Which banks hire the most Brown analysts?

By our count, Goldman Sachs leads with 135 Brown alumni holding investment banking analyst titles, then Bank of America with 80 and J.P. Morgan with 69, among graduates of 2013 or later at the 18 top banks we measure.

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

A semi-target by our count at #16, one place outside the target tier, with a top-bank count that ranks #19. Forum accounts call it a target with light competition and a loyal alumni base.

Which Brown clubs feed investment banking?

Brown Finance Club for the banking track and its freshman-sophomore cohort; Brown Investment Group for investing. Forum advice is to join any of the investment groups and keep the GPA high.

Why are there fewer Brown alumni in banking than at other Ivies?

Fewer students recruit, by forum accounts, though that is changing. The ones who do concentrate at Goldman Sachs, which holds a quarter of the recent top-bank analysts we count.

How many Brown University alumni work in private equity?

806 Brown University alumni profiles include a private equity job title, ranking #29 of the 100 schools in our database.

How many Brown University alumni work in venture capital?

297 Brown University alumni profiles include a venture capital job title, ranking #20 of the 100 schools in our database.

How many Brown University alumni work in hedge fund?

81 Brown University alumni profiles include a hedge fund job title, ranking #34 of the 100 schools in our database.

Semi-target school#16 of 100

Brown University investment banking placement: is it a target school?

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.

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

Photo: No machine-readable author provided. Dale182 assumed (based on copyright claims). · CC BY-SA 3.0

Rank: #16of 100 schools
At 18 top banks, 2015+: 53581% graduated 2018+
At the elite five: 26850% of the top-bank total
IB alumni network: 1,889#24 by profiles
Per 1,000 undergrads: 244.0#21 per capita
US-based: 83%1,569 profiles

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

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.

Is Brown a target school for investment banking?

The verdict, from the data

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.

Brown investment banking placement by bank

Analysts, classes of ~2015+

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.

Banks with fewer than five matched analysts, and banks not yet measured for this school, are left off the list. Of the 535 analysts at the 18 banks, 268 (50%) are at the elite five: Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, J.P. Morgan, Evercore, and Centerview.

Where Brown alumni land beyond investment banking

Alumni profiles, all years

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

How to recruit for investment banking from Brown

Brown has no business school. The Tisch Center's finance and consulting pathway says about 1 in 4 Brown students secure opportunities in those fields, among the most common destinations, with investment banking, asset management, wealth management, and corporate finance the finance routes, and outcomes searchable by concentration.

Brown Investment Group, founded in 1987, is the oldest and largest investment club on campus: a research committee of 35 students inside a general body of more than 500, running a core fund of $900K or more that dates to 2002 and a long/short fund of $100K or more started in 2023.

Brown Finance Club, founded in 2017, is the banking-specific organization: weekly educational meetings, annual New York treks, mentorship, mock interviews, and an alumni database, plus a cohort for second-semester freshmen and first-semester sophomores started in 2025 that the club says has placed nearly every member into finance roles in New York, San Francisco, and Chicago. The claim is the club’s own.

Forum accounts list Goldman Sachs, Centerview, Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, and Barclays as the banks that interview on campus, with J.P. Morgan, UBS, Qatalyst, Perella Weinberg, and Evercore giving first rounds without a campus visit, and Insight Partners taking several students a year.

The standing forum claim is that few Brown students want banking, which makes it easier to break in than at Columbia or NYU; a 2026 poster pushes back that the campus has become as pre-professional as its Ivy peers and that a large share of economics majors now recruit. Tier lists place Brown with Dartmouth, Cornell, and Northwestern, and alumni are described as loyal.

Our data shows the concentration those accounts imply: Goldman Sachs employs 135 of the 535 recent top-bank analysts, 25% of the entire group, and the elite five hold 50%. The headline #16 sits one place outside the target tier, lifted by the per-student leg from a #19 top-bank count.

What Brown publishes about outcomes

5 figures, 2 sources

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.

Brown Investment Group

Brown Investment Group founded: 1987
Brown Investment Group research committee: 35 students
Brown Investment Group general body: 500+
Brown Investment Group core fund (est. 2002): $900K+

Brown Finance Club

Brown Finance Club founded: 2017

How Brown compares with schools ranked nearby

Analysts at 18 top banks, ~2015+

See the full ranking of 100 schools →

Brown investment banking FAQ

8 questions

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.
Which banks hire the most Brown analysts?
By our count, Goldman Sachs leads with 135 Brown alumni holding investment banking analyst titles, then Bank of America with 80 and J.P. Morgan with 69, among graduates of 2013 or later at the 18 top banks we measure.
Do banks treat Brown as a target or a semi-target?
A semi-target by our count at #16, one place outside the target tier, with a top-bank count that ranks #19. Forum accounts call it a target with light competition and a loyal alumni base.
Which Brown clubs feed investment banking?
Brown Finance Club for the banking track and its freshman-sophomore cohort; Brown Investment Group for investing. Forum advice is to join any of the investment groups and keep the GPA high.
Why are there fewer Brown alumni in banking than at other Ivies?
Fewer students recruit, by forum accounts, though that is changing. The ones who do concentrate at Goldman Sachs, which holds a quarter of the recent top-bank analysts we count.
How many Brown University alumni work in private equity?
806 Brown University alumni profiles include a private equity job title, ranking #29 of the 100 schools in our database.
How many Brown University alumni work in venture capital?
297 Brown University alumni profiles include a venture capital job title, ranking #20 of the 100 schools in our database.
How many Brown University alumni work in hedge fund?
81 Brown University alumni profiles include a hedge fund job title, ranking #34 of the 100 schools in our database.

How we counted Brown’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 Brown University 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, 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.