Semi-target school#31 of 100
Is Williams College a Target School for Investment Banking?
Williams College is a semi-target school for investment banking by our count. It ranks #31 of the 100 schools we measure: 183 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 733 profiles that include an investment banking job title.
- Rank
- #31 of 100
- At 18 top banks, 2015+
- 183 87% since 2020
- At the elite five
- 111 61% of top-bank total
- IB alumni network
- 733 #58 by profiles
- Profiles per 1,000 undergrads
- 347.1 #15 per capita
- US-based
- 684 93%
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
Sixty-one percent of Williams' top-bank analysts work at the elite five, 111 of 183 people, an elite concentration only MIT's 63 percent beats in this tier. Where most schools at this rank spread across balance-sheet banks, the Williams cohort clusters at the firms with the smallest analyst classes. Goldman Sachs accounts for 49 of those seats and J.P. Morgan for 37, together roughly half the school's entire top-bank total.
The pipeline is also the freshest in the tier, with 160 of the 183 analysts graduating in 2018 or later, an 87 percent recent share. Density is extreme: 733 profiles against 2,112 undergraduates gives 347.1 per 1,000 undergraduates versus the 97.8 median, ranking #15 per capita while the raw count ranks #58. The headline #31 rests on the analyst seats instead, with the per-student leg pulling it well past the seat count alone.
Absolute scale is the constraint. A top-bank rank of #44 sits thirteen places below the headline #31, and the buyside network is modest, with 302 private equity profiles at #59 and 36 hedge fund profiles at #73. Ninety-three percent of profiles remain US-based. Williams delivers unusually high-quality banking outcomes per graduate, and anyone counting on alumni volume should expect a small, tightly clustered network.
Across finance
Williams College’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
Williams College 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 Williams Collegein 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, 684 (93%) are currently based in the United States and 49 are abroad. The per-1,000 figure divides the network count by 2,112 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.
