Target school#3 of 100
Is University of Pennsylvania a Target School for Investment Banking?
University of Pennsylvania is a target school for investment banking by our count. It ranks #3 of the 100 schools we measure: 1,183 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 5,099 profiles that include an investment banking job title.
- Rank
- #3 of 100
- At 18 top banks, 2015+
- 1,183 75% since 2020
- At the elite five
- 606 51% of top-bank total
- IB alumni network
- 5,099 #3 by profiles
- Profiles per 1,000 undergrads
- 439.2 #9 per capita
- US-based
- 4,228 83%
Ranks 1 through 15 are targets, and every school in this tier has placed at least 521 analysts into the 18 top banks since the classes of roughly 2015. The pipeline is proven at scale and banks arrive on campus expecting to hire, so your job is to use the machine early. Reach out to alumni your freshman and sophomore years, because at a target the competition sits in your own classrooms.
What the numbers say
Only four schools in the entire ranking clear 5,000 investment banking profiles, and the University of Pennsylvania belongs to that group at 5,099 — a raw total that edges past Harvard's 5,015 and lands the #3 count by network size among 100 schools. The #3 overall rank now rests on the strict top-bank measure instead: 1,183 analysts at the tracked banks, the #2 count anywhere, with 2,250 private equity profiles at #3 alongside.
Here the broad network's two reads pull further apart than at either school above: #3 by size but #9 per capita, at 439.2 profiles per 1,000 undergraduates across 11,611 undergrads. The network also stays home — 4,228 profiles, or 83%, are US-based, a share only Georgetown's 84% beats in the top five, and the second-largest US contingent of any school after Columbia. The mix of 44 private equity profiles per 100 IB profiles sits mid-pack among immediate peers.
A #9 per-capita rank flags the caveat: with 11,611 undergraduates against Harvard's 9,095, part of Penn's total is a function of sheer class size, and an all-time census cannot distinguish 1990s alumni from last year's analysts. Even after that discount, a top-three finish on both network size and the overall rank leaves Penn's network among the deepest in the data.
Across finance
University of Pennsylvania’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 Pennsylvania 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 University of Pennsylvaniain 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, 4,228 (83%) are currently based in the United States and 871 are abroad. The per-1,000 figure divides the network count by 11,611 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.
