Vlerick’s Masters in Financial Management rises to a top 15 position in the world

Our CFA-accredited programme provides a broad and in-depth corporate finance education, complemented with relevant management skills. Currently, the programme has 50 students representing 14 different nationalities.

According to Professor Wouter De Maeseneire, Programme Director of our Masters in Financial Management, this result is a great achievement: “We are very satisfied to be ranked amongst the world’s top finance programmes, which reflects the programme’s added value and our relentless efforts to further optimise and keep up to date with new trends emerging in the world of business and finance. We are particularly pleased to see that the satisfaction rates of our alumni with their overall programme experience and aims achieved are among the highest in the ranking.”

The programme scores particularly well on the effectiveness of its career services and the strength of its alumni network (both 7^th worldwide) in providing career opportunities and support throughout students’ professional lives. The successful careers of our graduates are equally reflected in the excellent value for money rank (14^th in Europe, 17^th in the world), which is based on alumni salaries and tuition fees.

Secondly, our efforts to increase the diversity of our student body are paying off. With the help of our Women in Finance scholarship, we even succeeded in attracting slightly more women than men to the programme, making us one of the few programmes in the list with almost perfect gender parity. Similarly, with the Science Talent scholarship, we encourage students with a non-business study background, such as exact sciences or engineering, to embark on the programme and pursue a career in finance.  

Another element that adds to our excellent result is the opportunity for students to gain international course experience. On top of the study tours to London and Amsterdam, students can opt for an extended international experience by doing their in-company consultancy project abroad or going on an exchange to one of our partner schools. This academic year, we’ve proudly added Imperial Business School (UK) to our current exchange offer, including top-notch schools such as EDHEC (France), Stockholm School of Economics (Sweden), Frankfurt School of Finance and Management (Germany), SKEMA (France) and NOVA (Portugal).

Finally, the Masters in Financial Management programme also ranks highly (24^th worldwide) on a new criterion that considers the proportion of the curriculum dedicated to environmental, social and governance (ESG) issues and climate solutions for how organisations can reach net zero.

The school’s efforts to also walk the talk on sustainability are rewarded with a 12^th position worldwide for carbon footprint. This criterion takes into account the net-zero year for carbon emissions that Vlerick Business School has set for itself as a target and reflects our commitment to embed sustainability systematically throughout the school.