Non-target school#71 of 100
Is William & Mary a Target School for Investment Banking?
William & Mary is a non-target school for investment banking by our count. It ranks #71 of the 100 schools we measure: 92 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 452 profiles that include an investment banking job title.
- Rank
- #71 of 100
- At 18 top banks, 2015+
- 92 65% since 2020
- At the elite five
- 37 40% of top-bank total
- IB alumni network
- 452 #76 by profiles
- Profiles per 1,000 undergrads
- 64.9 #61 per capita
- US-based
- 404 89%
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
92 William & Mary alumni have worked as investment banking analysts at the 18 top banks since the 2013 class, ranking #72 and sitting almost exactly in line with the school's #71 headline rank. Set against 452 total IB profiles, close to one in five of the banking network has passed through a recent analyst seat at one of those firms.
Density lands below par at 64.9 profiles per 1,000 undergraduates against the 97.8 median, though the per-capita rank of #61 still beats the #76 rank by network size, since 6,963 undergrads sit behind the total. 89 percent of profiles are US-based, and the elite five hold 37 of the 92 top-bank analysts, a 40 percent share.
Recency is the number to watch here: 60 of the 92 top-bank analysts graduated in 2018 or later, a 65 percent share, meaning more than a third of the cohort came earlier. Private equity ranks #85 with 176 profiles. William & Mary offers a steady rather than accelerating banking pipeline, which still leaves a usable set of alumni to reach.
Across finance
William & Mary’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 William & Maryin 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, 404 (89%) are currently based in the United States and 48 are abroad. The per-1,000 figure divides the network count by 6,963 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.
