Non-target school#80 of 100
Is Howard University a Target School for Investment Banking?
Howard University is a non-target school for investment banking by our count. It ranks #80 of the 100 schools we measure: 57 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 328 profiles that include an investment banking job title.
- Rank
- #80 of 100
- At 18 top banks, 2015+
- 57 81% since 2020
- At the elite five
- 36 63% of top-bank total
- IB alumni network
- 328 #89 by profiles
- Profiles per 1,000 undergrads
- 32.2 #78 per capita
- US-based
- 300 91%
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
36 of Howard's 57 top-bank analysts are at the elite five, a 63 percent elite share. Those 57 people graduated in 2013 or later and listed investment banking analyst titles alongside one of the 18 top banks tracked here, which ranks the school #81 on that count, one place behind the #80 headline rank.
46 of the 57, or 81 percent, graduated in 2018 or later, so the network is current as well as top-weighted. 328 IB profiles across 10,190 undergraduates gives 32.2 per 1,000 undergraduates against the median of 97.8, placing Howard at #78 per capita and #89 by volume. 91 percent of profiles are US-based, and private equity runs 57 profiles per 100 IB profiles.
The overall totals stay modest, and hedge funds are close to absent at 5 profiles per 100 IB profiles and a #95 vertical rank. What the file describes is a compact network whose destinations skew higher than its size, which is the fact most worth planning around for anyone reading this page.
Across finance
Howard 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.
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 Howard 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, 300 (91%) are currently based in the United States and 28 are abroad. The per-1,000 figure divides the network count by 10,190 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.
