Lower semi-target school#42 of 100
Is University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign a Target School for Investment Banking?
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign is a lower semi-target school for investment banking by our count. It ranks #42 of the 100 schools we measure: 278 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 1,872 profiles that include an investment banking job title.
- Rank
- #42 of 100
- At 18 top banks, 2015+
- 278 76% since 2020
- At the elite five
- 121 44% of top-bank total
- IB alumni network
- 1,872 #25 by profiles
- Profiles per 1,000 undergrads
- 52.6 #66 per capita
- US-based
- 1,380 74%
In the 36 to 60 band the pipeline still exists — every school here shows at least 92 analysts at the top banks — but it is thin enough that you have to build your own. Expect to source interviews through cold emails and off-cycle applications rather than campus recruiting, and expect the alumni you find to remember what that climb felt like.
What the numbers say
Illinois has 278 people matched to the 18 top banks by an investment banking analyst title tracked here, all of them 2013 graduates or later, which ranks the school #32 on that precise measure. J.P. Morgan holds the largest block at 59, followed by Goldman Sachs at 40, Citi at 34, Bank of America at 29 and Morgan Stanley at 28. The pipeline runs through several firms rather than depending on one relationship.
That #32 sits ten places above the headline rank of #42, a gap opened by the per-student leg of the blend rather than by the count itself. Of the 278, 121 are at the elite five, a 44 percent share, and 211 graduated in 2018 or later, meaning three quarters of the top-bank cohort is recent. The buyside mix is unusually deep for a large public school, with 177 hedge fund profiles ranking #11 and 49 private equity profiles per 100 IB profiles.
The scale is largely a function of size. Illinois carries 1,872 IB profiles across 35,564 undergraduates, which works out to 52.6 per 1,000 undergraduates against a median of 97.8, and its per-capita rank of #66 trails its count rank of #25 by 41 places. Only 74 percent of profiles are currently US-based. Illinois offers one of the largest and most bank-diversified alumni networks in this tier, spread thin across a very big student body.
Across finance
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign’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.
Where its analysts go
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign 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.
Nearby in the ranking
- 39Claremont McKenna College132
- 40Northeastern University277
- 41Villanova University225
- 42University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign278
- 43Penn State283
- 44Colgate University138
- 45University of Florida255
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 University of Illinois Urbana-Champaignin 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, 1,380 (74%) are currently based in the United States and 492 are abroad. The per-1,000 figure divides the network count by 35,564 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.
