Non-target school#91 of 100
Is University of Colorado Boulder a Target School for Investment Banking?
University of Colorado Boulder is a non-target school for investment banking by our count. It ranks #91 of the 100 schools we measure: 56 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 547 profiles that include an investment banking job title.
- Rank
- #91 of 100
- At 18 top banks, 2015+
- 56 75% since 2020
- At the elite five
- 25 45% of top-bank total
- IB alumni network
- 547 #67 by profiles
- Profiles per 1,000 undergrads
- 17.0 #91 per capita
- US-based
- 474 87%
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
Colorado Boulder's alumni network leans toward the buyside more than its banking rank implies, carrying 55 private equity profiles and 23 venture capital profiles per 100 IB profiles. The 125 venture capital profiles rank #46 and the 301 private equity profiles rank #60, both well ahead of the school's #91 headline position in banking itself.
The banking side is thinner. 56 alumni have worked as investment banking analysts at the 18 top banks since the 2013 class, ranking #85, with 42 of those graduating in 2018 or later and 25 sitting at the elite five, a 45 percent share. Density is 17 profiles per 1,000 undergraduates against a 97.8 median, from 547 IB profiles and 32,105 undergrads.
The limitation is arithmetic: 56 top-bank analysts across roughly a decade of graduating classes is a short list of people to reach, and hedge funds sit at #69 with 39 profiles. Colorado Boulder is a stronger base for reaching finance broadly than for a direct route into a large bank's analyst class, though that route is documented and recent.
Across finance
University of Colorado Boulder’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 University of Colorado Boulderin 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, 474 (87%) are currently based in the United States and 73 are abroad. The per-1,000 figure divides the network count by 32,105 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.
