Non-target school#67 of 100
Is George Washington University a Target School for Investment Banking?
George Washington University is a non-target school for investment banking by our count. It ranks #67 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 790 profiles that include an investment banking job title.
- Rank
- #67 of 100
- At 18 top banks, 2015+
- 100 67% since 2020
- At the elite five
- 46 46% of top-bank total
- IB alumni network
- 790 #54 by profiles
- Profiles per 1,000 undergrads
- 69.4 #58 per capita
- US-based
- 598 76%
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
George Washington's top-bank rank of #65 sits two places above its headline rank of #67, with the blend's per-student leg supplying the drag. The school shows 100 analysts across the 18 banks, one of the larger top-bank counts in this tier, while the broad network of 790 IB profiles ranks #54 by size — a volume read the analyst count never quite matched.
The trend compounds that lag: 67 of those 100 analysts graduated in 2018 or later, a 67 percent recent share toward the bottom of this tier, meaning fewer fresh seats are being added than at most nearby schools. Within the smaller cohort the quality is decent, with 46 people at the elite five for a 46 percent share, and venture capital adds 138 profiles at rank #44.
Density is unremarkable at 69.4 profiles per 1,000 undergraduates against the 97.8 median, and 24 percent of profiles are located outside the United States. George Washington supports a broad finance network with a genuine elite-weighted core, and the #67 headline now reflects the top-bank record directly rather than the size of the wider alumni base, which ranks thirteen places ahead of it.
Across finance
George Washington 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 George Washington 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, 598 (76%) are currently based in the United States and 192 are abroad. The per-1,000 figure divides the network count by 11,387 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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