US student visa changes: "Significant uncertainty for quant finance students"
If you're an international student pursuing a US Masters in Financial Engineering course in the hope of achieving the sort of quantitative finance job that pays $325k after a few years, then Donald Trump has other plans.
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Yesterday, Trump ordered embassies to stop scheduling appointments for US student visas. Today, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the administration will "aggressively" revoke the visas of Chinese students, "including those with connections to the Chinese Communist party or studying in critical fields”.
It's not clear which these critical fields are, but financial services firms employ large quantities of Chinese students as both quants and technologists.
Andy Nguyen, the former Deutsche Bank quant who runs QuantNet, a mathematical finance site, said the visa shifts have introduced "significant uncertainty" for students of quant finance and that there's already growing interest in studying in the UK, Canada or Europe instead. "This could reshape global applicant trends for quantitative programs in the coming years," he told us.
Chinese-born mathematicians occupy key roles in the financial services industry. Citadel Securities' CEO Peng Zhao was born in China, for example (but is now a US citizen). Zhao studied applied mathematics at Peking University before pursuing a PhD at Berkeley. Last time we looked, Peking University was one of Citadel Securities' key hiring schools. Multiple senior staff at the firm in the US are Peking University graduates. In 2023, Bloomberg reported that Ken Griffin assembled a "network of influence" to rework a law pushed through by Florida governor Ron DeSantis that would have prevented Chinese citizens from buying property in Miami, where Citadel is based.
Similarly, Goldman Sachs employs multiple Chinese quants, as does JPMorgan. So too does Two Sigma, which paid Jian Wu, a Chinese quant based in New York, $23m in 2022, and then put him on leave after it said Wu contributed to a significant loss, which he denied. Like Zhao at Citadel Securities, Wu studied a first degree in China before studying a PhD in the US.
A technology MD at one US bank told us the visa changes will be problematic. "This is going to be a big issue. Our teams are really international and it's detrimental to see America force out people who have studied in American universities, who America has invested in after paying their stipends as PhD students."
Citadel CEO Ken Griffin said earlier this month that the US should hand out visas to foreign students leaving US universities as they graduate. - "It should literally be if you graduate from one of America’s great universities, great graduate schools, you just get a visa stamp to your degree.”
Supporters of the new restrictions have pointed out that in 2019 a Chinese professor at UCLA was imprisoned for conspiring to export semiconductor chips with military applications to China.
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