Non-target school#65 of 100
Is Bucknell University a Target School for Investment Banking?
Bucknell University is a non-target school for investment banking by our count. It ranks #65 of the 100 schools we measure: 88 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 465 profiles that include an investment banking job title.
- Rank
- #65 of 100
- At 18 top banks, 2015+
- 88 85% since 2020
- At the elite five
- 38 43% of top-bank total
- IB alumni network
- 465 #74 by profiles
- Profiles per 1,000 undergrads
- 120.9 #43 per capita
- US-based
- 448 96%
A rank below 60 puts the odds against you without ending your chances: every school on this list has placed analysts into the top banks. Plan on cold email volume that feels unreasonable and a resume built from early finance internships. The students who make it from this tier start earlier and follow up longer than everyone they are competing against.
What the numbers say
85 percent of Bucknell's top-bank analysts graduated in 2018 or later, 75 of 88, which says the school's presence at the 18 largest firms is being built now rather than inherited from older classes. The full count of 88 alumni with investment banking analyst titles alongside those banks ranks #74, nine places behind the #65 headline position.
The school posts 120.9 profiles per 1,000 undergraduates against the 97.8 median, from 465 IB profiles and 3,846 undergrads, good for #43 on broad density, and the same small-campus arithmetic applied to the analyst count is what lifts the headline above the raw #74. 96 percent of profiles sit in the United States. The elite five hold 38 of the 88 top-bank analysts, a 43 percent share.
Counts are modest in absolute terms and the buyside network is the thinnest part of the picture, with venture capital at #90 on 34 profiles and private equity at #86 on 175. Bucknell's case rests on freshness and domestic concentration rather than volume, which is a reasonable base for a student targeting analyst recruiting directly out of undergrad.
Across finance
Bucknell 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.
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 Bucknell 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, 448 (96%) are currently based in the United States and 17 are abroad. The per-1,000 figure divides the network count by 3,846 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.
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