January 11th, 2012, 11:40 am
Forget about Vienna, if you seriously plan to stay in academia. SFI could be actually worth considering - definitely on the rise, and I heard people are generally happy there, not sure about the placement though. To traderjoe1976: if you look at the top schools you mentioned, their recentp lacements are going down the slope. To the extent I wouldn't call any of them anymore as consistently placing in decent US schools.To LSE fan: didn't see anything stellar in their placements. Few successes possibly are due to a larger size of the PhD program => more pronounced tail. I also hear a few years back, that support for their PhD students was really terrible, in all aspects. Wonder if that improved now.To summarize, I don't see the point of doing PhD in finance in Europe now, if you are targeting an academic career. If you have no other choice, just try to make it to the best place you can.