The top 35 MBAs for getting a job in investment banking

If you’re thinking of starting an MBA to boost your career prospects, the chances are that investment banking is not top of your list of priorities. More business school graduates are shunning finance for technology and industry jobs upon graduation – despite the higher pay packets – banks are recruiting fewer MBAs and those that target financial services are finding happier homes in private equity and asset management.

However, assuming that you’re about to embark on a qualification with the aim of eventually moving into investment banking, which schools are most likely to land you the job? Our research, which combed the data contained within 1.2m CVs on eFinancialCareers’ database globally, suggests that Columbia Business School is the place to go. However, Wharton, Yale, London Business School, Harvard and MIT are also happy hunting grounds for the large investment banks.

How have we come to this conclusion? The league table below is based on the number of people with an MBA who have gone on to work in a ‘front office’ investment banking role upon graduation. This means corporate finance, capital markets, sales and trading or equity research. We’ve allocated a greater weighting to those working for investment banks we’ve deemed ‘tier one’ (Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Citi, Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan and Morgan Stanley), then ‘tier two’ banks (Barclays, Credit Suisse and UBS) and finally ‘tier three’ banks (BNP Paribas, HSBC, Nomura, Royal Bank of Scotland and ScoGen). Together with the proportion of people on the CV database who have secured an investment banking job, we’ve come up with the ranking below.

The results will be relatively predictable to many – the large US investment banks target MBAs from the top US business schools and therefore colleges in the Ivy League predominate in the top ten. What’s more London Business School, which tells us it accounts for 40% of MBAs securing jobs in the City each year, also ranks highly.

Our research suggest that Goldman Sachs is most likely to target students from Wharton, but is also an active recruiter from Columbia and LBS. Both JPMorgan and Deutsche Bank have hired more students from London Business School than anywhere else. However, perhaps because of co-CEO Anshu Jain’s Indian heritage, Deutsche’s second most targeted school is the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad.

French banks SocGen and BNP Paribas recruited mostly from French schools like HEC Paris, according to the data. As we allocate less weighting towards these banks, this has affected the schools’ rankings.

These rankings are not perfect – they do not include earning potential, career progression or the total number of students securing employment immediately after graduation. What they do show are the numbers of people graduating with an MBA from these schools and then going on to secure a job in investment banking.