Semi-target school#21 of 100
Is New York University a Target School for Investment Banking?
New York University is a semi-target school for investment banking by our count. It ranks #21 of the 100 schools we measure: 738 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 5,193 profiles that include an investment banking job title.
- Rank
- #21 of 100
- At 18 top banks, 2015+
- 738 76% since 2020
- At the elite five
- 365 49% of top-bank total
- IB alumni network
- 5,193 #2 by profiles
- Profiles per 1,000 undergrads
- 174.5 #33 per capita
- US-based
- 4,112 79%
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
Nowhere in the top twenty-five does the broad network run further ahead of the headline than at NYU: #2 of 100 by raw profile count against a headline of #21, a 19-place gap. Scale drives the mismatch: 5,193 banking profiles, second only to Columbia's 7,500, spread across 29,760 undergraduates. The re-anchored headline rests on analyst seats at the 18 top banks instead, where NYU's 738 since the classes of 2013 rank #11 before per-student math pulls the blend down to #21.
Every vertical shows the same depth. The 403 hedge fund alumni rank #2 of 100 — within striking distance of Columbia's 416 — and at 8 hedge fund profiles per 100 IB profiles, the tilt toward that corner of the buyside runs heavier than at any school ranked above it. Private equity adds 2,156 profiles at #4. Some 79% of the network, 4,112 profiles, currently sits in the US.
Scale cuts both ways in this data. A school this size will always post a big absolute count on an all-time measure, and 174.5 profiles per 1,000 undergraduates — above the median of 97.8, yet a fraction of Yale's 451.5 — is the more honest per-student picture. Verdict: an enormous, buyside-rich network that individual students share with an unusually large crowd.
Across finance
New York 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
New York 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 New York 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, 4,112 (79%) are currently based in the United States and 1,081 are abroad. The per-1,000 figure divides the network count by 29,760 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.
