The world’s largest association of investment professionals has recognized the university for its commitment to instilling the highest ethical standards in students with career aspirations of providing financial and investment advice to future clients.
Elon University’s undergraduate finance program has been accepted into the CFA Institute’s University Recognition Program, an international benchmark currently given to fewer than 150 schools worldwide.
Inclusion in the program recognizes Elon’s rigorous finance curriculum and the way in which finance professors embed the CFA Institute’s code of ethics and standards of professional conduct into their courses. It will also allow Elon to award up to five CFA Program Awareness Scholarships to students each fiscal year and reference CFA Institute’s endorsement when promoting the university’s finance program.
Most importantly, said Raghu Tadepalli, dean of the Martha and Spencer Love School of Business, the recognition signals that students will have the necessary backgrounds for taking Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) examinations.
“The CFA is widely considered the investment profession’s most rigorous credentialing program,” he said. “Fewer than one in five candidates who begin the program successfully complete it and go on to earn the coveted CFA charter, the ‘gold standard’ for investment professionals.”
Elon’s finance program graduates are consistently being hired by many of the best-known investment companies such as JP Morgan and Credit Suisse. The University Recognition Program highlights to investment firms the superior quality of an Elon student’s finance education.
“This recognition affirms what faculty, recent graduates, and employers already know – that our program is designed well in line with Elon’s mission to challenge and prepare our students to compete with the best students globally,” said Associate Professor Neeraj Gupta, director of the university’s William Garrard Reed Finance Center.
The CFA Institute has 116,000 members in 137 countries and territories. One hundred and forty universities around the world have incorporated the CFA Program curriculum into their own academic programs.