Non-target school#78 of 100
Is Michigan State University a Target School for Investment Banking?
Michigan State University is a non-target school for investment banking by our count. It ranks #78 of the 100 schools we measure: 93 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 616 profiles that include an investment banking job title.
- Rank
- #78 of 100
- At 18 top banks, 2015+
- 93 68% since 2020
- At the elite five
- 27 29% of top-bank total
- IB alumni network
- 616 #62 by profiles
- Profiles per 1,000 undergrads
- 15.2 #95 per capita
- US-based
- 513 83%
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
Michigan State counts 93 alumni who worked as investment banking analysts at the 18 largest firms after graduating in 2013 or later, ranking #70 against a #78 headline. The raw IB count of 616 profiles ranks #62. Both counts beat the overall position, which is held back by per-student math — the broad per-capita read ranks #95 — rather than by the banking record itself.
That per-capita rank comes from 40,483 undergrads producing 15.2 profiles per 1,000 undergraduates against a 97.8 median. The buyside mix is the more interesting reading: private equity ranks #56 with 311 profiles and venture capital ranks #50 with 114, giving 50 private equity profiles and 19 venture capital profiles per 100 IB profiles.
The offsetting reads are elite share and recency. Just 27 of the 93 top-bank analysts sit at the elite five, a 29 percent share, and 68 percent of the cohort graduated in 2018 or later, leaving roughly a third of it older. Michigan State moves people into banking at real scale, and the practical constraint is how many classmates share the same 616-profile network.
Across finance
Michigan State 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 Michigan State 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, 513 (83%) are currently based in the United States and 103 are abroad. The per-1,000 figure divides the network count by 40,483 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.
