Non-target school#72 of 100
Is Pomona College a Target School for Investment Banking?
Pomona College is a non-target school for investment banking by our count. It ranks #72 of the 100 schools we measure: 57 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 181 profiles that include an investment banking job title.
- Rank
- #72 of 100
- At 18 top banks, 2015+
- 57 86% since 2020
- At the elite five
- 26 46% of top-bank total
- IB alumni network
- 181 #98 by profiles
- Profiles per 1,000 undergrads
- 108.8 #46 per capita
- US-based
- 167 92%
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
86 percent of Pomona's top-bank analysts graduated in 2018 or later, or 49 of 57, which is the group hired from roughly 2020 onward. That makes the school's presence at the largest banks a current phenomenon rather than an inherited one, and while Pomona ranks #82 on the raw count, the per-student leg of the blend lifts the headline to #72.
181 IB profiles from 1,664 undergraduates gives 108.8 per 1,000 undergraduates, above the 100-school median of 97.8 and good for #46 per capita. 26 of the 57 analysts, 46 percent, are at the elite five, while 92 percent of profiles are US-based. The buyside network is narrow, carrying 51 private equity profiles per 100 IB profiles and 3 in hedge funds, a #99 rank on both verticals.
The absolute figures stay small, with 181 profiles ranking #98 by volume, and a college of this size cannot produce large cohorts in any single field. What the data does establish is a per-student record strong enough to hold a #72 headline against a #98 volume rank, a twenty-six-place gap that runs almost entirely on density.
Across finance
Pomona College’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.
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 Pomona Collegein 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, 167 (92%) are currently based in the United States and 14 are abroad. The per-1,000 figure divides the network count by 1,664 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.
