Lower semi-target school#53 of 100
Is Davidson College a Target School for Investment Banking?
Davidson College is a lower semi-target school for investment banking by our count. It ranks #53 of the 100 schools we measure: 100 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 286 profiles that include an investment banking job title.
- Rank
- #53 of 100
- At 18 top banks, 2015+
- 100 76% since 2020
- At the elite five
- 11 11% of top-bank total
- IB alumni network
- 286 #90 by profiles
- Profiles per 1,000 undergrads
- 150.2 #39 per capita
- US-based
- 271 95%
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
Davidson ranks #64 on alumni at the 18 top banks against #90 by raw investment banking count, a 26-place gap produced by 100 top-bank analysts drawn from a total of only 286 IB profiles. More than a third of the school's entire banking network listed an investment banking analyst title alongside one of those firms since the 2013 class.
Density reaches 150.2 profiles per 1,000 undergraduates against the 97.8 median from a base of 1,904 undergrads, and 76 of the 100 top-bank analysts, or 76 percent, graduated in 2018 or later. 95 percent of profiles are US-based. The pattern is a small college punching considerably above its raw count at the biggest banks, and the top-bank-anchored headline now puts the school at #53 overall.
The elite-five share is the striking weakness, at 11 of 100 or 11 percent, and the buyside network is smaller still, with hedge funds at #98 on 6 profiles. Davidson gets people into large banks reliably; the most selective firms and the longer buyside route have very few alumni to follow, so those paths need building rather than borrowing.
Across finance
Davidson 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.
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 Davidson 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, 271 (95%) are currently based in the United States and 15 are abroad. The per-1,000 figure divides the network count by 1,904 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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