Lower semi-target school#58 of 100
Is Bowdoin College a Target School for Investment Banking?
Bowdoin College is a lower semi-target school for investment banking by our count. It ranks #58 of the 100 schools we measure: 92 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 390 profiles that include an investment banking job title.
- Rank
- #58 of 100
- At 18 top banks, 2015+
- 92 82% since 2020
- At the elite five
- 33 36% of top-bank total
- IB alumni network
- 390 #81 by profiles
- Profiles per 1,000 undergrads
- 210.8 #26 per capita
- US-based
- 364 93%
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
92 of Bowdoin's 390 investment banking profiles belong to alumni who worked as investment banking analysts at the 18 top banks after graduating in 2013 or later, better than one in five of the entire banking network, from a college of 1,850 undergrads. That top-bank count ranks #71 while the raw IB count ranks only #81.
Density reaches 210.8 profiles per 1,000 undergraduates against a 97.8 median, which is what carries the #26 per-capita rank. That per-student strength also lifts the top-bank-anchored headline to #58, ahead of both raw counts. The recent build is strong, with 75 of the 92 top-bank analysts, or 82 percent, graduating in 2018 or later. 93 percent of profiles are US-based, and the elite five hold 33 of the 92 top-bank analysts.
Buyside depth is where Bowdoin falls off, with private equity at #88 on 162 profiles and venture capital at #89 on 36. Absolute counts stay small everywhere because the college itself is small. For a student who wants an analyst seat at a large bank rather than a long buyside runway, the density and the recency both point the right way.
Across finance
Bowdoin 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.
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 Bowdoin 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, 364 (93%) are currently based in the United States and 26 are abroad. The per-1,000 figure divides the network count by 1,850 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.
