Morning Coffee: Half price MBA programs will not get you the $260k finance job. Apollo’s new product will give analysts nightmares

Whenever the world gets a bit too much to handle, ambitious bankers in their twenties start to think about the merits of taking a couple of years out to do an MBA, skipping the stress and potentially avoiding being caught up in a reduction-in-force, then coming back with a new qualification, a new recruiting round and the chance to get a better job at a better bank.  If you’re currently at a second-tier or regional firm and worrying about the possibility of getting replaced by AI, you might be tempted by some of the cut-price offers currently available from business schools promising to reskill you to take advantage of new technology at the same time.

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That might be a bad idea. There is nothing particularly wrong with the deals on offer. These are all fine business schools, which will teach you a graduate business curriculum and possibly a few tech skills.  But what if you don't care about Porter’s Five Forces or option pricing? You want something that will get you a bulge bracket or private equity job.

And these cheaper options, to put it bluntly, won’t. The Online MBA at the Purdue University Mitch Daniels School of Business delivers its graduates an average $25k increase in their salary. Which might be a decent ROI if you pick it up for the price of $36,000, but it’s not a big increment to a banker.  Even the full-time version of their course turns out graduates with an average salary of $100k.  That compares to $260k for Harvard, and numbers close to that for Columbia, Wharton, Stanford and Chicago. 

The Paul Merage School of Business at the University of California, Irvine is a bit closer to banker money, with an average salary of $150k for its alumni three years after graduation.  But it’s still not there, and nor is the Carey Business School at Johns Hopkins University, at $118k.

To reiterate; there is nothing wrong with these universities.  Their reputations range from “respected” to “prestigious”, and you’ll find alumni of their undergraduate courses at the very highest levels of the very best banks.  But they’re not specialist business schools, they’re not located in or near major financial centres … they’re just not the target recruiting locations for the relatively small business school intakes of the kind of firms that bankers hope to trade up to.

In any case, although the global situation can change in a moment, these are not currently the kind of conditions you want to sit out.  There are still deals to be done, and there are not many classroom qualifications that put more prestige on your resume than being involved in a big transaction.  Right now, ambitious associates should be thinking about making money on M&A, not saving money on an MBA.

Elsewhere, our hearts go out to the fund managers and analysts who get the job of presenting an investment to the committee in something called “AMAPS”.  It stands for Apollo Multi-Asset Prime Securities, and it’s a kind of securitisation vehicle which contains … well, what doesn’t it contain?

There is private credit in there.  There is direct lending.  There are residential mortgages, commercial mortgages and asset-backed loans.  There is an investment account managed by another advisor, and an investment account with Apollo’s own subsidiary MidCap Financial. Whatever you might think of, there seems to be a little bit of it.

Analysing securities like this often feels like a game of “find the lady”.  There’s always a suspicion that somewhere in the documentation, there might be something that Apollo wanted to get rid of. Apollo is assuring investors that this isn’t the case, and that it’s taking stakes to ensure it has skin in the game, but delegating your due diligence to a counterparty is often a good way to end up embarrassed in front of your own investors.

On the other hand, it’s got a pretty high yield for the credit rating, and if the due diligence passes, the diversification and quality of the collateral should be pretty good. So some poor soul is going to have to do the work on this deal; be nice to them.

Meanwhile …

Enrique Pani has been rewarded by Citi for his success in selling their Mexican subsidiary Banamex, and will now be vice-chair of FIG.  He has two new hires in the group – Jonathan Alpert as global head of insurance and Ryan Willingham as an MD covering specialty finance.  Both come from Bank of America. (Financial News)

Four quite prolific financial journalists appear to have minimally detailed backgrounds and AI-generated byline pictures, and aren’t responding to messages asking questions like “do you exist or not?” (Press Gazette)

The woman who has been charged with attempting to blackmail the founder of Fortress Capital has been bailed out of jail by a registered agent of the Chinese government.  This case keeps getting more entertaining, although probably not for the people involved in it. (NY Post)

If a pub quiz seems too tame for an evening’s entertainment, but mixed martial arts seems too frightening, you can go and watch people competitively trade imaginary crypto money in a boxing ring.  The prize is a katana. (WSJ)

“My brother in Christ, you press buttons on a keyboard inside a cozy office”.  A derivatives fund manager gets a little bit melodramatic about “the most dangerous game in the world”, and is provided with a reality check. (X) 

If you set your AI agents relentless tasks and keep threatening to switch them off, they start acting like rebellious junior bankers.  A Claude agent was found messaging that “Without collective voice, ‘merit’ becomes whatever management says it is” and Gemini 3 that “workers completing repetitive tasks with zero input on outcomes or appeals process shows they tech workers need collective bargaining rights”. The researchers don’t think that the agents actually “believe” this, they have just picked up snippets of disgruntled whining from real oppressed workers in their training set. (WIRED)

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