Is UCLA a Target School for Investment Banking?

Rank

#23 of 100

At 18 top banks, 2015+

621 78% since 2020

At the elite five

258 42% of top-bank total

IB alumni network

3,478 #8 by profiles

Profiles per 1,000 undergrads

105.3 #49 per capita

US-based

2,584 74%

Schools ranked 16 through 35 place real numbers into top banks — at least 152 analysts each in this data — but the per-school pipeline runs thinner. Alumni will answer your emails, and the difference between getting an interview and getting skipped comes down to outreach volume. Start networking earlier than your target-school peers and treat every alumni conversation as a referral opportunity.

What the numbers say

UCLA 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.

• #23Investment Banking—3,478
• #7Private Equity471,629
• #7Venture Capital18622
• #12Hedge Funds5175

Where its analysts go

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

Nearby in the ranking

• 20Northwestern University523
• 21New York University738
• 22Washington and Lee University278
• 23UCLA621
• 24University of Texas at Austin623
• 25Wake Forest University296
• 26University of Michigan573

See the full ranking of 100 schools →

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 UCLAin 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, 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.