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History and Mission
WQU was founded in 2015 with a bold mission: make advanced, quality education accessible to learners worldwide, free of cost.
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Our Founder, Igor Tulchinsky
After serving over 12 years as a portfolio manager and holding over 20 jobs from scientist to video game programmer, Igor Tulchinsky founded WorldQuant, LLC, a quantitative investment firm, in 2007. He knew that the exponential growth of data would ultimately change the way the world invests, learns, and works. In building WorldQuant, LLC and searching for quantitative finance talent, Igor encountered a consistent obstacle — exceptional ability existed everywhere, but access to the education needed to develop it did not. That gap sparked a passion for creating education opportunities worldwide.
Mission and Founding
In 2015, Igor founded WorldQuant University as a separate, independent institution funded through the WorldQuant Foundation. The University’s premise was to address what he identified as a global imbalance: high-quality quantitative education was concentrated in a small number of expensive, geographically restrictive universities, while talent capable of doing this work existed everywhere in the world.
WQU's mission is to make advanced, quality education accessible to capable students everywhere by delivering completely free online offerings.
This mission is also reflected in the institution's tagline:
"Talent is global, opportunity is not."
The University addresses this gap by removing the two largest barriers to graduate-level quantitative education: cost and geographic access. WQU operates entirely online and at no cost to learners.
Bringing Opportunity to Talent
Early WorldQuant University students were more than learners. They were partners in an experiment with a bold mission: Make advanced, quality education accessible to capable learners everywhere, free of cost.
“They were the pioneers,” says Daphne Kis, the university’s CEO from 2016 to 2023. “People were incredibly enthusiastic about giving feedback and participating.”
She says the same spirit of collaboration continues at WQU. “It’s a tremendous differentiator that the university has, which is that it’s not a one-way street,” she says. “It’s a collaboration over time as we innovate, offer new products, and see what the demand in the market is.”
Since 2015, this experiment has grown from a startup to a global educational provider. WQU had 890 students in 2017. Less than 10 years later, the university reached more than 30,000 learners in over 150 countries. A turning point came in 2021, when WQU received accreditation from the Distance Education Accrediting Commission (DEAC). New academic offerings quickly followed.
Despite the pace of change, Kis says one thing has remained constant: “Our goal has always been to bring opportunity to the talent.”
Our Mission
We make advanced, quality education accessible to capable students everywhere by delivering entirely free online offerings.
Questions?
Our offerings are designed to help students build high-demand quantitative and advanced technical skills in financial engineering and data sciences. Discover the best fit for you.