Target school#8 of 100
Is Cornell University a Target School for Investment Banking?
Cornell University is a target school for investment banking by our count. It ranks #8 of the 100 schools we measure: 1,144 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 4,711 profiles that include an investment banking job title.
- Rank
- #8 of 100
- At 18 top banks, 2015+
- 1,144 78% since 2020
- At the elite five
- 533 47% of top-bank total
- IB alumni network
- 4,711 #5 by profiles
- Profiles per 1,000 undergrads
- 293.5 #18 per capita
- US-based
- 3,874 82%
Ranks 1 through 15 are targets, and every school in this tier has placed at least 521 analysts into the 18 top banks since the classes of roughly 2015. The pipeline is proven at scale and banks arrive on campus expecting to hire, so your job is to use the machine early. Reach out to alumni your freshman and sophomore years, because at a target the competition sits in your own classrooms.
What the numbers say
Cornell's banking network runs 4,711 profiles deep — the #5 count by network size among all 100 schools, just behind Harvard's 5,015 — generated by the second-largest undergraduate population in the top ten, 16,051 students. Volume carries through the verticals as well, with private equity at #5 on 1,980 profiles and hedge funds at #5 on 246.
That scale cuts both ways across the broad reads: #5 by size but #18 per capita, with 293.5 profiles per 1,000 undergraduates — three times the 100-school median of 97.8, yet little more than a third of Columbia's 823.2. The headline, now anchored on top-bank analysts, lands at #8 even though the raw top-bank count ranks #4 on 1,144. The network skews domestic at 3,874 US-based profiles, or 82%, and the mix of 42 private equity profiles per 100 IB profiles tracks the norm among the schools above it, with venture capital ranking #8 on 587 profiles.
Cornell is the clearest case this high in the ranking of size lifting an all-time count: 16,051 current undergraduates imply bigger cohorts in every era the census covers, and the data cannot say whether an individual student's odds match those at denser peers. What it does establish is that the absolute pipeline is massive — a top-five network by raw volume, with buyside depth to match.
Across finance
Cornell 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.
Where its analysts go
Cornell 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.
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 Cornell 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, 3,874 (82%) are currently based in the United States and 837 are abroad. The per-1,000 figure divides the network count by 16,051 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.
