Non-target school#88 of 100
Is American University a Target School for Investment Banking?
American University is a non-target school for investment banking by our count. It ranks #88 of the 100 schools we measure: 42 alumni list investment banking analyst titles alongside the 18 top banks from classes of roughly 2015 onward, weighted for school size, and its wider banking alumni network holds 357 profiles that include an investment banking job title.
- Rank
- #88 of 100
- At 18 top banks, 2015+
- 42 79% since 2020
- At the elite five
- 20 48% of top-bank total
- IB alumni network
- 357 #86 by profiles
- Profiles per 1,000 undergrads
- 45.7 #68 per capita
- US-based
- 251 70%
A rank below 60 puts the odds against you without ending your chances: every school on this list has placed analysts into the top banks. Plan on cold email volume that feels unreasonable and a resume built from early finance internships. The students who make it from this tier start earlier and follow up longer than everyone they are competing against.
What the numbers say
20 of American University's 42 top-bank analysts are at the elite five, a 48 percent elite share. The full group of 42 covers graduates of 2013 or later who are matched to the 18 top banks by an investment banking analyst title tracked here, and 33 of them, 79 percent, graduated in 2018 or later, so the network skews heavily toward recent classes.
Density is the stronger of the two broad reads: 357 IB profiles across 7,817 undergraduates is 45.7 per 1,000 undergraduates and a #68 per-capita rank, against #86 by network size. 70 percent of profiles are currently US-based, leaving roughly 106 located outside the United States, a wider international spread than the raw counts alone suggest. Private equity representation runs 66 profiles per 100 IB profiles.
The top-bank rank of #93 trails both the #88 headline and the #86 rank by network size, which means the profile base is broader than the outcomes contained within it, and 42 analysts across roughly a decade is a small cohort in absolute terms. It remains 42 documented arrivals at the largest banks, achieved from a student body of 7,817, and that is the number worth carrying forward.
Across finance
American University’s rank in each vertical we count, by the same title-phrase method. Bars show its count as a share of that ranking’s #1 school.
Nearby in the ranking
How we counted
Counts come from People Data Labs, which aggregates public professional profiles. The headline rank is anchored on the strict measure: profiles that list American Universityin their education, a job title containing “investment banking analyst”, one of 18 named top banks as an employer, and a graduation year of 2013 or later — the analyst classes of roughly 2015 onward, deduplicated across banks. Those conditions hold on the profile rather than on a single job, so the title and the bank are usually but not provably the same role. The rank weights that count at two-thirds and the same count per 1,000 undergraduates at one-third, so school size is priced in. The elite-five figure counts analysts at Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, J.P. Morgan, Evercore, and Centerview. Data pulled 2026-08-25.
The alumni-network figure is broader: everyone who has held a title containing “investment banking” at any firm worldwide, across all years, including graduate alumni. It reads as the size of the school’s banking network rather than a single era’s placement. Of those, 251 (70%) are currently based in the United States and 106 are abroad. The per-1,000 figure divides the network count by 7,817 total undergraduates reported for fall 2023 in the NCES IPEDS Fall Enrollment dataset — a school-size comparison, not a placement rate for a graduating class.
