Haha. Most Ivy league schools have grade
inflation, choudvik. It's a harder to get into the Ivy league than it is to get kicked out--gentleman's B and all that. I'd be worried if you were attending Chicago or Swarthmore or something, not an Ivy. Of course it depends on where you go, Princeton and certain departments at Cornell and Dartmouth are generally the harshest graders in the Ivy league.
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tetris, the PhDs who work for masters work for the MBA types from HBS, etc. They don't work for quant masters typically. The PhD is a credential at this point, it is easier to believe a PhD in astrophysics is a grand modeler than an MA. The point is the capacity to do high end research is important. No, you don't waste 10 years on a PhD, beyond the MA it should take 3 years. I will urge my son to get a PHD, being asinine!!!
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Getting a PhD in astrophysics is wasted time, and someone that's doing something that difficult with finance in mind will undoubtedly fail and/or produce low-quality work. PhD programs are not easy. At the doctoral level it doesn't matter if you're "good" at math, you have to love the subject, you have to be able to convince people that you love the subject and you have to perform well without distractions. If the entire rationale behind getting a difficult doctorate is to end finance as a quant it's likely admissions committees will see through the charade, and it's likely students will burn out early on.
Now if you love x subject, and it happens to be highly quantitative, and you want to be able to have some
potential for doing certain things in industry in the future--that's another matter, but you're sure as hell not going to leisurely walk through a 4 year astrophysics doctorate program at CalTech. If the goal is finance, though, it's the equivalent of majoring in mathematics because you want to get a doctorate in economics and teach it. Yes, a mathematical background will help you in admissions, but you're basically wasting four years doing something you don't want to do so you can eventually do something you do want to do while putting yourself in a position where if you fail (which considering motivation plays a key role in these things is likely) or do worse than you thought you would you're shooting yourself in the foot in two ways--you didn't get to study the field you're interested in, and you've pretty much killed your grad school prospects.