Talent innovation company SHL analyzed the LinkedIn profiles of 13 of the world’s biggest and most exclusive banks to find out where their employees went to college, exploring the idea of whether elitism and predisposition plays a part when it comes to a career in finance.
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The analysis included the likes of Bank of America and Goldman Sachs, and aimed to discover what % of these elite institution’s workforces were educated at private or Ivy League colleges.
Key findings:
- Barclays hires the highest percentage of Ivy League graduates of all banks.
- Nearly 66% of Barclays’s workforce went to a private college.
- New York University produces the highest amount of graduates working in banks.
Barclays hires the highest percentage of Ivy League graduates of all banks
- This table shows the composition of Ivy League graduates in the world’s banking giants.
- 7.4% of US-university graduates working in banking went to an Ivy League school.
- More than 20% of Barclays’s workforce attended an Ivy League college.
- This is four times more than at Bank of America.
Nearly 66% of Barclays’s workforce is privately educated
- This table shows the composition of private college graduates in the world’s banking giants.
- 40.2% of the graduates of US universities who now work for the banks in our analysis went to a private college.
- Barclays tops this list too with a stifling 65.66% of its employees being educated at a private college.
New York University produces the highest amount of graduates working in banks
- This table shows the top 10 colleges banking giants hire from with a private/public split.
- A whopping 5018 graduates from New York University now works for one of the banks in our analysis.
- Those stateside wishing to work for the biggest banks in the world would do just as well at a public institution as a private – public colleges make up seven out of ten spots in our overall ranking.
Methodology
- SHL analyzed the LinkedIn profiles of 13 of the biggest and most exclusive banks with American offices.
- Using LinkedIn, we calculated the number of graduates from each institution for each bank, allowing us to explore a range of metrics, including percentage of Ivy League graduates and private/public university split.
- For those banks with subsidiaries, we included the employees of those subsidiaries in our analysis.
- The seed list of colleges includes the top 100 public and top 100 private universities in the US.