Non-target school#69 of 100
Is UC San Diego a Target School for Investment Banking?
UC San Diego is a non-target school for investment banking by our count. It ranks #69 of the 100 schools we measure: 120 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 1,053 profiles that include an investment banking job title.
- Rank
- #69 of 100
- At 18 top banks, 2015+
- 120 78% since 2020
- At the elite five
- 56 47% of top-bank total
- IB alumni network
- 1,053 #40 by profiles
- Profiles per 1,000 undergrads
- 31.2 #80 per capita
- US-based
- 713 68%
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 San Diego is the least US-concentrated network in this tier, with 713 of its 1,053 IB profiles currently located in the United States, a 68 percent share. Close to a third of the alumni base sits abroad, which matters for anyone assessing how many of those profiles are actually reachable for domestic recruiting, and it means the effective US network is meaningfully smaller than the headline count.
Venture capital is the standout vertical, with 223 profiles ranking #24 and 21 venture capital profiles per 100 IB profiles, far ahead of the school's IB rank of #69. On banking the school holds 120 top-bank analyst seats, ranking #57 by count — twelve places ahead of a headline the blend's per-student leg drags down to #69 — with 56 of those at the elite five for a 47 percent share and 93 graduating in 2018 or later.
Per-capita reach is the weakest number here: 31.2 profiles per 1,000 undergraduates against the 97.8 median, ranking #80, since 1,053 profiles come from 33,792 undergraduates. UC San Diego supports a real if modest banking pipeline attached to a strong investing network, and the odds facing any individual student inside that undergraduate population are long.
Across finance
UC San Diego’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 San Diegoin 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, 713 (68%) are currently based in the United States and 340 are abroad. The per-1,000 figure divides the network count by 33,792 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.
