Lower semi-target school#39 of 100
Is Claremont McKenna College a Target School for Investment Banking?
Claremont McKenna College is a lower semi-target school for investment banking by our count. It ranks #39 of the 100 schools we measure: 132 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 514 profiles that include an investment banking job title.
- Rank
- #39 of 100
- At 18 top banks, 2015+
- 132 73% since 2020
- At the elite five
- 52 39% of top-bank total
- IB alumni network
- 514 #71 by profiles
- Profiles per 1,000 undergrads
- 372.2 #13 per capita
- US-based
- 468 91%
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
Claremont McKenna records 372.2 IB profiles per 1,000 undergraduates, the highest density in this tier and nearly four times the 97.8 median. That figure ranks it #13 per capita while its 514 total profiles rank #71 by network size, a 58-place split that is the widest in this tier. With 1,381 undergraduates, everything about this school's numbers is a ratio story.
The density does convert into placement. Its 132 top-bank analysts rank #54 by count, and the blend's per-student leg lifts the headline fifteen places higher, to #39. Of those 132, 52 sit at the elite five for a 39 percent share, and 97 graduated in 2018 or later, a 73 percent recent share. Ninety-one percent of profiles are US-based.
The total network is one of the smallest in this tier at 514 profiles, and the buyside tail thins out fast, with 233 private equity profiles at #75 and 20 hedge fund profiles at #92. Claremont McKenna offers exceptional banking density per graduate, and the sheer number of alumni available to help is limited by how few people the school graduates.
Across finance
Claremont McKenna 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. 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 Claremont McKenna 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, 468 (91%) are currently based in the United States and 46 are abroad. The per-1,000 figure divides the network count by 1,381 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.
