There is a new resource https://predoc.org/ that you should consult.

A PhD takes about 6 years for **successful** students. Half of all admitted students fail out. A PhD is a very masochistic venture. You really have to have a love of knowledge for its own sake. There are more lucrative and pleasant careers elsewhere.

Application Advice

Disclaimer: I am just trying to give my own best assessment. I could be wrong. Finance professors and departments are not homogeneous. There are ranges of opinions.

Competitive Situation

Admissions to the UCLA Finance PhD programs is very competitive. We usually accept only 10 out of 200 applicants.

Unless a student has had dramatic mitigating socio-economic disadvantages to overcome, students with *quantitative* test scores below the 90th quantile are better off saving their money by not applying. (We typically have 30-50 applicants with 95+ quantile quantitative scores, and usually at most 1-2 of the admittees will not lie within this 95+ group.)
The next most important application aspect is relevant coursework GPA. We do not expect A's in Fine Arts and P.E. courses, but we do expect A's in math and economic courses. Roughly speaking, successful applicants do not rank lower than top-5 out of 60 students in competitive programs of highly talented students.
The next-most important application aspect are the reference letters from academic researchers *whom we know and trust* (not to bullshit us with superlatives). Thus, having a top-school MFE degree often helps, as enrollment in such a program often helps facilitate such interactions, in addition to allowing the candidate to measure their performance against other good students. It is not too difficult to get accepted into an MFE program. Typically, 1 in 3 students gets accepted.

We do not expect an applicant to know exactly what they are planning to research, nor to write long essays about why they were longing for a finance phd since they were six years old. We are aware that most of this prose is made-up nonsense. Keep it simple and straightforward.

Applying From Less Well-Known Venues

I have written a blog post for potential applicants from more provicincial programs.

Personalized Applications?

Each year, I receive a number of students that contact me by email to tell me about their interests in the Ph.D. program (a "personal admission request" kind of letter). I always have to return a note that says "All applications have to go through the formal process (the UCLA Graduate Division)." This is the brave new world we live in: everything has to go by the book. Otherwise, we would open UCLA up to lawsuits. It also has some good rationale: We cannot treat some applicants differently from other applicants.

(PS: Now that I have written and posted this, consider a 'personal admission request letter' to be a negative. It simply means that you did not bother reading my web page before you wasted my time with a pro-forma email.)

Race, Gender, and Background

Finance as a profession would be much better off with more minorities and more women professors, as well as more individuals from poorer and different backgrounds.

However, finance is a very international and diverse discipline in most other respects. Americans are a minority, and White American Males are a small minority.

Ranking of PhD Programs in Finance

The following is merely my personal opinion.

If I were trying to judge PhD programs, I would ask how many students they enroll, how many they graduate, and where they go to. Then I would reverse this by looking at various top universities to find out where their faculty graduated from. I would care only at graduates from the last 10 years.

If your interests are very technical (mathematical), then there is one standout school: Stanford. Otherwise, there are a cloud of schools that are all very good. In no particular order (west to east?): UCLA, UC Berkeley, Stanford, Chicago, Northwestern, NYU, Princeton, Yale, Harvard, MIT, NYU, Columbia, Duke. Faculty-wise, Chicago is top. Placement-wise, MIT is top.

Another 10-20 schools produce PhD students that can end up at the top universities every so often: USC, UCSD, UIUC, Cornell, Rochester, LSE, LBS, Insead, Swiss Finance Institute, Carnegie, Washington, UBC, Toronto, Florida, Arizona, etc.

The PhD program does not have to be a finance program. Econ programs often produce students that become finance faculty, too.

Visiting Another PhD Program

It is an unusual but not a bad idea for an enrolled PhD student to visit another program for no more than one semester. This should be arranged via inquiry by the advisor of the student, not the student himself/herself.

TBW: Good topics for a 2nd-year paper

Gratuitous starting advice on research

Thoughts on Women in Academic Finance.