The top 25 universities for getting a front-office job at Goldman Sachs

If you apply for a role at Goldman Sachs, you have roughly a 4% chance of receiving an offer based on their application and acceptance rates. If you didn’t attend a target school, that number likely drops precipitously. Goldman pulls much of its talent from Ivy League schools in the U.S. and a handful of top-ranked universities in the U.K. While this is still mostly the case for front-office roles, the order of merit does change a bit when looking at revenue-generating positions like sales and trading, M&A and other lucrative client-facing areas.

The rankings below are based on the total number of alumni from each school currently working at Goldman Sachs, courtesy of LinkedIn, combined with employment data from our own internal database that allows us to break down the percentage of graduates from each school who work in front-office roles at the bank. The composite rating allowed us to identify the top schools from which Goldman recruits as well those that best prepare graduates for client-facing positions at the bank.

As was the case when we put these rankings together nearly three years ago, the London School of Economics took first by a fairly large margin. It has the greatest number of alumni currently working at Goldman, the majority of whom work in the front-office. UPenn (Wharton), NYU, Columbia and Harvard fill out the top five.

Cornell University has a large number of graduates working at Goldman, but our database tells us that many work in middle and back-office roles like IT and compliance, pushing them down the rankings. Meanwhile, Stanford University has fewer alumni working at Goldman Sachs though nearly the same number of client-facing graduates, according to our research.

Other notables include University College London, which has become a bigger feeder into Goldman’s front-office over the last few years. It moved up six spots to 15th compared to three years ago. Perhaps the biggest surprise, at least based on name recognition, is Dartmouth College, even when taking into account its comparably diminutive size. However, Dartmouth and Brown are known more as liberal arts-focused Ivy League schools.

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