So I recently inquired about teaching some math/basic finance courses at the local community college. Was told that my CFA is irrelevant and they would require a masters degree for me to be eligible for consideration.
Since I assume a masters in finance does not include any courses that teach you how to teach…this seems to be a dumb rule. Is this requirement the same way everywhere or is this local school just being picky?
I know few alumni who have end up teaching finance after MBA.
Mostly all university/college lecturers require at least a masters degree in the field (or a related field) you would be teaching in. It is probably like this at most schools in north america. If you want to teach look into CFA tutoing or teaching study material. Also they would rather higher a graduate or honors student in the department to teach a course than a outsider.
Yep. Master’s degree is pretty required for lecturers at accredited colleges/universities. And yes, you don’t need to know how to teach to get assigned a course. I’m not sure if it is a regulatory requirement for accreditation to have a master’s degree for all personnel giving a final grade on something, but it is a de facto one if not a legal one. You can have non-mastered teaching assistants grading tests and papers, but they need to be supervised by someone with at least a master’s.
If you have a master’s degree in something else, your CFA credentials will tell people about your knowledge of the material. I was able to teach a finance course at a local university, even though my degree is not in finance, and the thing that made them feel I was qualified in the subject matter was the CFA. This was an undergraduate course, though. I wouldn’t want to teach a graduate course based only on CFA, although perhaps an intro finance for MBAs would be conceivable.
In the UK at least having the CFA is seen as equivilant to having a masters - from the CFAUK website:
“In August 2009, the CFA Program and CFA charter were benchmarked as comparable to a Master’s Level 7 qualification within the English Qualification and Credit Framework (QCF) by the National Recognition Information Centre (UK NARIC). UK NARIC is the UK National Agency responsible for providing information, advice, and expert opinion on vocational, academic, and professional skills and qualifications.”
yeah, im even looking at places like Devry and U of Phoenix and they all require a masters.
Yeah this is a local community college, nothing prestigious. I can understand why Harvard doesn’t want a random guy with the CFA designation teaching their MBA students about risk management.
…but 18/19 year old kids in a smallish midwest town could do worse than having a charterholder teach them ‘intro to investing’.
At least in the US, I believe it may be as simple as a requirement for university/college accreditation. Not 100% sure on that, but if community colleges stick to this as a requirement, it seems that there is probably a regulatory/accreditation issue driving it.
There are some cases where business professionals are able to give a class, and the main draw is their experience level and possibly their utility to the university in placing some students in whatever industry they are part of, but I suspect if you look at the fine print, you’ll discover that they all have some flavor of masters’ degree, such as an MBA.
Yeah, it may be the accrediting bodies that require certain education levels for the professors. I know that for AACSB accreditation a certain percentage of the professors must have a PhD from an AACSB accredited unversity. It is almost like a racket!
I don’t know MS in Finance vs. CFA as well as I do CPA vs. MS in Accounting but the CPA should be held in higher academic regard than an MS in Accounting, in my opinion. In fact, if someone has an MS in Accounting but no CPA, it raises some questions. Most specificially, why exactly don’t they have their CPA license? The CFA isn’t as mature as the CPA so people probably don’t wonder the same things…
Who knows? Maybe the whole education system is slowly getting upended by modern technology.
It’s an accreditation thing. for AACSB accredition, all instructors must have either a master degree with 18 graduate hours in the course they are teaching or 5 years relevant experience to the position. It is possible to teach a course with a bachelor degree, but you generally need some good experience. I know a few people that have done it at major universities even. (not ivy league, but large state unis). I would recommend just emailing the dean of the business school or the department chair and expressing your interest. the worst thing they could do is say no. If you show that you can put together a coherant sentence in english and have some legitimate intrerest, you’ll be ahead of 75% of your peers anyway.
maybe you should get a masters from U of Phoenix then … lolol