Semi-target school#16 of 100
Is Brown University a Target School for Investment Banking?
Brown University is a semi-target school for investment banking by our count. It ranks #16 of the 100 schools we measure: 535 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 1,889 profiles that include an investment banking job title.
- Rank
- #16 of 100
- At 18 top banks, 2015+
- 535 81% since 2020
- At the elite five
- 268 50% of top-bank total
- IB alumni network
- 1,889 #24 by profiles
- Profiles per 1,000 undergrads
- 244.0 #21 per capita
- US-based
- 1,569 83%
Schools ranked 16 through 35 place real numbers into top banks — at least 152 analysts each in this data — but the per-school pipeline runs thinner. Alumni will answer your emails, and the difference between getting an interview and getting skipped comes down to outreach volume. Start networking earlier than your target-school peers and treat every alumni conversation as a referral opportunity.
What the numbers say
Goldman Sachs employs 135 of Brown's 535 recent top-bank analysts — 25 percent of the entire group at one firm, and well ahead of the next-largest count, Bank of America's 80. Nothing else in the school's data approaches that relationship. The remaining large-bank counts cluster tightly, with J.P. Morgan at 69 and Morgan Stanley at 66, and elite-five firms hold 268 people overall, or 50 percent.
Count and density rank almost identically, #24 on 1,889 profiles and #21 at 244 profiles per 1,000 undergraduates, roughly two and a half times the 97.8 median. The headline #16 runs ahead of all of them, anchored on the #19 top-bank count and lifted the rest of the way by the per-student leg. Eighty-one percent of the analyst group graduated in 2018 or later, 83 percent of the wider network is US-based, and venture capital runs 16 profiles per 100 IB profiles.
Firm counts record where people have held analyst titles since 2013, not current headcount, so a 135-person Goldman Sachs figure is cumulative rather than a snapshot of who works there today. The verdict is a compact network that concentrates unusually hard at one firm, and at the elite five generally.
Across finance
Brown 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
Brown 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 Brown 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, 1,569 (83%) are currently based in the United States and 320 are abroad. The per-1,000 figure divides the network count by 7,741 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.
