Non-target school#86 of 100
Is UC Irvine a Target School for Investment Banking?
UC Irvine is a non-target school for investment banking by our count. It ranks #86 of the 100 schools we measure: 59 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 606 profiles that include an investment banking job title.
- Rank
- #86 of 100
- At 18 top banks, 2015+
- 59 73% since 2020
- At the elite five
- 26 44% of top-bank total
- IB alumni network
- 606 #63 by profiles
- Profiles per 1,000 undergrads
- 20.5 #87 per capita
- US-based
- 430 71%
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
UC Irvine's 606 investment banking profiles rank #63 by raw count, but only 59 of those alumni are matched to the 18 top banks by an investment banking analyst title since the 2013 class, a figure ranking #79, with the blended headline settling seven places lower at #86 on the per-student leg. Converting a large banking network into large-bank analyst seats is the weak link.
29,503 undergrads reduce density to 20.5 profiles per 1,000 undergraduates against a 97.8 median, for a per-capita rank of #87. Mix and recency read better. Venture capital ranks #58 with 100 profiles, or 17 venture capital profiles per 100 IB profiles. Of the 59 top-bank analysts, 43 graduated in 2018 or later and 26 sit at the elite five.
Only 71 percent of profiles currently sit in the United States, so the domestically reachable network is smaller than 606 suggests, and 59 top-bank analysts spread across a decade of classes is a short list of precedents. A UC Irvine student has a genuine base to work from and should expect to build most of the path independently of it.
Across finance
UC Irvine’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 UC Irvinein 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, 430 (71%) are currently based in the United States and 176 are abroad. The per-1,000 figure divides the network count by 29,503 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.
