The top 100 universities for careers in banking

Going to the right university is as important to your potential career in finance as drinking water, eating food, or even breathing. But which universities are best? It’s a question that has plagued students for years.

Luckily, there is a ranking. Quacquarelli Symonds’s annual top universities guide, often called the QS World University Rankings, can be broken down by subject – which is exactly what we’ve done to find the top 100 universities for finance (and accounting).

The results are… Mostly unsurprising. American universities dominate the list - providing 26 entries, including four of the top five - with British universities coming in a strong second, with 14. In third, surprisingly, was Australia (population 25m), which provided 8 universities, more than China and India combined (population 2.8bn).

Anglosphere countries make up a slight majority of the list (54 in total), which isn’t surprising given that the world of finance revolves around the London-New York axis. All of our second-tier universities that banks love were in the United States or the United Kingdom for good reason.

European countries were poorly represented, with only 19 EU representatives, including 5 of our top-rated (French) Grandes Écoles. Spain performed surprisingly strongly, with 4 universities, as did Switzerland – home to what we calculated as the world’s best university for a Goldman Sachs job.

Asia too was poorly represented, with 21 universities – most of which were in China (6) and Hong Kong (5). Korean universities performed surprisingly strongly, with 4 schools (as many as Germany and Switzerland combined). All of Singapore’s big three made the list, too.

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