Lower semi-target school#52 of 100
Is Fordham University a Target School for Investment Banking?
Fordham University is a lower semi-target school for investment banking by our count. It ranks #52 of the 100 schools we measure: 141 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 931 profiles that include an investment banking job title.
- Rank
- #52 of 100
- At 18 top banks, 2015+
- 141 67% since 2020
- At the elite five
- 69 49% of top-bank total
- IB alumni network
- 931 #45 by profiles
- Profiles per 1,000 undergrads
- 90.3 #52 per capita
- US-based
- 799 86%
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
Only 67 percent of Fordham's 141 top-bank analysts graduated in 2018 or later, one of the two lowest recent shares in this tier alongside Lehigh at the same 67 percent. Ninety-four of the 141 are recent, which means a larger portion of this network was built by earlier analyst classes than at most schools nearby. The alumni base skews toward people already several years into their careers.
Quality within that smaller cohort is high. Sixty-nine of the 141 analysts sit at the elite five, a 49 percent share that beats most schools in the tier. The hedge fund network is a genuine differentiator, with 135 profiles ranking #19 and 15 hedge fund profiles per 100 IB profiles. Density is close to average at 90.3 per 1,000 undergraduates against the 97.8 median.
The volume is modest, though the top-bank rank of #50 sits two places ahead of the headline #52, with the per-student leg of the blend giving back the difference. Fordham offers a seasoned, elite-weighted network with an unusual concentration on the hedge fund side, and the number of fresh analyst seats being added each year is smaller than at most schools directly above it.
Across finance
Fordham 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.
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 Fordham 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, 799 (86%) are currently based in the United States and 132 are abroad. The per-1,000 figure divides the network count by 10,307 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.
