Finance center may offer master's degree

When the Class of 2001 graduates, the only thing banking-bound students may be trading will be late nights and stressful hours at Wall Street desks for a fifth year of classes at the University.

Pending approval by the board of trustees at its May meeting, the University will offer a master's degree program in finance starting in the 2001-2002 academic year. Yacine Ait-Sahalia, director of the Bendheim Center for Finance, said 30 students each year would pursue the master's curriculum at the center.

The program, which ordinarily would take two years to complete, can be completed by students with exceptional backgrounds in finance in only one year. "This would basically put you at the MBA level," former economics department chair Ben Bernanke said. "You would have the qualifications to go to an advanced position."

Each year a faculty committee would admit 10 students who plan to complete the program in one year and 10 who would need two or more years, Ait-Sahalia said.

Competition for admission to the program — which would be open to graduates of other universities as well as finance professionals — would be intense, he said. University graduates, however, would have an advantage over other applicants, according to Bernanke.

Ait-Sahalia agreed. "We do have a very strong pool of undergraduates and it's a natural continuation of the financial certificate at the graduate level," he said.

In their proposal — which was approved at a University faculty meeting April 3 — proponents of the program cited similar "professionally-oriented mathematical and computational finance programs" at Columbia, the University of Chicago and other peer institutions.

Bernanke said the program's curriculum is more focused on mathematics and finance than many business administration master's programs, which involve accounting, management and strategic planning as well. "It's narrower and deeper than an MBA," he said.

Mike Po '01, an economics major pursuing a finance certificate, said he would be very interested in pursuing the master's program, though he doubted whether the program would be too mathematically intensive.

"Just the fact that you can do it in one year, that in itself is very attractive," said Po, who will intern at Chase Manhattan's investment banking division this summer.

Bernanke said creating the program has been a priority of the economics department since the early 1970s. The department lacked the necessary funding and faculty, however, until a $10-million donation from the Lowenstein foundation in honor of its president, Robert Bendheim '37, established the center.

"It's serendipity," Bernanke said.