Lower semi-target school#46 of 100
Is Boston University a Target School for Investment Banking?
Boston University is a lower semi-target school for investment banking by our count. It ranks #46 of the 100 schools we measure: 219 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 1,661 profiles that include an investment banking job title.
- Rank
- #46 of 100
- At 18 top banks, 2015+
- 219 78% since 2020
- At the elite five
- 107 49% of top-bank total
- IB alumni network
- 1,661 #28 by profiles
- Profiles per 1,000 undergrads
- 89.0 #54 per capita
- US-based
- 1,199 72%
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
Boston University's top-bank rank of #42 now sits four places above its headline #46, yet the older imbalance still shows: 1,661 investment banking profiles overall, but only 219 analysts at the 18 top banks. Of those 219, though, 107 are at the elite five, a 49 percent share that is high for the volume behind it. J.P. Morgan leads the firm counts at 52.
Density is the weak broad reading, #54 at 89 profiles per 1,000 undergraduates, just under the 97.8 median and set against 18,656 undergraduates, while network size ranks #28. The buyside network is where the school is strongest, with 185 hedge fund profiles at #10 and 973 private equity profiles at #21, or 11 and 59 per 100 IB profiles. Only 72 percent of profiles are US-based.
More than a quarter of the network reports a location outside the US, while the top-bank measure is built on analyst titles at a largely US-facing list of firms, so the two figures count overlapping but different populations. The verdict is a broad finance network whose banking core — the thing the headline now measures — is narrower than the network's size suggests.
Across finance
Boston 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.
Where its analysts go
Boston University 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 Boston 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, 1,199 (72%) are currently based in the United States and 462 are abroad. The per-1,000 figure divides the network count by 18,656 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.
