Giroux is a must read

Investment Banking What degree

Banking Investment / August 22, 2016

DegreeDo you really need a quantitative degree to secure a graduate investment banking job?

Investment banks would have you believe that any degree disciplines are considered during their graduate recruitment process and that the analytical skills of arts students are just as valued as the quantitative abilities of maths and economics graduates.

Broadly speaking, this is a fib. Analysis of 706 investment banking directors by salary benchmarking website Emolument.com suggests that finance and business students are hired in far greater numbers than anyone studying softer subjects. 34% of the sample it analysed majored in accounting, business or finance, 24% studied economics. After that, percentage figures get a little negligible.

emolument-universities11% of IB directors have maths and statistics degrees and 10% are engineering graduates. The fifth and sixth most common degrees are chemistry and computer science, but they account for just 4% and 3% of the total respectively.

What this implies is that should you possess an arts degree you will need to be both exceptional and attend a top university. 15% of bankers at HSBC have arts and humanities degrees, for example, but these people usually attended an Oxbridge university.

Graduates with more quantitative degrees like maths and statistics, economics and techie computer studies expertise end up earning more than those with accounting and business qualifications anyway as do the small proportion of graduates with history degrees. This may simply be a case of large numbers of accounting, business and finance graduates skewing the average down, however.

Source: news.efinancialcareers.com