How long does it take to get a Phd in financial engineering or quantitative finance, etc?

Question

Also, what if you already have a masters in mathematical finance?

Answer 1

I got my PhD in Finance in four years.

A master's degree in finance is not required -- but . . . .

The top finance programs are very hard to get into. For example, the year that I got into Berkeley, there were over 250 applications. Nine were accepted, and six chose to come to Berkeley. The following year applications were up, and only four were accepted. A few schools (Chicago, MIT, Wharton, Stanford) are actually a little harder to get into, while several others (Duke, UCLA, NYU, Carnegie Mellon) are about the same.

The year that I was started, eight of the nine accepted students had already done graduate work (two already had PhDs , two were at the dissertation stage for a different PhD , One had a master's in physics from MIT, one had a masters from the Kennedy School, one had a masters in financial mathematics from U of Chicago, and I had a done graduate work in Math and Philosophy and also had an MBA from Duke (where I took PhD level finance and economics classes).

That is the bad news. The good news is that you can also get a PhD in Finance through economics departments. And the top Econ departments accept more students right out of undergraduate programs. Students in Econ who do finance take their finance classes through the finance department (usually it is in the business school) and have a mixture of finance and economics professors on their committees. The degrees are almost identical. At Berkeley, for example, the economics students took the same preliminary exams as the finance students.

Without already having a graduate degree, you can probably get into a better econ program than finance program.

Answer 2

4 years