I have been admitted to the Booth EMBA with a 20k scholarship. This leaves a shortfall of 150k USD.

My goal is to switch from a senior legal role in an investment bank to a more senior executive role at a hedge fund or similar. Any take on whether this huge investment can really be an amazing leverage for my career? At the moment I don’t think so but happy to be contradicted and to have other views.

Booth invented the EMBA. It has a uniquely strong reputation for data-driven leadership. It's absolutely one of the strongest options, and the cost is a fraction of the uplift in salary most students experience. The question is: is this the best-placed business school network for your goals? Wharton, Columbia and Stern would be better options, assuming you are looking at the USA.

The issue is that I have a full time job in London so I need a local business school or a school with attendance for 5 consecutive days every 5 weeks for example. I checked Wharton and Columbia and I don’t think they offer this. I hadn’t thought of Stern as I thought the reputation was not as strong but I will have a look. 

I have just double checked. Wharton does have an online format but it has the same price as the physical version (so 40k more than Booth) and I doubt you would have the same networking/collegiate feeling. What are your thoughts? Anyone considering that?

The Columbia London EMBA could be an option: https://www.emba-global.com/ 
Are you focussed on the US? LBS is the obvious European option, and that's less costly. 

The LBS/Columbia global MBA is actually priced USD 224,600 which is more than Booth. I agree LBS London is cheaper and could be an option but I feel for good reasons a lot of people do it and Booth might make me stand out a bit more and give me access to a smaller more collegiate group of alumni. The flip side is that their career centre will be much less active than LBS in London but I don’t really expect that to be so relevant for an executive MBA compared to an MBA.

Compare the scale of the alumni networks on your target markets.