Top Feeders to Wall Street

Teens aiming to one day work at a major bank or investment firm often wonder which undergraduate colleges and universities will best aid this professional quest.

This is, after all, a field where the most reputable players often draw from a small pool of elite schools, and where tapping into one’s alumni network can prove critical to landing the most desired jobs. As expected, Penn, Columbia, and a few other “usual suspects” grant nearly unparalleled access to Wall Street; however, there are some surprising schools that send impressive numbers of grads to the top investment houses each year, including many smaller liberal arts schools.

To identify “top feeder” institutions into the banking sector, we relied on publicly available data from LinkedIn, a professional networking site featuring profiles of more than 175 million workers across the United States. Specifically, we identified and analyzed the undergraduate backgrounds of nearly 10,000 entry-level Investment Banking Analysts across fifteen of the most reputable banking firms, including PJT Partners, Goldman Sachs, Citi, JP Morgan, Bank of America, Morgan Stanley, Credit Suisse, Barclays, Guggenheim Partners, Evercore, Greenhill, Lazard, Moelis & Company, Centerview Partners, and Perella Weinberg. We then constructed two lists. The first list looks at the raw number of alumni employed by these select companies. The second list looks at the top 30 producers when adjusted for undergraduate enrollment, which allows us to highlight schools that may be smaller in size, but still send a significant number of graduates directly into the halls of Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, etc.

Finally, we identified the two top employers for each “feeder” institution. The first top employer is the bank employing the most undergraduate alumni from a particular school. The second top employer is the bank with the highest share of employees from that undergraduate school. For example, Penn’s first top employer is Goldman Sachs, because more Penn (undergraduate) alumni work at Goldman Sachs than at any of the other twelve banking firms. Penn’s second top employer is Centerview Partners because its graduates comprise a larger share of all employees at Centerview than they do at any other bank in our analysis. If a school’s first and second top employer are the same, we indicate the banking firm with the second highest share of employees instead. Measuring both total graduates employed and institutional share of an bank’s employees allows us to identify schools offering the best pipelines to smaller yet highly prestigious firms, such as Centerview and Evercore, which may draw heavily from one particular institution but wouldn’t otherwise make an institution’s list of top employers because of their relatively small size.

Updated July 2022