Courant-Stern Marriage
Such union is certainly unprecedented. Some b-schools do offer dual MBA-Finance-Quant Finance opportunities, but both programs were already based inside the same b-school. This is the first time that a b-school and a scientific school collaborate in such a manner.
Is this marriage a good idea? Yes and no. Courant clearly wins big. Stern´s potential gains are less obvious.
Pursuing a quant finance degree as opposed to an MBA has always been more of a gamble. MBAs simply have many more career opportunities. It is tough to get a job as a quant, given the relative scarcity of positions, the high caliber of the competition, and the fact that bullshit won´t cut it. Either you are good at stochastic calculus and C++ or you are not.
By being allowed to obtain an MBA at the same time, Courant students will be hedging their bets in a big big way. If that desired quant job does not become available, the MBA will open the door to other, softer possibilities, including even non-finance positions.
One big problem for MBAs is that this dual degree instantly makes the Courant students direct and equal competitors of MBAs for MBA-type jobs (traders, marketers, structurers). Until now, Courant guys did not take jobs away from MBAs.
But the opposite does not hold true. It is very unlikely that the dual-degree student coming from the MBA camp could out-smart his peer from the math finance camp when it comes to quanty jobs.
In other words, the dual program would allow those of the quantitative persuassion to receive the same quant training as previously available, plus the extremely highly-valuable MBA hedge.That is, the dual degree helps Courant and its typical students. For Stern and its typical students losses, not gains, may result. The new mahematical training would likely not add much job-searching value and could dangerously tempt non-quants to present themselves as quants, all the while creating thirty or forty new direct competitors just across the street.
In light of this, I wouldn´t be surprised if the dual-degree program ends up being almost completely populated by math-types, either students who would have anyway joined Courant and/or Wall Street quants looking for "business credentials". It seems to me that MBA students would soon realize that they have little to gain from inmersing themselves in the challenging fields of numerical methods, stochastics, and computer programming.
