If you’re a computer science graduate looking for a job, there’s a disproportionate chance you’re unemployed. If a career in finance is the end-goal, going back to school for a masters in financial engineering (MFE) seems an attractive option, but the course you pick really matters.
Quantnet.com‘s 2026 MFE rankings for the US have been released. Its top two MFEs are the same as the year before: Princeton University’s Master in Finance and Baruch College‘s Master of Financial Engineering. In 2025, Princeton supplanted Baruch as the top MFE, but this year, Baruch has retrieved the crown.
Rounding out the top three is Carnegie Mellon’s MS in computational finance, which enrolled more students than Baruch and Princeton combined. The school which enrolled the most students overall was 13th-place NYU Tandon, which had 146 students and an acceptance rate of 28.1%
Spying an opportunity, some MFE courses have massively expanded. Georgia Tech, for example, more than doubled its cohort from 51 to 107, while NC State University almost tripled its intake from 23 to 64. In each case, acceptance rates barely changed, suggesting an influx of applicants. The exception was Rutgers University, which increased its cohort size from 46 to 53, but its acceptance rate rose massively from 37% to 86%
Princeton has historically had the best MFE course by a large margin for starting pay, but 2025 is an off year. This year, Princeton’s MFE graduates earned $201k in base pay (salary plus sign-on bonus) on average in 2025, down from $260k in 2024. At Baruch, pay rose from $200k to $217k. That said, those are the only two schools where graduates earn above $200k on average; the closest competitor is Berkeley, where grads earn $168k.
Base pay is still impressive for MFE graduates elsewhere, averaging over $100k at each of the top 20 courses. This is a huge improvement from six years ago; in 2019, base pay only averaged above $100k at the top five courses, and the highest average starting pay (then at Princeton) was $120k. It’s a lucrative time, therefore, to be studying an MFE.
It’s not all positive news. Graduates of NYU Courant’s MFE had a bizarrely low employment rate of 26% at graduation, rising to an unimpressive 63% three months after graduation. Christos Koutsoyanis, an adjunct professor of the course, said at Quant Strats Europe last month that “many of [his] good candidates are finding it very hard to get internships.” Pay for the graduates that were able to find jobs rose significantly, though, from $118k to $152k.
These rankings don’t take European MFEs into account. Risk.com does a global ranking; it has yet to release its own yearly rankings but, in last years rankings, three European schools made the top ten. France reigned supreme with Ecole Polytechnique’s Master in Probability and Finance coming first for Europe and fourth globally.
MFE’s aren’t a staple at top UK universities yet. Oxford has one, but Cambridge only has a more generalist Master of Finance course with some machine learning and algorithmic trading modules. Still, the UK had more courses in the top 25 than any other European country.
Which companies hire MFE graduates? What jobs do MFE graduates get?
Employment statistics can often be opaque and don’t give the full story of what graduates of each course go on to do. Luckily, multiple of the top courses release more detailed statistics, including the overall number one Baruch. Students for the 24/25 academic year received internships from the likes of JPMorgan, Point72 and Tower Research, as well as full-time offers from Goldman Sachs, Millennium and Citadel.
Carnegie Mellon releases one of the more detailed reports for its cohort, detailing exactly which roles its graduates went into at their respective firms. The top recruiter from its MFE program was Goldman Sachs, which hired graduates into various roles including quant strats, quant risk and equity derivatives trading. The top five recruiters of Carnegie Mellon MFEs also included JPMorgan, Deutsche Bank, Bank of America, and trading firm Trexquant.
Hedge funds hiring Carnegie Mellon MFEs tended to hire them as quant researchers, a role known to be the most lucrative in the quant space. Millennium, Qube Research and SquarePoint all hired quant researchers, with Millennium hiring three of them, one of which moved to Hong Kong for the role. Other hedge funds included Cubist Systematic Strategies and Rokos Capital, which hired graduates into analyst roles.
Baruch also provides details about what its graduates accomplish multiple years after they graduate. In its most recent report, the school said that 20% of graduates entered management roles within four years of graduating, and that compensation packages reached upwards of $900k at both banks and hedge funds within five years of graduating.
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