Fordham University investment banking placement: is it a target school?

Gabelli’s outcomes page reports that 95% of the undergraduate Class of 2024 was placed in jobs, graduate education, the military, or service programs within six months, that 97% held at least one internship, with many saying the internship led to the full-time offer, and that more than two-thirds of students hold two or more internships; Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, and Morgan Stanley are on its employer list.

The finance-careers page tells students the recruiting process needs attention from the very beginning because traditional tracks start early, pairs each student with an adviser they may see several times a semester, runs a Spotlight Series on investment banking, sales and trading, and asset management, and organizes site visits to firms; seniors completing the alternative investments concentration can be placed in a résumé book circulated to as many as 40 firms that the school says has a 100% placement rate.

Finance Scholars is the honors track for high-performing sophomores aimed at Wall Street, with networking with senior bankers, résumé reviews, and mock interviews; the school says nearly all scholars reported internships at major banks at the end of the latest year, listing Barclays investment banking, Citigroup sales and trading, Goldman Sachs investment banking and asset management, JP Morgan investment and corporate banking, and Morgan Stanley. An August 2024 profile follows four scholars into a Goldman Sachs investment banking analyst seat, a Barclays internship that became a full-time analyst role, and a TD Securities credit analyst job.

Peak Frameworks ranks Fordham #36 of 60 and #35 by total hires, calling its placement fair, a handful of graduates to the top firms each year, with an elite-firm share of 51% built on a J.P. Morgan pipeline that represents 38% of all Fordham hires, negligible presence at elite boutiques, and modest private equity recruiting.

Forum posters place Fordham at the low end of semi-target or firmly non-target: a small but growing presence in banking with a supportive crop of alumni, a few banks recruiting on campus, and opportunities that will not come to you, so the students who break in network from the first semester and use the New York location to intern during the school year. One associate calls it a solid school albeit a non-target; another notes that when a Fordham managing director left one bank, the Fordham analysts left too, a reminder of how alumni-dependent the pipeline is.

Our data ranks Fordham #52 on 931 top-bank analysts, the #45 count in the country, from 10,307 undergraduates, or 90.3 per 1,000; 86% of its banking alumni network is US-based. Its per-bank cells are not yet fetched, so the neighbor table above stands in for a bank breakdown.