Non-target school#70 of 100
Is Swarthmore College a Target School for Investment Banking?
Swarthmore College is a non-target school for investment banking by our count. It ranks #70 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 186 profiles that include an investment banking job title.
- Rank
- #70 of 100
- At 18 top banks, 2015+
- 57 79% since 2020
- At the elite five
- 31 54% of top-bank total
- IB alumni network
- 186 #97 by profiles
- Profiles per 1,000 undergrads
- 113.1 #44 per capita
- US-based
- 167 90%
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
113.1 IB profiles per 1,000 undergraduates puts Swarthmore above the 100-school median of 97.8 and earns a per-capita rank of #44. From a base of 1,644 undergraduates, 186 people have listed a banking title, and 57 of them held an investment banking analyst role at one of the 18 top banks after graduating in 2013 or later.
Elite concentration is the sharper figure: 31 of those 57 analysts, or 54 percent, sit at the elite five. 45 of the 57 graduated in 2018 or later, a 79 percent recent share, and 90 percent of profiles remain in the United States. The surrounding buyside network is lopsided, carrying 51 private equity profiles per 100 IB profiles but only 3 in hedge funds, a #100 finish on that vertical.
Small absolute numbers are the binding constraint. 186 profiles ranks #97 by volume, the 57-analyst count ranks #83 on its own, and the per-student side of the blend is what lifts the headline to #70. Swarthmore's advantage is concentration rather than breadth, since more than half of its top-bank alumni landed at the elite five, which makes this a narrow pipeline pointed at a short list of destinations.
Across finance
Swarthmore 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 Swarthmore 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 (90%) are currently based in the United States and 19 are abroad. The per-1,000 figure divides the network count by 1,644 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.
