Lower semi-target school#41 of 100
Is Villanova University a Target School for Investment Banking?
Villanova University is a lower semi-target school for investment banking by our count. It ranks #41 of the 100 schools we measure: 225 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 1,018 profiles that include an investment banking job title.
- Rank
- #41 of 100
- At 18 top banks, 2015+
- 225 75% since 2020
- At the elite five
- 80 36% of top-bank total
- IB alumni network
- 1,018 #42 by profiles
- Profiles per 1,000 undergrads
- 144.1 #40 per capita
- US-based
- 972 95%
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
Villanova's top-bank distribution has an unusual shape. Bank of America is its largest single employer at 33 people, ahead of Deutsche Bank at 32, Goldman Sachs at 28, J.P. Morgan at 25 and Barclays at 20. Nothing dominates, and the gap between the largest and fifth-largest block is only 13 people, which points to a network spread across firms instead of anchored to one recruiting relationship.
Across all 18 banks the school has 225 analysts, ranking #41 — exactly where the headline lands as well, so the seat count and the blended rank tell one story here. Elite-five placement is the soft spot at 80 people, a 36 percent share. Density holds up on the broad side too, with 1,018 profiles over 7,063 undergraduates producing 144.1 per 1,000 undergraduates, comfortably above the 97.8 median.
Venture capital is nearly absent from the network at 7 profiles per 100 IB profiles, ranking #72, and the elite-five share trails more than half the schools in this tier. Ninety-five percent of profiles are US-based, among the most domestic figures in this tier, which makes the network dense for anyone recruiting inside the United States. Villanova is a genuine multi-bank pipeline that leans toward balance-sheet firms rather than the elite five.
Across finance
Villanova University’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
Villanova University 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 Villanova Universityin 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, 972 (95%) are currently based in the United States and 46 are abroad. The per-1,000 figure divides the network count by 7,063 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.
