Lower semi-target school#49 of 100
Is Carnegie Mellon University a Target School for Investment Banking?
Carnegie Mellon University is a lower semi-target school for investment banking by our count. It ranks #49 of the 100 schools we measure: 137 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 781 profiles that include an investment banking job title.
- Rank
- #49 of 100
- At 18 top banks, 2015+
- 137 74% since 2020
- At the elite five
- 54 39% of top-bank total
- IB alumni network
- 781 #55 by profiles
- Profiles per 1,000 undergrads
- 107.1 #47 per capita
- US-based
- 617 79%
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
Carnegie Mellon shows 22 venture capital profiles per 100 IB profiles, the highest venture mix in this tier. Those 171 venture profiles rank #38, eleven places better than the school's IB rank of #49, which says the network's strength is not concentrated in banking so much as spread across the investing side of finance.
On banking specifically the numbers are workmanlike. Carnegie Mellon holds 137 top-bank analyst seats, ranking #53 by count, with the blend's per-student leg nudging the headline four places up to #49. Of those analysts, 54 sit at the elite five for a 39 percent share and 102 graduated in 2018 or later. Density sits just above the bar at 107.1 profiles per 1,000 undergraduates versus the 97.8 median, ranking #47 per capita.
Twenty-one percent of profiles are located outside the United States, so the domestic banking network is smaller than the 781 total implies, and 137 top-bank analysts is a thin base to recruit through. Carnegie Mellon works best for someone who values a network that reaches deep into venture and investing roles as much as into banking itself.
Across finance
Carnegie Mellon 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.
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 Carnegie Mellon 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, 617 (79%) are currently based in the United States and 164 are abroad. The per-1,000 figure divides the network count by 7,289 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.
