The top 25 universities for getting a front-office job at J.P. Morgan

The latest in our series on top universities for high-paying finance jobs focuses on J.P. Morgan, which says it receives north of 45 CVs for every job that it advertises. It helps, therefore, to study at the universities that JPM likes to hire from.

Perhaps the biggest takeaway from the research isn’t the order of the rankings (below), but how tightly bunched the schools were. There wasn’t a huge drop-off after the top five like the rankings for Goldman Sachs and the big three consulting firms. J.P. Morgan clearly has target schools, but it tends to cast a wider net than Goldman, McKinsey, Bain and Boston Consulting Group. As with our previous research, we looked at the total number of alumni from each school currently working at J.P. Morgan, 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. We also took into account total enrollment numbers from each university.

The top of the list isn’t all that surprising. As with the Goldman Sachs rankings, London School of Economics rose to the front of the line. NYU actually has a few more alumni working at J.P. Morgan, but not in the front-office. Harvard’s positioning at 7th was a bit of an eye-opener. Eleventh-ranked Cornell has one-third more alumni working at J.P. Morgan, but Harvard has a much higher percentage of graduates working in front-office positions like M&A and sales and trading. Harvard alums don't seem to be a big fan of the middle or back-office at JPM.

However, the big headliner is Manhattan’s Baruch College, which has been quietly feeding Wall Street for decades with its finance-heavy curriculum and its close proximity to Wall Street. More Baruch alumni currently work at J.P. Morgan than any other school, according to our research. Like Cornell, the city college only finished 5th on the list because a vast majority of their graduates work in middle and back-office roles. Baruch is best-known in banking circles for its top-ranked financial engineering program. So to is Carnegie Mellon, producer of a large number of quants and strats at the master’s degree level.

Meanwhile, J.P. Morgan isn’t near as popular among Princeton grads as is Goldman Sachs. University of California, Berkeley and University of Michigan send plenty of graduates to J.P. Morgan, though they are two of the largest schools in the rankings, so their placement percentage isn’t quite as high as those in the top 10. That said, there are plenty of alumni from each school roaming the halls at J.P. Morgan, which can obviously be a great help. As with Goldman, Oxford and Cambridge are the second and third biggest U.K. feeders to J.P. Morgan, behind the London School of Economics.

Click here to check out the rankings for Goldman Sachs for the sake of comparison.

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