Which banks hire the most Berkeley analysts?

By our count, Goldman Sachs leads with 150 Berkeley alumni holding investment banking analyst titles, then Morgan Stanley with 141 and J.P. Morgan with 126, among graduates of 2013 or later at the 18 top banks we measure.

Do banks treat Berkeley as a target or a semi-target?

A target on the West Coast and a semi-target for New York, by forum consensus. Our count puts it #12 of 100, with the top-bank analyst count alone ranking #6.

Do you need to be in Haas to recruit for banking from Berkeley?

No. Alumni on Wall Street Oasis report economics and applied math majors at the same banks; Haas mainly eases the coursework and the curve.

Which Berkeley clubs feed investment banking?

The business fraternities UBG, CBA, and BAP carry the largest pipelines by forum accounts, with BFC and UFA behind them, and UBG claims the most placements at Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley of any campus organization.

How many UC Berkeley alumni work in private equity?

1,900 UC Berkeley alumni profiles include a private equity job title, ranking #6 of the 100 schools in our database.

How many UC Berkeley alumni work in venture capital?

1,044 UC Berkeley alumni profiles include a venture capital job title, ranking #1 of the 100 schools in our database.

How many UC Berkeley alumni work in hedge fund?

215 UC Berkeley alumni profiles include a hedge fund job title, ranking #7 of the 100 schools in our database.

Target school#12 of 100

UC Berkeley investment banking placement: is it a target school?

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.

By Ben Chon, former J.P. Morgan investment banking analystUpdated 2026-10-16

Photo: Gku · CC BY-SA 3.0

Rank: #12of 100 schools
At 18 top banks, 2015+: 83574% graduated 2018+
At the elite five: 42451% of the top-bank total
IB alumni network: 4,590#6 by profiles
Per 1,000 undergrads: 138.8#41 per capita
US-based: 72%3,320 profiles

TargetTarget 1–15Semi-targetSemi 16–35Lower semi-targetLower 36–60Non-targetNon-target 61–100

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.

Is Berkeley a target school for investment banking?

The verdict, from the data

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.

Berkeley investment banking placement by bank

Analysts, classes of ~2015+

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.

Banks with fewer than five matched analysts, and banks not yet measured for this school, are left off the list. Of the 835 analysts at the 18 banks, 424 (51%) are at the elite five: Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, J.P. Morgan, Evercore, and Centerview.

Where Berkeley alumni land beyond investment banking

Alumni profiles, all years

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. Per 100 IB shows the network mix: profiles per 100 IB profiles.

How to recruit for investment banking from Berkeley

Haas reports its undergraduate Class of 2025 at a $100,000 average starting salary, with 90% of graduates accepting a job or a continued-education offer within three months. Financial services heads the industry list ahead of consulting and technology, and Berkeley Career Engagement's first-destinations dashboard carries three years of jobs, employers, and pay by major.

Undergraduate Business Group calls itself Berkeley's premier business organization, lists investment banking, consulting, private equity, and venture among its members' placements, and claims it sends more members to Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley than every other campus organization combined. The claim is the club's own.

Forum accounts agree that recruiting at Berkeley runs through selective organizations: the business fraternities UBG, CBA, and BAP have the largest pipelines and the hardest admissions, BFC and UFA follow, and a 2026 poster warns that many opportunities are gatekept behind those clubs in an intense pre-professional culture.

The same threads describe a West Coast target and an East Coast semi-target: Goldman, Morgan Stanley, J.P. Morgan, and Qatalyst fill San Francisco technology groups from Haas, Los Angeles offices recruit on campus, and New York groups mostly do not, so New York seats come from alumni outreach. One poster who asked Haas directly was told roughly a fifth of its students go into banking and high finance.

Haas admission is not the gate. Alumni on the forum say economics and applied math majors land the same Goldman, Morgan Stanley, and Qatalyst seats, that Haas mostly makes the coursework and the curve easier, and that the campus-wide grade deflation is the real cost for a GPA-screened industry.

Our count covers the whole university, which is why the reads diverge: 4,590 investment banking profiles rank #6 by size and 835 top-bank analysts rank #6, while 33,078 undergraduates push the per-capita rank to #41 and the headline to #12. The venture network is the standout, with 1,044 venture capital profiles, the largest count of any school we measure.

What Berkeley publishes about outcomes

2 figures, 1 source

Every figure below is quoted from the source named above it, as published; none is ours. Read them beside our counts, which measure a different thing: analysts matched to named banks rather than a graduating class's outcomes.

Berkeley Haas Undergraduate Program, Career Resources

Average starting salary, Haas undergraduate Class of 2025: $100,000
Accepted a job or continued-education offer within three months, Class of 2025: 90%

How Berkeley compares with schools ranked nearby

Analysts at 18 top banks, ~2015+

See the full ranking of 100 schools →

Berkeley investment banking FAQ

8 questions

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.
Which banks hire the most Berkeley analysts?
By our count, Goldman Sachs leads with 150 Berkeley alumni holding investment banking analyst titles, then Morgan Stanley with 141 and J.P. Morgan with 126, among graduates of 2013 or later at the 18 top banks we measure.
Do banks treat Berkeley as a target or a semi-target?
A target on the West Coast and a semi-target for New York, by forum consensus. Our count puts it #12 of 100, with the top-bank analyst count alone ranking #6.
Do you need to be in Haas to recruit for banking from Berkeley?
No. Alumni on Wall Street Oasis report economics and applied math majors at the same banks; Haas mainly eases the coursework and the curve.
Which Berkeley clubs feed investment banking?
The business fraternities UBG, CBA, and BAP carry the largest pipelines by forum accounts, with BFC and UFA behind them, and UBG claims the most placements at Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley of any campus organization.
How many UC Berkeley alumni work in private equity?
1,900 UC Berkeley alumni profiles include a private equity job title, ranking #6 of the 100 schools in our database.
How many UC Berkeley alumni work in venture capital?
1,044 UC Berkeley alumni profiles include a venture capital job title, ranking #1 of the 100 schools in our database.
How many UC Berkeley alumni work in hedge fund?
215 UC Berkeley alumni profiles include a hedge fund job title, ranking #7 of the 100 schools in our database.

How we counted Berkeley’s analysts

Counts come from People Data Labs, which aggregates public professional profiles. The headline rank is anchored on the strict measure: profiles that list UC Berkeley in 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 2026-10-16.

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.