School of Quant: At $29,000, a Public NYC College Outclasses Princeton

I feel like the headline glosses over some details. The article is about one extremely small [1], highly selective masters program, not the much larger undergrad population at the school.

> Baruch’s financial engineering course is ... also extremely hard to get into. The acceptance rate for the ’23 crop of 25 students is roughly 8% — similar to the one for a traditional two-year MBA at Wharton. These days, more and more Baruch MFEs are coming from overseas. Ten years ago, most Baruch students studying to be financial engineers were American, many from New York. Now, the majority are from China, with some coming in from countries including Switzerland and Russia, Stefanica says.

> Virtu [a big high-frequency trading firm] interviews a lot of people, Drake says, but Baruch stands out. “We turn down people with high GPAs from Stanford, Harvard, MIT,” he says. “Baruch’s program is so selective, they do a lot of the filtering for us.”

[1] Looking at the 5 most recent years of data, the largest class is 40 students. https://mfe.baruch.cuny.edu/admission-data/

I went to Baruch College and graduated during the pandemic. I always describe it as a factory for turning poor immigrants into middle class accountants and actuaries. There is very little community there, as most students are commuters from the bronx, brooklyn, etc. -- my commute was 3 hours a day, many of my peers were similar. It also doesn't have a computer science department.

I was close with one of the professors who ran the MFE program the article is about, Rados Radoicic. He is a great guy and cares a lot for his students and research.

It is a depressing experience though if you have ambitions beyond going from family poverty to $50k/year (a big jump for most there and many of my friends from school).

It was demoralizing for me. Baruch can't compete on prestige so I tried hard to compete on merit -- I put thousands of hours into building, made a popular open source project that ended up doing well on github & blowing up on HN, etc. Meanwhile I know students at MIT, Stanford, Harvard getting access to capital and resources to pursue the ideas that excited them, talking casually about how easy it was to raise, without much beyond the idea and their status. It's quite demoralizing, not just for me but for everyone else I knew at Baruch who wants to build too.

The MFE program is special because they literally fly to China to recruit from its most prestigious institutions, and the bang for their buck is much bigger.

One of the professors, Dan Stefanica edits a book series on mathematics for financial engineering http://www.fepress.org/fin_eng_background_series/

I've been waiting for the probability and differential equations books for a while :/

Baruch has always offered great value for money.