Goldman Sachs recruits primarily from US Ivy League universities. This might sound entirely predictable, but Goldman does have some surprises in the places it recruits from. In Asia, for example, it recruits mostly from local universities. In the UK, it seems to draw most of its operations hires from Warwick.
Based on the 22,000 Goldman Sachs CVs in the eFinancialCareers CV database, we’ve created rankings of the top universities the bank hires from by sector and region.
Globally, the best university for getting into Goldman Sachs is the London School of Economics (LSE), our data suggests, followed by Columbia University and the University of Pennsylvania – both of which have a strong emphasis on financial services careers.
Goldman has a list of target schools, but our data suggests that elite local universities tend to supply the bulk of talent. In the U.S. for instance, LSE’s global dominance is unsurprisingly watered down – it ranks 16th behind Ivy League and top-ranked local universities. Only three international schools – LSE, the Indian Institute of Technology and Tsinghua University make the top 25 in the U.S. In other words. Goldman’s U.S. business mostly recruits locally.
Goldman has close ties with Tsinghua, but this is primarily in China and it ranks only ninth across Asia. Instead, the University of Hong Kong and the National University of Singapore top the rankings. However, our data suggest that the reason for the pre-eminence of these two universities in Asia is because so many people work in operations, rather than front office, jobs.
In Europe, again local schools dominate, but less so. LSE, Oxford and Cambridge are the obvious winners, but Harvard, Penn and Columbia all make the top ten.
This is the first in a series of articles focusing which colleges top financial institutions recruit from.
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