What Is a Target School?
A target school is a university that investment banks recruit from directly. The bank holds information sessions on campus, runs a dedicated resume drop for that school, and fills a meaningful share of each analyst class from its graduates. Being at a target does not get you an offer, but it puts you in the room where offers are decided.
The label comes from the banks' own hiring data rather than from any published ranking. A school is a target for a given bank when that bank has hired from it steadily for years. That is why the list differs from bank to bank: a school can be a core target for Goldman Sachs and barely register at a middle market firm.
How Banks Decide
Recruiting teams track where their analysts came from and where their best performers came from. Schools that keep producing analysts who earn top bonus buckets and stay past two years earn dedicated recruiting budgets. Alumni density matters too, because senior bankers push to recruit from their own alma maters. The result is a stable core of roughly a dozen schools per bank, with a longer tail that shifts every few years.
What It Means for Recruiting
At a target, the process comes to you. Applications open through the school's career portal, first-round interviews are often on campus, and alumni are easy to reach because they expect the outreach. The competition is the rest of your class, which is fierce, but the path is well marked.
If you are not at a target, the same seats exist. You reach them through networking rather than a portal, and you start a year earlier than your target-school peers, because nobody is coming to campus to find you. rareliquid's target schools ranking measures analyst placement at 18 banks for 100 US schools, so you can see exactly where your school stands instead of guessing from forum threads.
