Non-target school#74 of 100
Is University of South Carolina a Target School for Investment Banking?
University of South Carolina is a non-target school for investment banking by our count. It ranks #74 of the 100 schools we measure: 97 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 485 profiles that include an investment banking job title.
- Rank
- #74 of 100
- At 18 top banks, 2015+
- 97 82% since 2020
- At the elite five
- 27 28% of top-bank total
- IB alumni network
- 485 #73 by profiles
- Profiles per 1,000 undergrads
- 17.0 #92 per capita
- US-based
- 420 87%
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
South Carolina places #68 on top-bank alumni while carrying a headline rank of #74, and the six-place slide is entirely the blend's per-student leg. 97 people who graduated in 2013 or later listed an investment banking analyst title alongside one of the 18 top banks tracked here, and 80 of them finished school in 2018 or later.
Scale rather than density drives that count. 485 IB profiles come out of 28,470 undergraduates, or 17 per 1,000 undergraduates against a median of 97.8, leaving the school at #92 per capita and #73 by volume. 27 of the 97 top-bank analysts, 28 percent, are at the elite five. 87 percent of profiles are currently US-based, and the buyside mix is light at 41 private equity and 10 venture capital profiles per 100 IB profiles.
The profile count is all-time and worldwide, so it says nothing about how many seniors receive offers in a given year, and 17 per 1,000 undergraduates is a thin spread by any reading. What survives that caveat is a concrete group of people who reached the largest banks in the industry, and a group whose membership has grown substantially since the 2018 classes.
Across finance
University of South Carolina’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 University of South Carolinain 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, 420 (87%) are currently based in the United States and 65 are abroad. The per-1,000 figure divides the network count by 28,470 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.
