College of the Holy Cross investment banking placement: is it a target school?

Holy Cross’s Class of 2025 first-destination report, at a 93% knowledge rate on 715 of 766 graduates, has 91% employed, in graduate school, in service, or on a fellowship: 60% in full-time jobs and 20% continuing education, with a $70,000 median and $71,398 mean starting salary on a $40,000 to $120,000 range, and 75% having completed at least one internship. Financial services is the second-largest industry at 15% behind health care at 18%, and the report names BlackRock, Fidelity Investments, Goldman Sachs, and JP Morgan as its financial services employers.

The Class of 2022 report, at a 92% knowledge rate on 682 of 741 graduates, had 91% placed, 69% employed full time and 17% continuing education, a $64,235 mean and $67,000 median salary from the 46% of employed graduates who reported one, and Bank of America among the top seven employers with 6 hires behind EY, Fidelity, and Mass General.

Holy Cross has no business major; the Ciocca Center says about 75% of alumni work in business anyway and runs a Finance and Banking certificate of three courses, five workshops, an internship, and an advanced Excel tutorial with visits to firms. Its alumni-built Finance Boot Camp is a four-day immersion in the divisions of Wall Street taught entirely by alumni from Boston and New York, with an application like a job’s; in its first year 78 students applied and 30 were accepted.

The alumni network shows up in December: a finance networking reception started by alumni in 2004 and hosted at Bank of America Merrill Lynch draws nearly a hundred alumni across investment banking, asset management, and hedge funds on the first working day after fall exams, so students can spend January shadowing. The career center’s own guidance is blunt about the bar: major in anything, but firms want a 3.5 GPA and investment banking a 3.7, and recruiting for summer analyst seats starts in the spring of sophomore year.

The forum comparison with Florida State calls placement at both essentially zero and entirely on the student, networking and preparation included, though one poster’s LinkedIn count found the two schools with a similar number of alumni holding investment banking titles at the nine bulge brackets despite Florida State’s tenfold enrollment, and the advice was to ignore placement tallies and pick the school where you will do best.

Our data ranks Holy Cross #81 on 248 top-bank analysts from 3,035 undergraduates, or 81.7 per 1,000, the #57 per-capita figure in the country from a raw count that ranks #93; 97% of its banking alumni network is US-based, tied with Fairfield for the highest share in this batch. Its per-bank cells are not yet fetched, so the neighbor table above stands in for a bank breakdown.