Target school#12 of 100
Is UC Berkeley a Target School for Investment Banking?
UC Berkeley is a target school for investment banking by our count. It ranks #12 of the 100 schools we measure: 835 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 4,590 profiles that include an investment banking job title.
- Rank
- #12 of 100
- At 18 top banks, 2015+
- 835 74% since 2020
- At the elite five
- 424 51% of top-bank total
- IB alumni network
- 4,590 #6 by profiles
- Profiles per 1,000 undergrads
- 138.8 #41 per capita
- US-based
- 3,320 72%
Ranks 1 through 15 are targets, and every school in this tier has placed at least 521 analysts into the 18 top banks since the classes of roughly 2015. The pipeline is proven at scale and banks arrive on campus expecting to hire, so your job is to use the machine early. Reach out to alumni your freshman and sophomore years, because at a target the competition sits in your own classrooms.
What the numbers say
UC Berkeley fields 4,590 investment banking profiles — the #6 count among all 100 schools — out of an undergraduate population of 33,078, the largest of any school in this top 15. Spread across that enrollment, the network thins to 138.8 profiles per 1,000 undergraduates, good for only #41 per capita. The #12 headline rests instead on the strict measure, where 835 recent top-bank analysts also rank #6.
The standout inside the network is venture: 1,044 venture capital profiles, the #1 count among all 100 schools, and 23 venture capital profiles per 100 IB profiles — a tilt only Stanford (29) beats in this group. Private equity runs deep as well, with 1,900 profiles ranking #6 of 100. Meanwhile 72% of the network is US-based — 3,320 profiles — toward the lower end of this tier.
Absolute counts flatter a school of this size: 33,078 undergraduates generate large alumni totals almost automatically, so the 4,590 figure proves reach without proving odds for any individual student — and the per-capita rank of #41 is a reminder of how much that total dilutes. Taken together, Berkeley reads as a network built on sheer breadth, with a venture bench no other school in the dataset can out-count.
Across finance
UC Berkeley’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.
Where its analysts go
UC Berkeley analysts at each of the top banks we measured — graduates of 2013 or later with investment banking analyst titles. Banks with published feeder pages link through.
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 UC Berkeleyin 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, 3,320 (72%) are currently based in the United States and 1,270 are abroad. The per-1,000 figure divides the network count by 33,078 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.
