Which universities and business schools did Goldman, JPM and others target this year?

Which university or business school should you be attending if you want to get a job in an investment bank when you graduate? Based upon our own CV database, we’ve already suggested the top 35 MBAs for getting into banking. However, this data is necessarily historical – it’s based on the schools banks recruited from in the past. Which ones are they targeting for their 2015 intakes?

Where still available, we’ve looked at the lists of campus events banks publish on their websites and used these a proxy for their target schools.

Based on the list of campus events run by Goldman Sachs during the 2014-2015 recruitment season, it looks a lot like Columbia Business School, Wharton and Chicago Booth are the firm’s favourite places for finding MBA hires for 2015. Conversely, European business schools like the London Business School (LBS) and INSEAD aren’t listed on Goldman’s current events calendar at all…

By comparison, at the undergraduate level, Goldman’s event calendar suggests it’s particularly interested in hiring analysts from Princeton and Oxford Universities. Surprisingly, the likes of Cambridge University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) don’t get much of a look-in.

Goldman Sachs didn’t respond to a request to comment on the extent to which its graduate events are correlated with its targeted schools. However, if you’re studying at Cambridge, MIT or LBS, all is not lost – you just need to join the finance society. A senior recruiter for another American bank pointed out that most firms are now quietly running events through societies rather than advertising them on their sites. “Recruiting juniors has become all about invitation-only events with the finance societies,” she says. “Most institutions don’t bother listing events on their career pages because you get anyone and everyone turning up.”

Accordingly, the calendar for London Business School’s Finance Society shows Goldman running 10 events there between September and the end of December, including multiple ‘coffee catch-ups’ and an informal networking event. Similarly, Harvard Business School’s Finance Club has just run its annual conference, sponsored by Goldman Sachs, Lazard. JPMorgan and others.

JPMorgan’s online events calendar is less transparent than Goldman’s, covering only events that are yet to come rather than events for the whole season. On this basis, Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business and Columbia Business School are both popular, whilst at graduate level JPM looks to be lavishing most attention on the universities of Pennsylvania, Oxford, Cambridge and Bournemouth (where it has a European infrastructure centre), whilst also paying multiple visits to Imperial College London, University College London, and the London School of Economics.

The award for blanket events coverage, however, must go to Credit Suisse. The Swiss bank has a back office centre in Wroclaw Poland. Its own events page suggests that it’s running seven events at the University of Wroclaw between now and the end of the year. Irrespective of additional soirees quietly organised by Credit Suisse through university finance societies, we deduce that the bank’s particularly keen to hire from this particular school in Poland.

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