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Quant Finance Master’s Guide 2026 Risk.net’s guide to the world’s leading quant master’s programmes, with the top 25 schools ranked Jump to: All programmes | Methodology Welcome to the latest edition of Risk.net’s guide to the world’s leading quantitative finance master’s programmes, and ranking of the top 25 courses. Forty-three courses feature in the 2026 edition, with the top 25 ranked according to Risk.net’s proprietary methodology. Click on an institution’s entry to access its full listing, including programme data and Q&As with course directors. A full list of all featured institutions can also be found here, at the bottom of this page. Like last year, US courses occupy seven of the top 10 slots and 13 of the top 25. The other 12 programmes are European and one Canadian – the University of Waterloo. The rest-of-the-world group is led by two Swiss programmes, organised by ETH Zurich/University of Zurich and EPFL. As before, the guide covers only master’s programmes in which the teaching of quantitative finance is central. Courses that focus on other subjects – corporate finance, management or statistics – which may still feature quantitative finance courses, have not been considered here. The list of programmes is non-exhaustive. Several programmes that failed to provide updated statistics were not included in the 2026 edition; the 2025 edition can be found here. We are grateful for the help of course directors and faculty administrators when collecting data. Risk.net bears no responsibility for exceptions, oversights or omissions. We will gladly consider feedback in this regard: quant-guide@risk.net The guide should not be relied on for advice, but we hope it proves helpful to would-be master’s students, their teachers and their future employers. Research by Mauro Cesa and Naomi Cardona Castellanos Editing by Rob Evers Ranking methodology To compile the ranking of the top 25 programmes, we considered eight metrics. These have been standardised with respect to the total pool of entries, and a weight has been assigned to each to reflect their contribution to the final score. The total score is the sum of the eight standardised metrics. The institution with the highest score takes the top position in the ranking. The methodology used for this year’s ranking is identical to that used for the 2025 guide and previous editions. The eight variables and the respective weights are: 5% – Average class size; 10% – Acceptance rate; 10% – Percentage of offer-holders who enrol; 5% – Ratio between students and lecturers; 10% – Number of industry-affiliated lecturers over the total number of lecturers; 30% – Employment rate in finance sector six months after graduation; 5% – Number of citations for the five most cited lecturers since 2020; and 25% – Average salary six months after graduation, adjusted for the purchasing power conversion factor provided by the World Bank. The average number of students per class, the ratio between the number of students and lecturers, and the programme’s acceptance rate – an indicator of the selectivity of a programme – contribute negatively to the final score, so the lower they are, the higher the final score. For an institution to be considered for this ranking, it needed to provide sufficient data for the calculation of the final score. Institutions that submitted insufficient data have not been included. Not all institutions provided the number of citations for their lecturers. Where possible, these figures were sourced from Google Scholar. Where that was not possible, the number of citations is considered as zero. To mitigate the effect of the high variability in the citations count, the ranking has been calculated using the logarithm of that variable. The ranking, as well as the guide, relies on the featured institutions providing accurate figures. Risk.net bears no responsibility for any inaccurate metrics, or their impact on a university’s position in the guide. North America Baruch College, City University of New York Boston University (Questrom School of Business) University of California, Berkeley (Haas School of Business) * Carnegie Mellon University Columbia University Columbia University (Columbia Engineering) Cornell University Fordham University (Gabelli School of Business) Georgia Institute of Technology Lehigh University New York University (Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences) New York University (Tandon School of Engineering) North Carolina State University Princeton University (Bendheim Center for Finance) Stevens Institute of Technology Stony Brook University University of Toronto University of Waterloo Europe Bayes Business School (City St George’s, University of London) Imperial College London SOAS, University of London University College London University of Oxford University of Warwick Queen Mary University of London University of Bologna Collegio Carlo Alberto, University of Turin University of Florence University of Padua Paris Cité University Paris-Saclay University Paris-Sorbonne University/Ecole Polytechnique EPFL ETH Zurich/University of Zurich WU: Vienna University of Economics and Business Technical University of Munich University of Amsterdam Asia-Pacific Monash University University of Technology Sydney Nanyang Technological University City University of Hong Kong Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen Hong Kong University of Science and Technology * Update, January 12, 2026: This guide has been updated to include the University of California, Berkeley (Haas School of Business), whose course was not ranked because the relevant data was not available before publication. 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