Semi-target school#25 of 100
Is Wake Forest University a Target School for Investment Banking?
Wake Forest University is a semi-target school for investment banking by our count. It ranks #25 of the 100 schools we measure: 296 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 1,214 profiles that include an investment banking job title.
- Rank
- #25 of 100
- At 18 top banks, 2015+
- 296 76% since 2020
- At the elite five
- 73 25% of top-bank total
- IB alumni network
- 1,214 #36 by profiles
- Profiles per 1,000 undergrads
- 221.9 #24 per capita
- US-based
- 1,170 96%
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
Nearly a third of Wake Forest's 296 top-bank analysts work at Wells Fargo — 91 people, with Bank of America adding another 54. Between them the two firms hold 145 of the 296. Goldman Sachs sits fifth at 26, behind Barclays's 35 and J.P. Morgan's 30, which is why only 73 of the analysts, or 25 percent, sit at the elite five.
The school ranks #24 on density at 221.9 profiles per 1,000 undergraduates, more than double the 97.8 median, against a #36 rank by network size on 1,214 profiles. The top-bank count ranks #28, three places behind the headline #25, with the per-student side of the blend closing the gap. What stands out is how domestic and how banking-specific this network is: 96 percent US-based, with 6 venture capital and 3 hedge fund profiles per 100 IB profiles.
One firm supplying almost a third of the top-bank analysts leaves the rank sensitive to a single relationship, and nothing in the data says whether that relationship is still adding people at the same rate. The verdict is a dense network with a narrow center of gravity and very little buyside spread.
Across finance
Wake Forest 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
Wake Forest 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 Wake Forest 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, 1,170 (96%) are currently based in the United States and 44 are abroad. The per-1,000 figure divides the network count by 5,471 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.
