Target school#9 of 100
Is Princeton University a Target School for Investment Banking?
Princeton University is a target school for investment banking by our count. It ranks #9 of the 100 schools we measure: 535 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 1,992 profiles that include an investment banking job title.
- Rank
- #9 of 100
- At 18 top banks, 2015+
- 535 75% since 2020
- At the elite five
- 277 52% of top-bank total
- IB alumni network
- 1,992 #23 by profiles
- Profiles per 1,000 undergrads
- 351.3 #14 per capita
- US-based
- 1,754 88%
Ranks 1 through 15 are targets, and every school in this tier has placed at least 521 analysts into the 18 top banks since the classes of roughly 2015. The pipeline is proven at scale and banks arrive on campus expecting to hire, so your job is to use the machine early. Reach out to alumni your freshman and sophomore years, because at a target the competition sits in your own classrooms.
What the numbers say
A majority of Princeton's recent top-bank analysts work at the elite five: 277 of 535, or 52 percent. Goldman Sachs takes 110 of the total and J.P. Morgan 100, so those two firms alone hold nearly 40 percent of the school's top-bank footprint. Morgan Stanley and Barclays sit behind them at 71 apiece, and the counts fall away quickly after that, with Bank of America at 55.
Density is the strongest of the broad-network reads, #14 at 351.3 profiles per 1,000 undergraduates against a 97.8 median, while network size places it #23 on 1,992 profiles. The headline #9 runs ahead of both, and ahead of the #20 rank by top-bank count, because the blend's per-student leg rewards a 5,671-undergraduate school this concentrated. Eighty-eight percent of the network is US-based, and private equity supplies 41 profiles per 100 IB profiles.
Profiles count anyone who lists the school in education, so graduate-degree holders sit in the same pool as undergraduates and a small undergraduate enrollment does not by itself explain the 1,992 total. The verdict: a mid-sized network by headcount that is unusually concentrated at the elite-five firms.
Across finance
Princeton 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
Princeton 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 Princeton 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, 1,754 (88%) are currently based in the United States and 238 are abroad. The per-1,000 figure divides the network count by 5,671 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.
