What qualifications do you need to work for a hedge fund?
Back when hedge funds were a niche sector of financial services, getting a junior job in one was not easy. Now that hedge funds are more mainstream, they are busy developing younger and homegrown talent. Hedge funds run graduate programs. They also have a type.
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Which universities do hedge funds hire from?
Hedge funds like elite students. They hire mostly from the US Ivy League or other top global universities, and they like students with excellent grades, an unblemished record and (ideally) a prominent role in their school's investment society.
Students at some schools are much more likely to get hedge fund jobs than others. Harvard University, Cambridge, University and the National University of Singapore provide the highest numbers of hedge fund employees, based on our analysis of 36,000 LinkedIn employee profiles across 25 top hedge funds*.
What should you study for a hedge fund job?
The path to becoming a portfolio manager (PM) at a hedge fund usually involves starting out as either a quant researcher or an investment analyst. For quants, a STEM degree is essential and mathematics is much preferred. Olga Naumovich, a former Goldman Sachs MD and head of technology in Miami for hedge fund Millennium, said in 2024 that mathematics is the best course to take at university because it can be used to enhance your understanding of other subjects. "You must know it, then add on it," she said. Naumovich also said that "every educated person must know arts, literature and history."
Mathematics is becoming increasingly popular among junior investment analysts too. Interns and graduates are also likely to be studying economics, finance and statistics for these roles.
Hedge funds also have large engineering teams, which create their trading systems and other platforms. These teams are on the lookout for computer scientists to join as interns. This won't put you on the path to PM, but specializing in something like low latency C++ can earn you a respectable compensation package of over $500k later in your career.
Today's top hedge fund managers have mixed educational histories. Izzy Englander at Millennium studied finance at NYU in 1970. Ken Griffin studied economics at Harvard. Jim Simons, the founder of quant fund Renaissance Technologies, studied mathematics. So did Chris Rokos of macro hedge fund Rokos Capital Management. Mike Platt of BlueCrest studied mathematics and economics.
There are a few outliers. Alan Howard of Brevan Howard studied chemical engineering at Imperial College. William Reeves, co-founder of BlueCrest, studied English at Yale. Other hedge fund managers, including George Soros, studied philosophy instead.
Top masters qualifications for hedge fund jobs
The most popular qualification beyond a bachelor's is, predictably, a master's; more than a third of employees across the 25 hedge funds we looked at had a masters qualification.
There are different kinds of master's degrees specializing in specific areas of finance. Generalist master's degrees in business administration (MBAs) are a small proportion of the hedge fund talent pool. Less than 2% of staff across those 25 hedge funds had an MBA. However, Michael Gelband of ExodusPoint has an MBA and a bachelor's in business administration.
Given that the bulk of junior hedge fund hires are quants and engineers, it's more common for new hires to have a master's in financial engineering (MFE) or Masters in Finance qualifications. Masters in financial engineering are specialist courses focused on applying mathematics, statistics and engineering in a financial services context. They also have strong connections to major funds which makes it easier to source an internship. There's a significant gap between the top MFEs and the rest; Baruch, a public college, boasts the highest ranked MFE course despite only costing $45k a year. The full ranking can be seen here.
Do you need a PhD to work in a hedge fund?
PhDs are less common, making up just 3.6% of the hedge fund talent pool. They're slightly underrepresented; ~4% of graduates in the UK and ~5.5% of graduates in the US have doctorates.
Quant funds are most likely to employ PhDs. AQR's Cliff Asness has a finance PhD. Renaissance Technologies is renowned for hiring a large number of them and having a distinctly academic culture. Sometimes hedge funds boast about their PhD employees and say they're representative of the intellectual capacity of employees.
Alternative qualifications for hedge fund jobs
You can supplement your resume with industry-relevant qualifications. Best known among them are the chartered financial analyst (CFA) qualifications, which have three levels.
CFAs are also declining in popularity among hedge fund staff. When we analyzed our candidate database in 2017, 20% of hedge fund employees were CFA charterholders; our analysis of top hedge funds today suggests that just 4.2% of hedge fund staff today are charterholders. Given that the CFA exams can take up to 900 hours to properly study for, graduates may have decided their time could be better spent elsewhere.
As an alternative, there’s the Chartered Alternative Investment Analyst (CAIA) qualification. The CAIA has over 14,000 members, but less than 1% of hedge fund employees we looked at on LinkedIn said they had CAIA membership.
Return to our guide to hedge fund jobs here.
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*Citadel, Millennium, Balyasny, D.E. Shaw, Two Sigma, ExodusPoint, Marshall Wace, AQR, Point72/Cubist, Brevan Howard, Rokos Capital Management, WorldQuant, Bridgewater Associates, Tudor Group, Renaissance Technologies, Schonfeld, Verition, Dymon Asia, Capula Investment Management, Squarepoint, Man AHL, Capstone Investment Advisors, BlueCrest, Jain Global
