Semi-target school#19 of 100
Is MIT a Target School for Investment Banking?
MIT is a semi-target school for investment banking by our count. It ranks #19 of the 100 schools we measure: 380 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 2,070 profiles that include an investment banking job title.
- Rank
- #19 of 100
- At 18 top banks, 2015+
- 380 74% since 2020
- At the elite five
- 239 63% of top-bank total
- IB alumni network
- 2,070 #21 by profiles
- Profiles per 1,000 undergrads
- 452.4 #6 per capita
- US-based
- 1,347 65%
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
With 4,576 undergraduates, MIT runs one of the smallest campuses in this dataset, yet its alumni network holds 2,070 investment banking profiles — 452.4 per 1,000 undergraduates, roughly four and a half times the 100-school median of 97.8. That density ranks #6 per capita, while the headline turns on top-bank analyst seats: 380 of them, ranking #25 by count, blended up to #19 overall by the per-student leg.
The rest of the profile tells the same concentrated story with one twist: the network leans hard into venture, with 24 venture capital profiles per 100 IB profiles, second only to Stanford's 29 among the top 20, plus 50 private equity profiles per 100 IB profiles. Geography is the counterweight — 65% of the network is US-based, the lowest share in the top 20, or 1,347 profiles stateside.
These 2,070 profiles accumulated over careers spanning decades, so the figure measures the depth of an alumni bench rather than how many graduates head to banking desks in any given year — and the per-student density is an index against current enrollment, not a placement rate. What it does establish is a small school with an outsized, globally scattered banking network that tilts hard toward the buyside.
Across finance
MIT’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
MIT 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 MITin 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, 1,347 (65%) are currently based in the United States and 723 are abroad. The per-1,000 figure divides the network count by 4,576 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.
