Lower semi-target school#57 of 100
Is Bentley University a Target School for Investment Banking?
Bentley University is a lower semi-target school for investment banking by our count. It ranks #57 of the 100 schools we measure: 109 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 811 profiles that include an investment banking job title.
- Rank
- #57 of 100
- At 18 top banks, 2015+
- 109 77% since 2020
- At the elite five
- 39 36% of top-bank total
- IB alumni network
- 811 #52 by profiles
- Profiles per 1,000 undergrads
- 186.4 #30 per capita
- US-based
- 601 74%
In the 36 to 60 band the pipeline still exists — every school here shows at least 92 analysts at the top banks — but it is thin enough that you have to build your own. Expect to source interviews through cold emails and off-cycle applications rather than campus recruiting, and expect the alumni you find to remember what that climb felt like.
What the numbers say
Bentley shows 73 private equity profiles per 100 IB profiles, the richest buyside mix in this tier and a reflection of 592 private equity profiles that rank #36, twenty-one places better than its IB rank of #57. Hedge funds sit at 82 profiles and rank #33, also ahead of the banking rank. The network's centre of gravity leans further from banking than almost any other school here.
On the precise measure the picture reverses. Bentley has 109 top-bank analysts, ranking #61 against a headline rank of #57, a four-place shortfall the blend's per-student leg claws back. Of those 109, 39 are at the elite five for a 36 percent share, and 84 graduated in 2018 or later. Density remains solid at 186.4 profiles per 1,000 undergraduates versus the 97.8 median.
The honest reading is that the broad alumni network outruns hard placement at the named top banks — #52 by network size against #61 on analyst seats — and 74 percent US-based means roughly a quarter of profiles sit outside the country. Bentley alumni are demonstrably present across finance in volume, and the #57 headline now prices in a top-bank pipeline that stays thinner than the buyside numbers suggest.
Across finance
Bentley 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. 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 Bentley 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, 601 (74%) are currently based in the United States and 210 are abroad. The per-1,000 figure divides the network count by 4,350 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.
