Top 30 schools by IB analyst headcount
Ran an analysis on top 30 undergraduate institutions by # of current IB analysts across EB, EB, and MM banks. Definitely a few surprises in there - didn't expect Vandy to be so high, for example.
Data pulled from 4,000 analyst profiles from LinkedIn, normalized for school, bank, title, and role.

Really interesting data.
- NYU, Indiana, and Michigan churning out finance robots in waves due to having hundreds of students recruiting for IB
- UChicago surprisingly high total numbers. UNC and UC Berkeley surprisingly low compared to top publics
- Wide scattering of Ivies with Penn / Cornell far on the left, Columbia / Harvard / Princeton / Dartmouth in the middle and Brown / Yale on the right or off the map showing vast differences in student interests
- Georgetown placement quality right with Harvard and Princeton at the very top
- Ohio State pipeline to Keybanc in Cleveland doing a lot of work to make the cut
Lots of cool tidbid from the data. I just ran IU for example to see placement -
55% and 60% of BB and EB placement from IU come from IBW (at least to the extent disclosed on LinkedIn), vs just 40% for MM firms and a much smaller % at boutiques.
Likely real #s are higher as not everyone will disclose but you do see the dispersion in recruiting outcomes.
NYU’s quality of placement is actually pretty decent too, better than Indiana and Umich and pretty much the same as uchi
There's clearly a gap between those schools. Interestingly, this is how the schools would line up if grouped by placement quality instead of quantity. UT and UCLA outperform likely due to being targets for Houston and SF/LA while Michigan, UVA, Dartmouth, and Brown surprisingly get pushed down to the 2nd group based on this data.
Targets (~70+% BB and EB): Penn, NYU, UChicago, Cornell, Georgetown, UT, Columbia, Northwestern, Duke, Harvard, Berkeley, Princeton, UCLA, Yale
Semi-targets (~50-60% BB and EB): IU, Michigan, Notre Dame, BC, USC, UVA, Vanderbilt, Emory, Northeastern, UNC, Dartmouth, Brown, WashU,
I don’t think stern is in the same boat as Ross and Kelley lol… look at placement quality
You're right. I was just thinking about the stereotypes of the schools but this shows NYU to be in line with top targets in quality
if you could have coffee chats in person all the time, I’d hope you’d place better than bums in a corn field
This already seems 10x more accurate than that PeakFrameworks analysis a while ago
How? All these numbers seems low?
This doesn't really matter because no one will pick schools like IU or NYU over Princeton, Yale, or Brown. These three ivies only have max 100 who srsly consider and prep for IBD recruiting, while IU and NYU have 600 people business schools with 75% gunning for IBD. But good data collection. I also attend one of the Duke, UChicago, Northwestern, Darty, Cornell type of school, so pretty much unbiased here.
think u miswrote your first sentence
Yes, clearly HYP have far better finance placement per capita but the data does help when picking between schools in the same tier
Stern over brown isn’t unheard of ngl, not saying it’s the right choice though
Congrats on Cornell/Northwestern
Congrats on brown!
Congratulations on Cornell
CONRATS ON CORNELL!
Seems way more accurate than the PeakFramewoeks ranking a while ago
I went through the (painful) work of actually determining if these analysts are in IB vs. other functions, which makes the data more accurate. It's also broken out by group which takes a bit of work to map.
Will be releasing a few more interesting data points in coming days. Have some fun figures on military recruiting for example I'm cooking up.
What are the major differences for people who are too lazy to cross reference?
Schools that went down: UC Berkeley, Harvard, BYU, Yale, Western Ivey
Schools that went up: Indiana, UChicago, Boston College, Vanderbilt
Key difference is PF was 2008-2023 while this is probably 2024-2025 grad dates and includes MM banks
UGA?
38 total analysts US-wide, so just missed the cutoff of top 30.
Weird, pretty sure there are more than 38 analysts country-wide. They have sent at least 28 kids into banking over the past few years from just the Corsair Society
Can someone do the same shit for MF PE/UMM PE. Would love to see how Banks, Groups, Schools stack up
This is coming soon in v 2.0 (probably not for a few months)
yeah that'd be great tho thanks
I did this for MFs 2 years ago by crawling through company websites, NYU definitely dropped off the charts, and as expected Wharton Harvard dominated, the remaining top IB schools were quite evenly distributed
If NYU dropped off the charts, so should Cornell, Michigan, etc
please do this
Wisconsin sleeper
where LSE
Virtually no presence in the US. 5 total current analysts.
It’d be really interesting to see this for NYC specifically. I think some of the other regional schools are definitely boosted by the fact that they place a lot in their local region.
NYC is where it’s at though.
Ask and ye shall receive
Biggest losers are the "regional" targets - IU, UCB, etc. Biggest surprise to me is Washington & Lee - I double checked the data and their presence in NYC is surprisingly strong.
You can also really see the prestige focus of the EBs here.
could u do one for like specific BB/EBs like GS/MS/JPM/EVR/CVP/LAZ/PJT/MOE
This is great - also looks very much in line with the actual industry from my experience.
crazy that UCLA has so many in EBs
UCLA does really well at EBs
4 at Qatalyst, 3 Lazard, 3 Evercore, 6 Moelis, 3 PJT
Interestingly enough majority is in NYC, altho sizeable in West Coast (3 of MOE are LA office)
Also 8 of the UCLA analysts are transfers (NYU, Dartmouth, UChicago, Wharton, etc.)
Lots of UCLA at g dyal
could you tell us which firms you included for MM?
surprised how close ucla and ucb are. even more surprised how much usc is ahead of both.
for all the simps for ucb, usc/ucla seem a better deal, if you're in-state for ucla, or if you can afford usc for better recruiting prospects. no need to spend 4 years in a drug-infested homeless camp when you can go to school in socal for the same/better.
Berkeley is also a lot more prestigious... social life matters after college
exactly the type of stuff you'd hear from a crusty nerd at uc backup
Would you say that Vandy is actually accelerating very well and they are becoming more prestigious on the street? How would you compare UVA to them? UVA-McIntire?
Target level placements the past 2 years, but the PJT Park Hill incident may throw a minor wrench in it.
Do you think Vandy is about the same level as UVA McIntire for placements then? Or would you say they are better or worse
Inaccurate data. I know for sure SMU has more than 60 alums in IB right now
i trust this guy
This is analysts only, and only at BB/EB/MM platforms
Still seems light for SMU.
mainly in Houston offices lol
This is awesome. Curious - have you done this for PE?
My product is currently geared towards IB recruiting, so I've been laser focused on getting bankers in. So no - PE is on the roadmap (helping inform folks what groups/firms exit where) but not quite there yet.
I feel the PE route is not very monetizable given recruiting is gated by HHs so have deferred that in favor of getting a really rich IB dataset first
This is awesome and seems pretty accurate - thank you
Anything interesting you found about Fordham?
From this list, looks like the tiers are (adjusting for quality and school size/interest (per capita)
1 Wharton UChicago Harvard Princeton
2 Columbia Northwestern Duke
3 NYU Cornell Georgetown Dartmouth Brown
4 Michigan UVA Berkeley USC Notre Dame Vanderbilt
5 Indiana UNC UT Austin BC Emory UCLA WashU
6 Northeastern Florida SMU Wisconsin
7 Ohio State
Seems to track. Surprising (high): Chicago, Georgetown, USC. Surprising (low): Michigan
Also interesting: this list tracks with acceptance rates far better than conventional wisdom/what the subjective rankings on this forum say. NYU/Georgetown up with some low ivies, Michigan down, Northwestern up with md-ivies
How much of this did Claude do?
I know it isnt really possible to filter for how many people are actually trying to recruit for banking, but I feel like for schools like UVA, that are very consulting focused with only a minority recruiting for banking, this can be a little misleading.
UVA is more of an IB school than consulting (per UVA student)
Are ucla numbers better than expected?
Hey guys -
Just a heads up I am working on an updated version of this with (a) slightly fuller data, there is probably slight under-counting here, (b) broken out by class year so we can see the evolution of placement and going back several years, and (c) tracking exits by both bank and group, also over time.
This will take a couple of months - if you'd like to see it, those who sign up to SuperdayIQ will receive the report first thing when it comes out.
Thanks all for engaging! Was a fun/rewarding project independent of the business idea. :)
do for MF/UMM PE
I wonder where all those UVA apologists went after seeing this… Threw so much MS at me for stating Stern easily outdoes their semi-target
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