The top 30 Masters in Finance courses for getting a job in hedge funds, private equity and asset management

A Masters in Finance course, while not a prerequisite, appears to come in handy when applying for a graduate job in investment banking. Getting into the buy-side is a tougher ask – few hedge funds or private equity firms recruit graduates directly from university with no industry experience and even large asset management firms recruit a handful of students annually into their programmes.

To what extent does staying on at university and paying thousands of dollars for a specialist Masters course actually help if you have ambitions to work on the buy-side? Following on from our rankings of Masters in Finance courses to break into investment banking, we’ve scoured the eFinancialCareers CV database – encompassing 1.2m resumes – to assess which universities are most likely to enhance your chances.

The results suggest that only a small proportion of MSc in Finance graduates globally go on to work in buy-side functions. Predictably, hedge funds, which tend to hire raw graduates that they can mould into the employees they need, hire only 1-5% of graduates from a particular school, while asset management firms are more likely to recruit those with a specialist Masters qualification.

Overall, a relatively small proportion of MSc Finance graduates gravitate towards the buy-side. Our top ranked university, London Business School – one of the few post-experience courses on offer – still only managed 29% of total students across all three sectors.

The more mature courses in the UK and Europe largely fare better than their US or Asian counterparts, with the exception of MIT’s course, which comes in fourth in the rankings.

Our rankings reflect the relative difficulty of securing a hedge fund and private equity job – a greater weighting is given to the percentage of graduates working in hedge funds, followed by those who have gained a job in private equity and finally in asset management firms, which are more active recruiters of students directly from university.

We’ve ranked the schools on this weighting for getting a job in each sector, combined this figure with the overall proportion of people working across asset management, hedge funds and private equity, and given each school a score based on their graduates’ employability.

Again, we don’t claim that these are perfect – as they don’t include earning potential, career progression or the total number of students finding jobs immediately after graduation – but they do show the number of people graduating from these schools going on to get a job in private equity, hedge funds and asset management.