Non-target school#66 of 100
Is Wesleyan University a Target School for Investment Banking?
Wesleyan University is a non-target school for investment banking by our count. It ranks #66 of the 100 schools we measure: 77 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 387 profiles that include an investment banking job title.
- Rank
- #66 of 100
- At 18 top banks, 2015+
- 77 78% since 2020
- At the elite five
- 36 47% of top-bank total
- IB alumni network
- 387 #82 by profiles
- Profiles per 1,000 undergrads
- 126.2 #42 per capita
- US-based
- 330 85%
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
Nearly half of Wesleyan's top-bank analysts work at the elite five, 36 of 77 for a 47 percent share, which is the most useful single fact the data offers about the school. The 77 total ranks #76 on alumni at the 18 largest banks, ten places behind the #66 headline that the per-student leg pulls up.
Density is the network's strong suit at 126.2 profiles per 1,000 undergraduates versus the 97.8 median, with 387 IB profiles from 3,066 undergrads and a per-capita rank of #42 against an #82 rank by network size — the same small-school shape that lifts the headline's per-student leg. 60 of the 77 top-bank analysts, or 78 percent, graduated in 2018 or later, and 85 percent of profiles are currently US-based.
The buyside network is small in both absolute and ranked terms, with private equity at #87 on 165 profiles and hedge funds at #81 on 27. Wesleyan's banking alumni are concentrated rather than numerous, which suits a student who plans to work a short list of contacts hard instead of relying on the volume of the network.
Across finance
Wesleyan 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.
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 Wesleyan 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, 330 (85%) are currently based in the United States and 57 are abroad. The per-1,000 figure divides the network count by 3,066 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.
