The "quant" job market is going to be a lot more competitive once this stat circulates the web. What is a quant, you ask? Well, according to Business Insider, quants are "financial engineers that (generally) design trading systems." Apparently, Masters of Financial Engineering graduate students studying to be quants are paid at annual rate of $94,068 (they get $7,839 per month for three months) interning at a Wall Street firm . It wasn't more than four years ago that professional quants were being paid this much after graduation. But now, apparently, the quant business is booming because the big firms have hiked their entry-level salaries to around $200,000.

Even more mind-blowing, Courtney Comstock adds:

And remember that's just the average, so some firms are paying a lot more. For example, $94,068 per year is the average of 65 students at the Haas School of Business at the University of California at Berkeley, seven of whom went to Goldman Sachs in New York, 16 of whom went to JPMorgan, BNP Paribas and the Global Emerging Market Group in New York. We assume that those seven who went to Goldman Sachs bumped the average up quite a bit.

This isn't exactly Wall Street's best kept secret, either. Quant graduate programs have spiked from seven to nearly 100 in the past decade--"each cranking out anywhere from twenty to a hundred graduates a year," according to Quant Network.

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Caitlin Dickson