Semi-target school#26 of 100
Is University of Michigan a Target School for Investment Banking?
University of Michigan is a semi-target school for investment banking by our count. It ranks #26 of the 100 schools we measure: 573 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 3,000 profiles that include an investment banking job title.
- Rank
- #26 of 100
- At 18 top banks, 2015+
- 573 74% since 2020
- At the elite five
- 229 40% of top-bank total
- IB alumni network
- 3,000 #14 by profiles
- Profiles per 1,000 undergrads
- 88.9 #55 per capita
- US-based
- 2,527 84%
Schools ranked 16 through 35 place real numbers into top banks — at least 152 analysts each in this data — but the per-school pipeline runs thinner. Alumni will answer your emails, and the difference between getting an interview and getting skipped comes down to outreach volume. Start networking earlier than your target-school peers and treat every alumni conversation as a referral opportunity.
What the numbers say
Michigan's top-bank rank of #15 sits eleven places above its headline #26, a gap that is now per-student dilution rather than any shortage of seats: 573 analysts across the 18 firms. What is striking is how evenly those analysts spread. J.P. Morgan leads at 81 and Goldman Sachs follows at 76, but the fifth-largest count, Bank of America's 56, still sits within 30 people of the leader, so the network leans on no single relationship.
Exactly 3,000 profiles put the school #14 by network size, yet 88.9 profiles per 1,000 undergraduates falls under the 97.8 median and ranks #55, the direct consequence of 33,730 undergraduates. Buyside depth is genuine, with 1,245 private equity profiles and 392 in venture capital, both ranking #14. Eighty-four percent of the network is US-based, and 74 percent of top-bank analysts graduated in 2018 or later.
Density here is a ratio between two mismatched quantities, profiles accumulated across every graduating cohort divided by one fall's enrollment, which is why a large public university lands under the median while holding a top-fifteen network by size. The verdict is scale and top-bank strength that the headline rank understates.
Across finance
University of Michigan’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.
Where its analysts go
University of Michigan analysts at each of the top banks we measured — graduates of 2013 or later with investment banking analyst titles. Banks with published feeder pages link through.
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 University of Michiganin 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, 2,527 (84%) are currently based in the United States and 473 are abroad. The per-1,000 figure divides the network count by 33,730 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.
