MBA applicants can get carried away with rankings. In this series, we profile amazing programs at business schools that are typically ranked outside the top 15.
Students aspiring to sharpen their analytic and quantitative skills are well served at Carnegie Mellon University’s Tepper School of Business. Boasting a faculty that includes multiple Nobel Prize winners, Tepper has pioneered “management science,” a supplement to traditional case studies that draws on more scientific—rather than historical—strategies for complex business decision making. Management science depends on tools such as computer modeling, organizational behavior, and economic theory.
In addition to this overall “quant” emphasis in its curriculum, Tepper offers a unique joint MBA/MS degree in computational finance for students who are deeply driven by quantitative analysis. The Master of Computational Finance program curriculum is created specifically for candidates who have strong quantitative backgrounds and hope to ultimately pursue a leadership position in financial services. Students are immersed in highly focused computational analysis, examining different theories of finance, stochastic calculus modeling, and statistical methodologies, in addition to the managerial skills they learn in the MBA program’s marketing, strategy, communications, and operations courses. While schools such as Wharton, Chicago Booth, and Columbia may garner a higher rank for careers in finance, few programs offer such uniquely intensive academic resources for a specialization in quantitative analysis.