The Masters in Finance (MIF) qualification is slowly starting to gain traction in Hong Kong – a city where banking professionals have traditionally preferred taking MBAs.
But where should you study if you want a MIF that will help you boost your finance career in Hong Kong?
We searched our CV database for financial professionals in the city who already have a Masters in Finance to their name, and we found out which business school they attended.
We then ranked each college by the percentage of Hong Kong-based MIF graduates who studied there to produce the table below.
Because the MIF has only recently emerged as a popular qualification in Hong Kong, the data set isn’t yet large enough to examine the business function of graduates or the type of organisation they work for (but you can click here for our global list of top MIF schools for getting front-office jobs at leading investment banks).
However, our numbers do show that spending tens of thousands of dollars on an elite overseas MIF course may well be worth the effort.
A clear majority (62.3%) of people with Masters in Finance degrees who have now got jobs in Hong Kong’s finance sector studied outside the territory.
And the top-three most popular foreign-based courses were in the same city: London. Imperial College, London School of Economics, and London Business School each boast more than 9% of MIF grads in Hong Kong.
Five other UK universities feature in our top-20, making the UK by far the most popular overseas destination for Hong Kong MIF students.
Hongkongers who want to break into finance for the first time or make a major career change typically look to these top-tier British courses to give them an edge, although some have recently expressed reservations about studying in the UK in the wake of the Brexit vote.
Unsurprisingly, the three main local Masters in Finance programmes – at the University of Hong Kong, Chinese University of Hong Kong, and City University of Hong Kong – all sit towards the top of our table.
Mainland China’s nascent MIF sector is starting to make an impact in Hong Kong – the Guanghua School of Management and the Shanghai Advanced Institute of Finance rank in 7th and 15th places respectively.
US Masters in Finance courses are comparatively thin on the ground, and none feature in our table for Hong Kong.
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