What is a target school for investment banking?
Target schools are schools where the vast majority of top banks conduct on-campus recruiting or specifically allocate spots for that school. Each target school is going to have multiple school alumni across all of the top banks.
UCLA, for a school with a 12% acceptance rate and considered the #1 public school and a top 20 school, is actually a complete non-target for investment banking and other high finance careers generally outside of LA, and a semi target for jobs even within the LA area.
Target Schools
A target school is one where your academic credentials ( grades , SAT or ACT scores , and class rank) fall well within the school's average range for the most recently accepted class.
Three of the top schools that investment banks consistently interview and hire from include the University of Pennsylvania, New York University, and the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. Beyond the top schools, the Ivy League schools, such as Harvard, are also key spots that investment banks look to hire from.
If, according to the admissions calculator, you have between a 30% and 80% chance of gaining admission, you should categorize the college as on target. If the school has less than a 15% acceptance rate, you should categorize the school as a reach regardless of your GPA and standardized test scores.
- The Ohio State University (1,811 alumni)
- University of Phoenix (1,081 alumni)
- University of Mumbai (989 alumni)
- Baruch College, City University of New York (774 alumni)
- Franklin University (745 alumni)
- University of Delaware (660 alumni)
- New York University (619 alumni)
If you're planning to attend GaTech, keep in mind it isn't very well known and is not considered a target school from a financial position.
Targets – There is a crop of elite schools (and somehow UC Berkeley slid in here) that solidly place into MBB every year. We set the cut-off at 80 hires per year. This tier includes the usual suspects like Yale, Stanford, and Princeton.
Goldman Sachs prefers Ivy League schools, with Cornell, Harvard, and Columbia ranking third through fifth among employees with bachelor's degrees. The firm also recruits heavily in the United Kingdom, with the London School of Economics, Oxford University, and Cambridge University being among their favorites.
There is no magic number, but five to eight applications are usually enough to ensure that a student is accepted into a suitable institution (depending, of course, on the individual student's record and circ*mstances). This number should be made up of a combination of “safety,” “probable” and “reach” colleges.
Will I get into target schools?
You will almost certainly gain admission. Target Schools – Your test scores, GPA, and/or class rank more closely fit the ones of accepted students or at least fall within a realistic range. You have a reasonable chance (typically better than 50-50) for admission.
Stanford is a target school. Plenty of banks come to their campus to recruit. However, they are not in the top ten for overall distribution in investment banking. A large part of their student body wants the more "socially conscious" positions at tech and startups.
To an extent this is true, but banks also have an elite group of 'target' universities to which they'll actively sell a career within investment banking. At undergraduate level in the UK (in no particular order) these are Oxford, Cambridge, London School of Economics (LSE), UCL, Imperial College London and Warwick.
Investment banks are interested in hiring graduates from all subject areas, not just finance. But certain degrees can help give you key transferable skills and knowledge. Mathematics, economics or business degrees can be a good choice, as can specialist finance degrees such as banking and finance.
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Top 25 Feeder School For Bulge Bracket Banks.
| 1. Harvard University | |
| Morgan Stanley | 14 |
| JPMorgan | 17 |
| Credit Suisse | 8 |
| Barclays Capital | 8 |
Target Schools
While they have an average composite ACT score of 26, they have an average GPA of 3.7. With a 70% acceptance rate, this is also a reasonable Target institution.
A target school puts you in the 40-60% range of acceptance, so like a reach school you can't count on being admitted, but unlike a reach school, you shouldn't be surprised if you do.
Less than 12% — Long Reach. Less than 45% — Reach. Less than 60% — Hard Target. Less than 85% — Target. 85% or higher — Safety.
employees in the Investment Banking division shared that their best estimate of their target schools include: Boston College, Columbia, Cornell, Duke, Georgetown, Harvard, Michigan, NYU, Notre Dame, Page 10 10 UPenn (Wharton), Princeton, University of Virginia, and Yale.
The short answer – yes. USC is a target school for investment banks, but not necessarily all of them. For those firms where USC is a target school, it is typically only a target for the west coast offices for those firms.
Is Goldman Sachs hard to get into?
Goldman Sachs is the premier investment bank in the world. With an acceptance rate of roughly 4%, it's harder to get into Goldman than it is to get into Harvard or Yale.
The Master of Science in Quantitative and Computational Finance at Georgia Institute of Technology – commonly referred to as Georgia Tech – is one of the highest-ranking new entrants in this year's Risk.net quant guide, debuting at number 13.
- Georgia Tech is ranked #4 in Best Undergraduate Engineering Programs. ...
- Scheller College of Business ranks #19 among all Undergraduate Business Programs and #16 for their Part-Time MBA (Source: U.S. News & World Report).
Georgia Tech grads make up chunk of Silicon Valley employees — more than any Ivy League schools. If you want a job at one of Silicon Valley's coveted tech companies such as Google, Apple, Amazon or Facebook, a degree from the Georgia Institute of Technology might do the trick.
Im a sophom*ore at Hopkins and everyone says we are a non target school for both consulting and Investment banking. I think we do send quite a bit of people to MBB , however tier 2 firms heavily recruit for federal consulting and try to push students into that.
The next tier of most popular feeder schools make up nearly 14% of McKinsey recruits. They include the University of Pennsylvania, Duke University, Brigham Young University, Rice University, The University of Sydney in Australia, and the University of Chicago, Stanford University and Cornell University.
Of those 142, nearly 20% hail from the University of Pennsylvania, Yale University, or the University of Michigan. Second-tier schools for McKinsey appear to be Stanford University, Duke University, Princeton University, and Boston College.
Three other institutions in the Ivy League placed on the list of the top 10 target schools for major banks, with Harvard University at No. 3, Cornell University at No. 5, and Columbia University at No. 7.
Washington, D.C. – Georgetown University's McDonough School of Business has been ranked as the No. 1 undergraduate school for Investment Bankers and No. 3 for Finance Professionals by LinkedIn.
flickr/willbeardphoto Harvard Business School graduates are some of the most sought-after new hires in the world. They're among the top choices for companies in just about every industry — including Wall Street investment banks.
Is applying to 3 colleges enough?
The standard thinking from counselors has been that the average college-bound student should apply to about 6-8 colleges: 2-3 reach colleges, 2-3 target colleges, and 2 safety schools.
It is important that students apply to several colleges that are good matches for their background. If students apply to 5 to 10 colleges, as two-thirds of counselors recommend, odds are in their favor that they will be admitted to at least one college.
The College Board recommends that high school seniors narrow down their application list to five to eight schools. It's okay to stray a little outside this range, but as a general rule of thumb you should aim to reach those numbers because sending more than ten applications can have drastic consequences.
Remember that colleges and universities look at applications holistically, so put equal focus on extracurriculars. You can consider Boston University, Purdue University, and Michigan State University colleges matching your academic ability, with an average GPA of accepted students at 3.7.
Generally, a college is considered a reach if your test scores fall below the 25th percentile of students enrolled at the college. Don't let that stop you from being ambitious! Put two or three reach schools on your list. You never know what might happen.
Out of more than 440 schools that are represented in the WSO data, NYU, Harvard, Cornell University, University of Pennsylvania, and Columbia University have the highest distribution percentages for graduates represented in large Wall Street firms, soaking up more than 15% of the overall distribution of recruitment and ...
Even compared to U.S. school standards, Ivey ranks as a semi-target, besting many other top U.S. colleges. The third best finance school is McGill. And McGill's Global Firm % actually really impresses me; they send a handful of extremely bright people every year to Wall Street.
However, many previous threads on WSO say Dartmouth is a target school at equal level with Yale and Duke. These threads about Dartmouth, however, are from a few years back (before Dartmouth started slipping in the rankings and public view).
Choose the Right University
Most students securing positions in banks attend 'target' universities which include; Oxford, Cambridge, LSE, Warwick, UCL, Imperial and Durham (in that order).
