Non-target school#83 of 100
Lafayette College investment banking placement: is it a target school?
Lafayette College is a non-target school for investment banking by our count. It ranks #83 of the 100 schools we measure: 40 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 189 profiles that include an investment banking job title.
- Rank
- #83of 100 schools
- At 18 top banks, 2015+
- 4083% graduated 2018+
- At the elite five
- 1743% of the top-bank total
- IB alumni network
- 189#96 by profiles
- Per 1,000 undergrads
- 68.4#59 per capita
- US-based
- 93%175 profiles
Is Lafayette a target school for investment banking?
The verdict, from the dataLafayette ranks #59 per capita and #96 by raw count, a 37-place gap between the broad reads; the headline, now anchored on top-bank analysts, settles at #83. 189 IB profiles from 2,764 undergraduates gives 68.4 per 1,000 undergraduates, under the 100-school median of 97.8 but well ahead of what the volume rank on its own would lead anyone to expect.
40 alumni have held analyst roles at one of the 18 top banks since the 2013 class, and 33 of them, or 83 percent, graduated in 2018 or later. 17, or 43 percent, are at the elite five, while 93 percent of profiles are US-based. The buyside network is the thinnest part of the file, ranking #100 in both private equity and venture capital, at 6 venture capital profiles per 100 IB profiles.
40 people over roughly a decade is a small number, and the #95 rank on top-bank alumni sits a single place ahead of the #96 rank by network size, so the #83 headline rests on per-student conversion rather than on outcome depth. The verdict is a narrow pipeline that performs considerably better per student than it does per headcount.
Lafayette investment banking placement by bank
Analysts, classes of ~2015+Lafayette College's analysts at the 18 top banks we measure, graduates of 2013 or later with investment banking analyst titles, against the elite five. Its per-bank cells are not yet measured, so the breakdown by bank is the one thing this page cannot show.
- 18All 18 top banks we measure40
- 5The elite five: Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, J.P. Morgan, Evercore, and Centerview17
By count alone Lafayette College ranks #95 of 100; the table of schools ranked nearby, below, sets that figure beside its neighbors.
Where Lafayette alumni land beyond investment banking
Alumni profiles, all yearsLafayette College’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.
How to recruit for investment banking from Lafayette
Lafayette’s Investment Club calls itself the oldest student-run investment club in the country: seeded in the mid-1940s with $3,000 from an alumnus and World War II veteran, its portfolio has crested $1,000,000, mostly in equities with mutual funds, international holdings, and bonds, and members meet every Friday to pitch investments, hear guest speakers on finance careers, and vote on trades.
The club says its network of alumni and professionals has been instrumental to its history, sharing advice, speaking to members, and helping with the club’s trips to New York, where it visits banks and hosts alumni discussions each year; a former head analyst told the student paper that alumni at many big banks come back to explain their roles and how they got them.
The college reports that 95% of the Class of 2024 were employed, continuing education, or doing meaningful work within six months, and The Princeton Review ranks its career services #7 in the country; the Gateway Career Center publishes first destinations for the classes of 2023 through 2025 as an interactive dashboard rather than a text report, so industry shares are not quoted here.
Forum threads file Lafayette with its Patriot League peers, Colgate, Lehigh, Bucknell, and Holy Cross, as underrated liberal arts schools for Wall Street with good alumni networks, though the group is called non-target at the top banks and the one thread devoted to Lafayette on Wall Street asks the question without a public answer; the recurring caution is that a well-off student body and family connections drive part of the placement at all of them.
Our data ranks Lafayette #83 on 189 top-bank analysts from 2,764 undergraduates, or 68.4 per 1,000, the #59 per-capita figure in the country from the #96 raw count; 93% 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.
What Lafayette publishes about outcomes
4 figures, 2 sourcesEvery figure below is quoted from the source named above it, as published; none is ours. Read them beside our counts, which measure a different thing: analysts matched to named banks rather than a graduating class's outcomes.
Lafayette College Investment Club
- Investment Club seed capital
- $3,000
- Investment Club portfolio
- more than $1,000,000
Lafayette College News, Lafayette College continues to rise in U.S. News & World Report, The Princeton Review, and other national rankings (September 2025)
- Class of 2024 employed, continuing education, or doing meaningful work within six months
- 95%
- Princeton Review rank for career services
- #7
How Lafayette compares with schools ranked nearby
Analysts at 18 top banks, ~2015+Lafayette investment banking FAQ
8 questionsIs Lafayette College a target school for investment banking?
Lafayette College is a non-target school for investment banking by our count. It ranks #83 of the 100 schools we measure: 40 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 189 profiles that include an investment banking job title.
How many Lafayette alumni are analysts at the top investment banks?
40 Lafayette College alumni from the classes of roughly 2015 onward hold investment banking analyst titles alongside one of the 18 top banks we measure, the #95 count of the 100 schools ranked; 17 of them are at the elite five, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, J.P. Morgan, Evercore, and Centerview. Its per-bank breakdown is not yet measured, so the table above compares its total with the top of the ranking.
Do banks treat Lafayette as a target school?
No; forum threads group it with Colgate, Lehigh, Bucknell, and Holy Cross as underrated Patriot League schools with good alumni networks that are non-targets at the top banks. Our count ranks it #83 of 100, with the #59 per-capita figure in the country.
What is the Lafayette Investment Club?
The oldest student-run investment club in the country by its own account, seeded with $3,000 in the mid-1940s and now past $1,000,000, meeting every Friday to pitch and vote on trades and taking an annual trip to Wall Street.
How do Lafayette graduates fare after graduation?
95% of the Class of 2024 were employed, continuing education, or doing meaningful work within six months, and The Princeton Review ranks the college’s career services #7 nationally.
How many Lafayette College alumni work in private equity?
83 Lafayette College alumni profiles include a private equity job title, ranking #100 of the 100 schools in our database.
How many Lafayette College alumni work in venture capital?
11 Lafayette College alumni profiles include a venture capital job title, ranking #100 of the 100 schools in our database.
How many Lafayette College alumni work in hedge fund?
26 Lafayette College alumni profiles include a hedge fund job title, ranking #82 of the 100 schools in our database.
How we counted Lafayette’s analysts
Counts come from People Data Labs, which aggregates public professional profiles. The headline rank is anchored on the strict measure: profiles that list Lafayette College in 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 2026-10-16.
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, 175 (93%) are currently based in the United States and 14 are abroad. The per-1,000 figure divides the network count by 2,764 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.
