BMW (read MIT) started producing chocolates( Read MFIN) , it won't necessarily mean that the chocolates will be better than those of Hershey's (Baruch ) just because BMW is an excellent car manufacturer.