Semi-target school#33 of 100
Is WashU St. Louis a Target School for Investment Banking?
WashU St. Louis is a semi-target school for investment banking by our count. It ranks #33 of the 100 schools we measure: 263 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 1,437 profiles that include an investment banking job title.
- Rank
- #33 of 100
- At 18 top banks, 2015+
- 263 79% since 2020
- At the elite five
- 121 46% of top-bank total
- IB alumni network
- 1,437 #34 by profiles
- Profiles per 1,000 undergrads
- 173.8 #34 per capita
- US-based
- 1,175 82%
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
Elite-five firms hold 121 of WashU St. Louis's 263 top-bank analysts, a 46 percent share of a group that skews toward the biggest names. Goldman Sachs is the largest single employer at 47, ahead of J.P. Morgan's 39, and the firm list then tapers quickly down to a 23-apiece tie between Bank of America and Citi. Morgan Stanley's 32 fills the middle of that distribution.
Both broad reads land on the same number, #34 by network size on 1,437 profiles and #34 on density at 173.8 profiles per 1,000 undergraduates, which is well above the 97.8 median. The top-bank rank of #35 sits two places below the headline #33, a small deficit rather than a real divergence. Eighty-two percent of the network is US-based, and private equity contributes 36 profiles per 100 IB profiles.
Because every profile listing the school counts regardless of degree level, the 1,437 total blends undergraduate and graduate paths while the density figure divides that blend by undergraduate enrollment alone. The verdict is a balanced mid-tier network whose quality shows up in firm mix more than in volume.
Across finance
WashU St. Louis’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
WashU St. Louis 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 WashU St. Louisin 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, 1,175 (82%) are currently based in the United States and 262 are abroad. The per-1,000 figure divides the network count by 8,267 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.
