Is Washington and Lee University a Target School for Investment Banking?

Rank

#22 of 100

At 18 top banks, 2015+

278 77% since 2020

At the elite five

78 28% of top-bank total

IB alumni network

890 #48 by profiles

Profiles per 1,000 undergrads

468.9 #3 per capita

US-based

863 97%

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

Washington and Lee posts 468.9 investment banking profiles per 1,000 undergraduates, nearly five times the 97.8 median and third-best in the country on density. The arithmetic behind it is 890 profiles against 1,898 undergraduates. Raw count places the school at #48, a 45-place split between the two broad reads, while the headline sits at #22 on the top-bank-anchored blend.

The top-bank count holds up better than the count rank implies, with 278 analysts placing it #33, and the per-student leg of the blend lifts the headline eleven places past that. Wells Fargo dominates at 89 and Deutsche Bank follows at 52 — together 141 of the 278, more than half. The network is almost entirely domestic at 97 percent, and buyside adjacency is thin at 24 private equity and 4 venture capital profiles per 100 IB profiles, with hedge funds down at #96.

With 1,898 undergraduates, the per-capita figure is the most volatile number the school has, and it still compares an all-time profile count against a single year of enrollment rather than measuring anything about a graduating class. The verdict is an extraordinarily banking-dense small network that largely stays inside banking rather than fanning out.

• #22Investment Banking—890
• #78Private Equity24211
• #87Venture Capital439
• #96Hedge Funds113

Where its analysts go

Washington and Lee 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.

• 1Wells Fargo89
• 2Deutsche Bank52
• 3J.P. Morgan46
• 4Bank of America24
• 5Goldman Sachs22
• 6Barclays7
• 7Citi7
• 8Morgan Stanley6

Nearby in the ranking

• 19MIT380
• 20Northwestern University523
• 21New York University738
• 22Washington and Lee University278
• 23UCLA621
• 24University of Texas at Austin623
• 25Wake Forest University296

See the full ranking of 100 schools →

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 Washington and Lee 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, 863 (97%) are currently based in the United States and 27 are abroad. The per-1,000 figure divides the network count by 1,898 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.