First of all, I don’t think anyone gets a Ph.D. in Quant. There are Ph.Ds in math, physics, economics, finance, music, sociology, etc.. Some of these have more quantitative aspects than others.
My Ph.D. is not in finance, so before I did L1 of the CFA program, I got a lot of questions saying, “Well, bchad, you’re obviously smart, but what do you know about finance.” Truth is, I knew some statistics, and a fair amount of economics, but I’d never navigated financial statements, and I wasn’t all that sure about all the different things that go into equity and fixed income valuation. I knew what options were, but not much else about derivatives.
After passing L1, I never got the “so what do you know about finance” question again. I went on to do L2 and L3 because 1) might as well complete what you started, and 2) I was genuinely interested in the material, and 3) it helped to have a formal program that covered key issues in portfolio management without requiring that I go back and get another university degree.
Also, there are lots of different ways to do statistics. The way a medical researcher uses statistics is different from the way an economist uses statistics is different from the way a policy maker uses statistics is different from the way a quantitative portfolio manager uses statistics. Yes, there are some similarities, and knowing one helps you move to the other, but it’s not as simple a jump as you’d think. Volatility clustering and ARCH/GARCH models are regression techniques, sure, but they are completely unique to finance, AFAIK. Portfolio optimization is fairly unique too.
And in pretty much all statistical modeling, the best models are based on understanding theories of the underlying processes, and you need the CFA (or some other source) to give you a base in that.
As for Harvard Ph.D. students being dismissive of CFA as rote learning, just realize that a Ph.D. grad student from pretty much anywhere is generally a somewhat bitter person. They’re usually poor students slaving away being told that they’re not really intellectually good enough to play with the big boys (and girls) and trying to justify every thought they have with some reference to existing literature. It’s a pretty degrading experience, one that often drags on for many years, so many tend to let off steam and justify their own plight by claiming that what they are doing is deeper, more meaningful, more profound than CFA or MBA programs that their competition is doing. There are certainly ways in which CFA and MBA can be considered “lighter” than Ph.D. work, but it’s also true that Ph.D. is overkill for most of life’s needs. I think you’ll find that Ph.Ds who have had their degrees for a while will not poo-hoo CFA and MBA so readily.