Lower semi-target school#38 of 100
Is Rice University a Target School for Investment Banking?
Rice University is a lower semi-target school for investment banking by our count. It ranks #38 of the 100 schools we measure: 192 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 761 profiles that include an investment banking job title.
- Rank
- #38 of 100
- At 18 top banks, 2015+
- 192 78% since 2020
- At the elite five
- 90 47% of top-bank total
- IB alumni network
- 761 #57 by profiles
- Profiles per 1,000 undergrads
- 166.4 #36 per capita
- US-based
- 685 90%
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
Nearly half of Rice's top-bank analysts sit at the elite five, 90 of 192 people, a 47 percent share that places its quality mix above most of this tier. The school ranks #43 on raw top-bank placement, while the headline — which also weighs those analysts per student — lands five places higher at #38, and it does all this on a base of only 4,574 undergraduates.
Density supports that reading at 166.4 profiles per 1,000 undergraduates versus the 97.8 median, ranking #36 per capita while the raw count of 761 profiles ranks #57. The pipeline is current, with 150 of the 192 analysts graduating in 2018 or later for a 78 percent recent share, and 90 percent of all profiles are US-based.
Hedge funds are close to invisible in this network, with 21 profiles ranking #91 and only 3 hedge fund profiles per 100 IB profiles, and private equity ranks #62 on 289 profiles. Rice converts a small undergraduate population into high-quality bank placement, and alumni looking for buyside coverage will find far less support than on the banking side.
Across finance
Rice 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.
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 Rice 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, 685 (90%) are currently based in the United States and 76 are abroad. The per-1,000 figure divides the network count by 4,574 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.
