The Financial Times offers a comprehensive look this week at financial training programs. European business schools have traditionally run Master’s in Financial Engineering (MFE) programs, as compared to financially-oriented MBAs in the United States. But new, specialized degrees are on the horizon here and abroad.

According to FT, European business schools have launched, or will launch, nine specialized masters degrees in finance–schools such as Cass Business School and the London School of Economics in the UK and EM Lyon and Edhec in France. IE Business School in Spain and The University of Strathclyde in Scotland are launching programs in 2009.

In the US, Purdue’s Krannert School of Management, Pepperdine and Rochester are launching programs this year. The Anderson school at UCLA will enter the fray with a degree in financial engineering in 2009, the article reports, adding that MIT’s Sloan school of management is also expected to launch a masters in finance degree in the next year.

The growth in demand mirrors the growth in the financial services sector but also reflects a growing demand for technical knowledge, says Sabine Vinck, associate dean of the London Business School Masters in Finance program. “Finance is a specialist industry and it is more and more a technical industry.”

The Haas School’s Master’s in Financial Engineering (MFE) Program is featured prominently in this special section. “Jobs Outside Wall Street and the City” describes the placement success of Haas MFE graduates. Another article, titled “Global Links Help Talent Pool Flourish,” describes how the Monetary Authority of Singapore, Singapore’s de facto central bank, created a scholarship initiative to train talented Singaporeans at the Haas MFE program.

Since our 2/18 post on the Wharton Business Plan competition (see “Develop Your Inner Entrepreneur“) several other BPCs have proceeded to conclusion. Here are the results to date:

HBS 12th Annual BPC - First Prize ($10K cash + $10K in-kind services) went to teams EyeViewDigital.com and Diagnostics-For-All. EyeViewDigital “enables communication between businesses and customers through cutting-edge video technology,” while Diagnostics-For-All “provides health care agencies and commercial organizations with a new generation of point-of-care tools to address the diagnostic and clinical management needs of the global medical community.”

NYU Stern 9th Annual BPC - Traditional track first prize ($50K cash + $10K in-kind services) went to team Social Bomb, “a game development company which taps into the large amounts of existing social networking data to provide entertainment and reveal unexpected value for players and advertisers.” The social entrepreneurship track first prize ($100K + 10K in-kind support) went to team Naya Jeevan For Kids, “dedicated to providing socioeconomically disadvantaged children in the developing world with affordable access to catastrophic health care,” and The Red Island, which imports and manufactures specialty food products from Madagascar, focusing on importing finished versus raw materials.

Rice BPC - Grand prize valued at over $325K (!!) was awarded to qcue, “a dynamic pricing solution for concert promoters, sports teams, and venues. Its software application transforms existing box offices into electronic markets by implementing elements of airline pricing and NASDAQ trading to provide dynamic pricing based on market conditions, while hosting a secondary market which is seamlessly integrated with the primary market.”

Duke Start-Up Challenge - First place overall and healthtrack winner ($30K) went to Cerene Biomedics, dedicated to developing an “implantable device which delivers localized cooling to the surface of the brain to prevent epileptic seizures.”

Wharton BPC - Grand prize ($20K + $10K in-kind services) was awarded to Solixia, “an early stage radiopharmaceutial company developing products that allow doctors to target radiation specifically to solid tumors.”

Keep an eye out for the results of the MIT 100K Entrepreneurship Competition, which is scheduled to conclude on May 14th.

David Schmittlein, former Wharton professor and recently appointed dean of MIT Sloan, shared with Financial Times this week a plethora of maverick views regarding management education. “The future of management education is not the future of the MBA,” Schmittlein tells FT, adding, “I would like to be the first North American school that gets this.”

MIT Sloan is one of the top U.S. business schools, offering a small undergraduate program as well as the full-time, one-year Sloan Fellows program aimed at experienced managers. Schmittlein believes there should be an appropriate program for managers at every point in their careers, noting in the article that “We will be driven by growth in the number of programs [we offer], not by a bigger MBA.”

In keeping with tradition across the pond, Sloan’s new dean intends to launch a one-year masters program in management for those who have just finished their undergraduate work. The school has already announced that it will launch a specialized masters degree in finance and more specialized masters may soon appear on the horizon.

Schmittlein tells FT he believes the MBA will form a critical tool for people in their late 20s who want to change careers. With this in mind, the school is reducing the core of the MBA–the first part of the program that all students study together–to a single semester. In doing so, Sloan will be able to offer more focused elective tracks to suit students’ individual needs. Reducing the MBA to a one-year program is not the solution, however, since Schmittlein says an MBA takes two years to earn because people want to accomplish a thoughtful career transition.

Prominent on Schmittlein’s agenda is boosting the school of management’s visibility and making sure the world knows what in particular is great about Sloan. Interdepartmental offerings, such as joint courses with engineering or medicine, is an important area in which MIT Sloan has excelled. “Our graduates are close to graduates from other departments,” Schmittlein tells FT. “The school needs to be relevant to them at different times.” The university’s much-copied MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition, in which students from all departments work together on business ideas, is the most noteworthy example of this philosophy.

With about 100 faculty and 400 MBA students, MIT Sloan is less than half the size of Wharton or Harvard. The new dean expects the number of faculty and programs, though not the number of students on the full-time MBA program, to grow. “We’re just above being too small and we’re not close to being too big,” Schmittlein says.

Stay tuned for further examination of one-year vs. two-year programs on Friday.

To hear voices from the frontlines, check out the MIT Sloan student blogs, or Dean Schmittlein’s blog.

This month’s QS Top MBA newsletter takes a look at a dilemma soon to be at the forefront at many business schools: GMAT or GRE, which test is best? For the fall 2007 class, both Stanford and MIT accepted GRE scores from applicants to their MBA programs. Johns Hopkins University has also been giving students the option.

A January article in Inside Higher Ed says that according to several other business school admissions officials who asked not to be identified, their schools have been accepting GRE scores quietly–not publicizing it as an option, but not turning away applicants who want to be considered that way. And consultants, such as those from Stacy Blackman Consulting, have seen some clients obtain permission to use the GRE instead, on a case-by-case basis.

“We were talking with faculty about whether we were attracting the most intellectually curious students, about whether MBA programs were attracting students with a genuine intellectual curiosity with the subject matter,” says Derrick Bolton, director of MBA admissions at Stanford. The business school there has always used the GRE for admission to its doctoral programs, and someone said ‘why do we require the GMAT’ for the MBA?’” Bolton recalls. “It’s just one of those things that you accept as gospel until someone asks you the question.”

The GMAT has for some time been the established test for getting into business schools. It measures verbal, mathematical and analytical skills that the candidate has developed in education and at work. It does not measure specific knowledge of business, job skills, or subjective qualities such as motivation, creativity, and interpersonal skills. Even if a test taker’s first language is not English, he or she may still perform well on the exam.

The GRE measures the extent to which undergraduate education has developed a student’s verbal and quantitative skills in abstract thinking. For non-native speakers, the GRE requires a far broader knowledge of vocabulary, writing skills and general subjects than the GMAT. Without good English and writing skills it is impossible to get a good score in the GRE. So, for non-fluent English speakers, their best bet would be to stick with the GMAT.

One essential difference pointed out by Top MBA: the GRE requires you to do the arguing, whereas in the GMAT you analyze what has been argued. The style expected from GRE test readers is more abstract and draws from various sources and disciplines for examples or references, whereas it is more concrete and analytical for the GMAT. This supports the suitability of the GRE for the more academically-minded student.

Not everyone agrees with that line of thinking, however. In the post GMAT or GRE, splitting hairs?, Peter Sacks Amazon Blog scoffs at the idea that the GRE provides a more intellectually curious applicant pool, saying that “there’s plenty of evidence to suggest that most admissions tests actually punish individuals with thinking and learning styles that we might call ‘intellectually curious,’ who tend to solve problems using creativity and imagination.” He goes on to say that top business schools “need to take a much broader approach to admissions reform, and start asking the hard questions about relying on such tests for admission, whether it’s the GMAT or the GRE.”

Proponents of the GRE option believe it may help business schools attract classes that are more diverse and more intellectual, and to land students who are considering both business school and master’s or Ph.D. programs in economics or other business-related fields. Applicants to business schools say that they also like the price: $140 for the GRE compared to $250 for the GMAT.

Some supporters say that they are intrigued by the GRE option but are facing pressure from the Graduate Management Admission Council, a group of leading business schools, which created the GMAT, not to deviate from requiring that test. Officially, the council’s rules demand that members require the GMAT. Council officials deny that they are pressuring anyone and note that they have not kicked out the business schools that no longer require GMAT. But tensions are evident in talking not only to council officials, but to business school leaders who say they are worried about offending the council.

This issue will not likely be resolved soon, but prospective applicants interested in taking the GRE instead should first ask which tests their top-choice schools will accept. It never hurts to inquire, especially if your score on one is stronger.

sources: QS Top MBA, Inside Higher Ed