Lower semi-target school#40 of 100
Is Northeastern University a Target School for Investment Banking?
Northeastern University is a lower semi-target school for investment banking by our count. It ranks #40 of the 100 schools we measure: 277 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 1,554 profiles that include an investment banking job title.
- Rank
- #40 of 100
- At 18 top banks, 2015+
- 277 85% since 2020
- At the elite five
- 148 53% of top-bank total
- IB alumni network
- 1,554 #30 by profiles
- Profiles per 1,000 undergrads
- 97.8 #51 per capita
- US-based
- 1,211 78%
In the 36 to 60 band the pipeline still exists — every school here shows at least 92 analysts at the top banks — but it is thin enough that you have to build your own. Expect to source interviews through cold emails and off-cycle applications rather than campus recruiting, and expect the alumni you find to remember what that climb felt like.
What the numbers say
Northeastern's top-bank presence is almost entirely new: 235 of its 277 analysts graduated in 2018 or later, an 85 percent recent share. That leaves only 42 people from earlier cohorts, so the network was built across roughly the last five analyst classes. Goldman Sachs leads the firm counts at 68 and Morgan Stanley follows at 50, while UBS at 39 edges out J.P. Morgan's 38.
Density lands exactly on the 100-school median, 97.8 profiles per 1,000 undergraduates, for a #51 rank, while the broad network ranks #30 on 1,554 profiles. Its top-bank rank of #34 runs six places ahead of the #40 headline, with the per-student leg pulling the blend back. Elite-five firms hold 148 of the 277 analysts, or 53 percent, and the buyside mix is heavy at 67 private equity profiles per 100 IB profiles, with hedge funds ranking #6 on 239 profiles.
A pipeline this recent has less history behind it, so the top-bank figures describe a trajectory measured over a handful of analyst classes rather than a settled long-run pattern. The verdict is a young network whose recent skew and elite-firm share both point in the same direction.
Across finance
Northeastern 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.
Where its analysts go
Northeastern University 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 Northeastern 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, 1,211 (78%) are currently based in the United States and 343 are abroad. The per-1,000 figure divides the network count by 15,891 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.
