Semi-target school#32 of 100
Is Amherst College a Target School for Investment Banking?
Amherst College is a semi-target school for investment banking by our count. It ranks #32 of the 100 schools we measure: 152 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 598 profiles that include an investment banking job title.
- Rank
- #32 of 100
- At 18 top banks, 2015+
- 152 78% since 2020
- At the elite five
- 76 50% of top-bank total
- IB alumni network
- 598 #65 by profiles
- Profiles per 1,000 undergrads
- 313.1 #16 per capita
- US-based
- 550 92%
Schools ranked 16 through 35 place real numbers into top banks — at least 152 analysts each in this data — but the per-school pipeline runs thinner. Alumni will answer your emails, and the difference between getting an interview and getting skipped comes down to outreach volume. Start networking earlier than your target-school peers and treat every alumni conversation as a referral opportunity.
What the numbers say
Roughly one in four of Amherst's 598 IB profiles corresponds to a recent-era top-bank analyst: 152 people hold those seats among 2013 graduates and later. For a school with 1,910 undergraduates, that conversion of a small alumni base into concentrated top-bank presence is the defining number: the raw count ranks #46, and the per-student leg of the blend carries the headline fourteen places higher, to #32.
The broad-network reads diverge by 49 places. Amherst ranks #16 per capita on 313.1 profiles per 1,000 undergraduates, more than three times the 97.8 median, while ranking only #65 by raw count. Within the top-bank cohort, 76 people are at the elite five for a 50 percent share, and 119 of the 152 graduated in 2018 or later.
The buyside network barely registers by comparison, with 218 private equity profiles ranking #77 and 21 hedge fund profiles ranking #90, or 36 private equity profiles per 100 IB profiles. Ninety-two percent of profiles are US-based. Amherst produces a small stream of alumni who land well at the strongest banks, and the total network is too small to lean on for coverage across every corner of finance.
Across finance
Amherst College’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. The last column shows the network mix: profiles per 100 IB profiles.
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 Amherst Collegein 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, 550 (92%) are currently based in the United States and 48 are abroad. The per-1,000 figure divides the network count by 1,910 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.
