Semi-target school#30 of 100
Is UNC Chapel Hill a Target School for Investment Banking?
UNC Chapel Hill is a semi-target school for investment banking by our count. It ranks #30 of the 100 schools we measure: 507 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 2,262 profiles that include an investment banking job title.
- Rank
- #30 of 100
- At 18 top banks, 2015+
- 507 79% since 2020
- At the elite five
- 168 33% of top-bank total
- IB alumni network
- 2,262 #19 by profiles
- Profiles per 1,000 undergrads
- 109.4 #45 per capita
- US-based
- 2,066 91%
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
Wells Fargo and Bank of America together account for 260 of UNC Chapel Hill's 507 top-bank analysts, 139 and 121 respectively — slightly more than half the school's entire top-bank group concentrated at two firms. J.P. Morgan trails at 71 and Goldman Sachs at 55, which goes a long way toward explaining an elite-five share of just 33 percent, or 168 people.
The school ranks #30 overall while its broader network is #19 by size on 2,262 profiles, with density at #45, where 109.4 profiles per 1,000 undergraduates clears the 97.8 median by a modest margin against a 20,681-student base. Its top-bank rank of #24 runs six places ahead of that headline, a gap the per-student leg of the blend opens. Ninety-one percent of profiles are US-based, and the buyside mix is unremarkable at 39 private equity profiles per 100 IB profiles.
Firm concentration is descriptive rather than predictive: the counts record where alumni have held analyst titles since 2013 and cannot say whether those two relationships still run as hot today. The verdict is a large, domestically anchored network whose top-bank strength is real but narrowly sourced.
Across finance
UNC Chapel Hill’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
UNC Chapel Hill 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
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 UNC Chapel Hillin 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, 2,066 (91%) are currently based in the United States and 196 are abroad. The per-1,000 figure divides the network count by 20,681 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.
