Target school#10 of 100
Is University of Virginia a Target School for Investment Banking?
University of Virginia is a target school for investment banking by our count. It ranks #10 of the 100 schools we measure: 748 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 3,231 profiles that include an investment banking job title.
- Rank
- #10 of 100
- At 18 top banks, 2015+
- 748 73% since 2020
- At the elite five
- 263 35% of top-bank total
- IB alumni network
- 3,231 #11 by profiles
- Profiles per 1,000 undergrads
- 183.5 #31 per capita
- US-based
- 2,899 90%
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
At 17,612 undergraduates, the University of Virginia is more than three times MIT's size, yet it still posts 183.5 investment banking profiles per 1,000 undergraduates — nearly double the 100-school median of 97.8 — while its raw total of 3,231 profiles ranks #11 of 100. The headline #10 rests on the strict measure — 748 alumni in investment banking analyst seats at the 18 top banks since the 2013 class, a count that ranks #10 all on its own.
The broader network reads #11 by size against #31 per capita, but its real signature is geography: 90% of profiles are US-based, 2,899 in all, a share only Dartmouth and Notre Dame, both at 92%, top in this group. The buyside mix is similarly conventional, with 37 private equity profiles per 100 IB profiles and a venture capital figure of just 8 per 100 IB profiles, tied for the lowest of any school in this group.
An all-time profile count can mask trajectory: 3,231 profiles say how many Virginia alumni have ever carried a banking title, not whether the current flow into analyst classes is rising or falling, and a 17,612-student denominator softens the per-capita read either way. The verdict is a profile that holds when the measure tightens — #10 on analyst seats at the top banks, #11 by network size — anchored almost entirely in the US market.
Across finance
University of Virginia’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 Virginia 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 Virginiain 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, 2,899 (90%) are currently based in the United States and 332 are abroad. The per-1,000 figure divides the network count by 17,612 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.
