Non-target school#73 of 100
Is University of Washington a Target School for Investment Banking?
University of Washington is a non-target school for investment banking by our count. It ranks #73 of the 100 schools we measure: 114 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 922 profiles that include an investment banking job title.
- Rank
- #73 of 100
- At 18 top banks, 2015+
- 114 75% since 2020
- At the elite five
- 59 52% of top-bank total
- IB alumni network
- 922 #47 by profiles
- Profiles per 1,000 undergrads
- 23.3 #85 per capita
- US-based
- 669 73%
A rank below 60 puts the odds against you without ending your chances: every school on this list has placed analysts into the top banks. Plan on cold email volume that feels unreasonable and a resume built from early finance internships. The students who make it from this tier start earlier and follow up longer than everyone they are competing against.
What the numbers say
Fifty-two percent of Washington's top-bank analysts sit at the elite five, 59 of 114 people, one of the highest elite shares in this tier. The school does not produce many top-bank analysts in absolute terms, and a disproportionate number of the ones it does produce land at the most selective firms rather than at the larger balance-sheet banks.
The wider network leans heavily toward investing, with 476 private equity profiles at rank #40 and 199 venture capital profiles at rank #30, both far ahead of the banking rank of #73, alongside 52 private equity and 22 venture capital profiles per 100 IB profiles. Its top-bank count ranks #60, thirteen places ahead of the #73 headline that the per-student leg of the measure pulls down, and 85 of the 114 analysts graduated in 2018 or later.
The limitations are scale and location. Density is 23.3 profiles per 1,000 undergraduates against the 97.8 median, ranking #85, because 922 profiles come from 39,515 undergraduates, and only 73 percent of profiles are currently US-based. Washington offers a strong investing network and a small, quality-weighted banking pipeline that thins out quickly beyond the elite firms.
Across finance
University of Washington’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.
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 Washingtonin 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, 669 (73%) are currently based in the United States and 253 are abroad. The per-1,000 figure divides the network count by 39,515 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.
