Lower semi-target school#43 of 100
Is Penn State a Target School for Investment Banking?
Penn State is a lower semi-target school for investment banking by our count. It ranks #43 of the 100 schools we measure: 283 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 1,462 profiles that include an investment banking job title.
- Rank
- #43 of 100
- At 18 top banks, 2015+
- 283 73% since 2020
- At the elite five
- 128 45% of top-bank total
- IB alumni network
- 1,462 #31 by profiles
- Profiles per 1,000 undergrads
- 34.6 #76 per capita
- US-based
- 1,263 86%
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
Penn State counts 128 people at the elite five, a raw elite-five presence that only Northeastern's 148 and Johns Hopkins's 131 beat within this tier. That comes out of 283 total top-bank analysts, a 45 percent elite share, and it means the school's absolute footprint at the most selective firms rivals schools ranked well above it. The comparison holds against WashU St. Louis, which is ranked #33 overall and shows 121 at the elite five.
Its raw top-bank count ranks #31, twelve places better than the #43 headline once the per-student leg drags the blend down — one of the larger such gaps in this batch — and the hedge fund network is genuinely strong at 144 profiles and rank #17. Private equity adds 690 profiles at #31. The trend is the weaker element, with 208 of 283 analysts graduating in 2018 or later, a 73 percent recent share that sits toward the lower end here.
Per-capita reach is poor: 1,462 profiles across 42,223 undergraduates gives 34.6 per 1,000 undergraduates against a 97.8 median, ranking #76. Fourteen percent of profiles sit outside the United States. Penn State punches meaningfully above its headline rank at the top banks, and the competition for those seats inside a very large undergraduate population is correspondingly heavy.
Across finance
Penn State’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 Penn Statein 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, 1,263 (86%) are currently based in the United States and 199 are abroad. The per-1,000 figure divides the network count by 42,223 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.
