The crème de la crème of investment banking internships

Cold, hard statistics on the best places to kick-start your career scoff at suggestions that investment banking is losing its allure for graduates.

Four bulge bracket investment banks make it into the latest Bloomberg BusinessWeek rankings of the best internships on offer (in the US). Notably, however, Goldman Sachs (predictably the top ranked i-bank...) has slipped from first place in 2008, to sixth in 2009.

In descending order, Goldman Sachs (6th), UBS (8th), J.P. Morgan (13th) and Barclays (22nd) offer the best investment banking internship programme, according to the latest rankings.

Delving into the assessment criteria paints a slightly different picture, however. Offering $14k (8.7k) for the entire placement, UBS pays its interns most generously, followed by J.P. Morgan ($12.3k) and Goldman ($11.5k).

A whopping 92% of entry level hires at UBS were former interns, followed by 88% at J. P. Morgan, 78% at Goldman and 75% at Barclays.

But UBS only took on 184 interns this year, 68% of whom received a full-time offer. By comparison, a hefty 85% of BarCap's 350 interns were hired for an entry-level position.

Goldman offered 66% of its 666 interns a full-time place, while J. P Morgan hired 75% into its graduate programme. A caveat to this, though, is that not all interns had responded to offers when the data was collected.

The only bank to provide an insight into its hiring plans for 2010 was Barclays, which intends to up the number of interns by 43% to 500 this year.