Semi-target school#23 of 100
UCLA investment banking placement: is it a target school?
UCLA is a semi-target school for investment banking by our count. It ranks #23 of the 100 schools we measure: 621 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 3,478 profiles that include an investment banking job title.
- Rank
- #23of 100 schools
- At 18 top banks, 2015+
- 62178% graduated 2018+
- At the elite five
- 25842% of the top-bank total
- IB alumni network
- 3,478#8 by profiles
- Per 1,000 undergrads
- 105.3#49 per capita
- US-based
- 74%2,584 profiles
Is UCLA a target school for investment banking?
The verdict, from the dataUCLA carries 3,478 investment banking profiles, the eighth-largest network of the 100 schools measured, yet ranks #49 on density — a 41-place spread between the two broad reads. The cause is a 33,040-undergraduate base, which pulls 3,478 profiles down to 105.3 per 1,000 undergraduates, barely above the 97.8 median. The overall rank of #23 lands between those two very different readings, though it is now set by top-bank analyst seats rather than by either one.
The top-bank count tells a cleaner story: 621 analysts, #14 nationally, nine places ahead of the overall #23, with the gap opened on the per-student leg by the same enrollment math. Buyside adjacency runs deep, with 1,629 private equity profiles and 622 in venture capital, both at #7, working out to 47 and 18 per 100 IB profiles. Just 74 percent of the network sits in the US, leaving roughly a quarter of profiles located abroad.
That quarter matters, because the top-bank list is built around analyst titles at a largely US-facing set of firms, so the broad count and the precise count are not describing quite the same population. The verdict: exceptional raw scale and top-bank presence, with a density figure that says more about enrollment than about outcomes.
UCLA investment banking placement by bank
Analysts, classes of ~2015+UCLA 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.
- 1Bank of America102
- 2J.P. Morgan96
- 3Goldman Sachs89
- 4Morgan Stanley79
- 5Citi59
- 6UBS53
- 7Deutsche Bank36
- 8Barclays25
- 9Wells Fargo18
Banks with fewer than five matched analysts, and banks not yet measured for this school, are left off the list. Of the 621 analysts at the 18 banks, 258 (42%) are at the elite five: Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, J.P. Morgan, Evercore, and Centerview.
Where UCLA alumni land beyond investment banking
Alumni profiles, all yearsUCLA’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. Per 100 IB shows the network mix: profiles per 100 IB profiles.
How to recruit for investment banking from UCLA
UCLA has no undergraduate business school, so the clubs carry the training. Bruins in Finance and Banking runs a 10-week accelerator on Excel modeling with a capstone project and lists members at Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and JPMorgan; Bruin Asset Management calls itself the premier finance organization on campus, with a training program, a portfolio simulation, and alumni at Goldman Sachs, Blackstone, Morgan Stanley, J.P. Morgan, and Evercore.
Bruin Value Investing, founded in 2012, is the first and oldest student-run investment fund at UCLA, a real-money value fund with more than 150 alumni across banking, buyside, and consulting.
The university's public first-destination dashboard covers graduates from summer 2016 through spring 2019, built on 8413 responses at about a 33 percent response rate; it reports by industry rather than by job, so a banking share for a recent class is not published.
Forum accounts call UCLA a target for Los Angeles offices, a solid semi-target for San Francisco, and a network-heavy semi-target for New York, where alumni have still reached Goldman TMT, Morgan Stanley, J.P. Morgan, and PJT. A 2025 guide to the Los Angeles scene names USC, Berkeley, and UCLA as the main target schools there and notes that LA banks weigh ties to the city.
The recurring warning is that opportunity is uneven: on-campus recruiting with nearly every top group runs through the Investment Banking Workshop, which takes a few dozen sophomores a year, and the four feeder clubs admit single-digit shares of applicants, mostly freshmen. Posters advise joining a club freshman fall or winter and taking local boutique internships early, and one older estimate puts the annual flow into high finance in the low dozens.
Our data shows a much larger network than that flow implies: 3,478 investment banking profiles rank #8 by size and 621 top-bank analysts rank #14, while 33,040 undergraduates drag the per-capita rank to #49 and the headline to #23. The buyside depth is real, with 1,629 private equity and 622 venture capital profiles, both #7, and a quarter of the network sits outside the US.
What UCLA publishes about outcomes
4 figures, 2 sourcesEvery figure below is quoted from the source named above it, as published; none is ours. Read them beside our counts, which measure a different thing: analysts matched to named banks rather than a graduating class's outcomes.
Bruin Value Investing
- Bruin Value Investing founded
- 2012
- Bruin Value Investing alumni
- 150+
UCLA Student Affairs Information and Research Office, First Destination Survey data
- First-destination dashboard responses (2016–2019 graduates)
- 8413
- First-destination survey response rate
- about 33 percent
How UCLA compares with schools ranked nearby
Analysts at 18 top banks, ~2015+UCLA investment banking FAQ
8 questionsIs UCLA a target school for investment banking?
UCLA is a semi-target school for investment banking by our count. It ranks #23 of the 100 schools we measure: 621 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 3,478 profiles that include an investment banking job title.
Which banks hire the most UCLA analysts?
By our count, Bank of America leads with 102 UCLA alumni holding investment banking analyst titles, then J.P. Morgan with 96 and Goldman Sachs with 89, among graduates of 2013 or later at the 18 top banks we measure.
Do banks treat UCLA as a target school?
A target for Los Angeles and a semi-target elsewhere, by forum consensus. Our count puts it #23 of 100: a top-fifteen count of analysts at the top banks, diluted by one of the largest undergraduate bodies we measure.
Which UCLA clubs feed investment banking?
The Investment Banking Workshop is the gate to on-campus recruiting, and four clubs feed it: Bruin Asset Management, Bruin Value Investing, Bruin Hedge Fund, and Bruins in Finance and Banking. Forum posters say to join one freshman year.
Can you get to New York banking from UCLA?
Yes, with networking. Forum accounts describe New York as the office where UCLA has to work hardest, and name Goldman, Morgan Stanley, J.P. Morgan, and PJT among the seats alumni have reached.
How many UCLA alumni work in private equity?
1,629 UCLA alumni profiles include a private equity job title, ranking #7 of the 100 schools in our database.
How many UCLA alumni work in venture capital?
622 UCLA alumni profiles include a venture capital job title, ranking #7 of the 100 schools in our database.
How many UCLA alumni work in hedge fund?
175 UCLA alumni profiles include a hedge fund job title, ranking #12 of the 100 schools in our database.
How we counted UCLA’s analysts
Counts come from People Data Labs, which aggregates public professional profiles. The headline rank is anchored on the strict measure: profiles that list UCLA in 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 2026-10-16.
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, 2,584 (74%) are currently based in the United States and 894 are abroad. The per-1,000 figure divides the network count by 33,040 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.
