Target school#5 of 100
Is Yale University a Target School for Investment Banking?
Yale University is a target school for investment banking by our count. It ranks #5 of the 100 schools we measure: 804 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 3,078 profiles that include an investment banking job title.
- Rank
- #5 of 100
- At 18 top banks, 2015+
- 804 78% since 2020
- At the elite five
- 440 55% of top-bank total
- IB alumni network
- 3,078 #12 by profiles
- Profiles per 1,000 undergrads
- 451.5 #7 per capita
- US-based
- 2,270 74%
Ranks 1 through 15 are targets, and every school in this tier has placed at least 521 analysts into the 18 top banks since the classes of roughly 2015. The pipeline is proven at scale and banks arrive on campus expecting to hire, so your job is to use the machine early. Reach out to alumni your freshman and sophomore years, because at a target the competition sits in your own classrooms.
What the numbers say
Ranked by raw count alone, Yale would sit at #12 by the size of its broader alumni network. Spread those 3,078 profiles across just 6,818 undergraduates and the school reads #7 per capita — 451.5 profiles per 1,000 undergraduates, roughly four and a half times the 100-school median of 97.8. The headline #5 rests on a stricter ledger: 804 alumni matched to the 18 top banks by an investment banking analyst title since the 2013 class, the #8 count on that measure, with 625 of them — 78% — graduating in 2018 or later.
Only 74% of the network is US-based — 2,270 profiles — leaving a larger international share than neighbors like Georgetown at 84% or Duke at 86%. The buyside mix is middle-of-the-pack: 41 private equity profiles and 14 venture capital profiles per 100 IB profiles, closer to Cornell's blend than to Harvard's 51. Hedge fund alumni rank #18, a step behind the school's #5 IB position.
Per-capita density divides an all-time alumni pool by fall 2023 enrollment, so it flatters any school that stayed small — it is a size index, never a placement rate, and it cannot say what share of a current class actually reaches a banking desk. Verdict: a firmly target-tier network whose analyst bench at the top banks, not its mid-pack network size, is what holds the #5.
Across finance
Yale 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. The last column shows the network mix: profiles per 100 IB profiles.
Where its analysts go
Yale University 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 Yale 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, 2,270 (74%) are currently based in the United States and 808 are abroad. The per-1,000 figure divides the network count by 6,818 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.
