Lower semi-target school#47 of 100
Is University of Wisconsin-Madison a Target School for Investment Banking?
University of Wisconsin-Madison is a lower semi-target school for investment banking by our count. It ranks #47 of the 100 schools we measure: 233 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 1,452 profiles that include an investment banking job title.
- Rank
- #47 of 100
- At 18 top banks, 2015+
- 233 76% since 2020
- At the elite five
- 92 39% of top-bank total
- IB alumni network
- 1,452 #32 by profiles
- Profiles per 1,000 undergrads
- 39.5 #72 per capita
- US-based
- 1,151 79%
In the 36 to 60 band the pipeline still exists — every school here shows at least 92 analysts at the top banks — but it is thin enough that you have to build your own. Expect to source interviews through cold emails and off-cycle applications rather than campus recruiting, and expect the alumni you find to remember what that climb felt like.
What the numbers say
Wisconsin's two network reads disagree sharply. Its 1,452 IB profiles rank #32 by raw count, while 39.5 profiles per 1,000 undergraduates ranks #72 per capita, less than half the 97.8 median, and the top-bank-anchored headline lands at #47. The arithmetic is simply 36,797 undergraduates: the network is large because the school is large, and any individual student is one of many chasing the same seats.
The raw top-bank count is more flattering than the blended headline. Wisconsin holds 233 top-bank analyst seats at rank #39, with 92 of them at the elite five, a 39 percent share that sits mid-pack. Recent graduates make up 176 of the 233, a 76 percent recent share. The buyside network is one of the tier's better ones, with 677 private equity profiles at #32 and 190 venture capital profiles at #34.
Twenty-one percent of profiles are located outside the United States, so the domestic network is smaller than the 1,452 total suggests, and per-capita reach is the weakest part of the case. Wisconsin gives access to a broad, well-balanced finance alumni base across banking and the buyside, with the caveat that scale is doing most of the work behind the count.
Across finance
University of Wisconsin-Madison’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.
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 University of Wisconsin-Madisonin 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, 1,151 (79%) are currently based in the United States and 301 are abroad. The per-1,000 figure divides the network count by 36,797 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.
