Banking interns must make 100 applications per job. Unless they are diverse
It’s pretty common knowledge that summer internships in finance are very difficult to get into. Historical acceptance rates have hovered anywhere from single digits to decimals – Goldman’s acceptance rate, for example, dipped from around 2% in 2013 to around 0.72% in 2025. But is that true across the industry?
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Data from student application tracker Trackr, formerly known as the Bristol Tracker, shed some light on the situation. The answer was pretty nasty: the average number of applications that aspiring financier students had to make, per offer, shot right up this year.
In 2024, students made an average of 68 applications to get an offer. In 2025, they made an average of 75. And in 2026, they made a whopping 101 applications per offer. Those are year-of-year increases of 10% and 35%, respectively. This was also the first year that the average student needed to make over 100 applications to get an offer, Trackr noted.
With such a hill to climb, students will want to maximise their odds. And there are two things that students can, err, do to improve their odds: be female, or be black.
Women only had to make 79.1 applications to get an offer on average, compared to the 111.1 applications that men had to make on average. Being a woman means you must make 29% fewer applications than a man to get an offer.
Students of black heritage, meanwhile, only had to make 49.8 applications to get an offer, compared to 105.8 application per offer for white students. Being black means you must make 58% fewer applications than a white person to get an offer.
Another thing that can help your applications, of course, is getting a spring internship. Without a spring week, students need to make a rather daunting 137.6 applications, on average, to get an offer. Those that got a spring week only had to make 73.3 applications. And those that convert their spring internships only had to make 39.3 applications to get an offer for a summer internship.
It was “definitely the toughest recruitment cycle yet,” one student told Trackr. “Summers [internships] have become ridiculously competitive.” It makes sense; more than half of students who applied for internship did not get any offer at all, Trackr noted. But – the bright side, if there is one – is that 46% of students did receive some sort of summer internship offer at the end of the day. Not bad.
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