The second-tier universities that banks love

You want to get into investment banking, but your grades aren’t great, and you won’t be able to go to a top tier university. Now what?

Fear not. Although it definitely helps to go to a top university to maximise your chances of getting into banking, it’s not the end of the world if you don’t get in to one. Because there are some universities that banks like – even without them topping global charts.

A word of warning, however. A true list of second-tier universities would be, for all intents and purposes, impossible. A lot of them are regional – for example, NUS is a great university in Singapore, but it’s “just good” outside of APAC. Prestige for most universities doesn’t stretch around the world in quite the same way that a top tier institution’s, such as Oxford, Cambridge, or Harvard, does.

That means that, for most of the developed world, the “second-tier universities that banks love” are the best local ones. You’re always best off going to LSE or Wharton, regardless of where you want to be a banker, basically.

The methodology used was cross-referencing publicly-avilable data on investment banking analyst intakes with relative the sizes of each university's intake.

With all that in mind, here are the best (international) universities to go to if you didn’t make the cut at your first choice:

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