These small colleges send one-fifth of their graduates into finance. Here’s how they see recruiting efforts changing.

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Jobs across finance have continued to be highly sought after and extremely competitive, and studies find that a growing proportion of recent graduates see professions in the sector as the most promising career path.

Linkedin News published this year’s Top Colleges List, analyzing the best schools for career development, alumni job placement and network strength based on our data. Additionally, LinkedIn’s Economic Graph Research Institute looked at the schools on the 2025 Top Colleges list with the largest percentage of graduates between 2019 and 2024 who landed jobs in financial services. 

Surprisingly, only one Ivy League institution made the list. The majority of the list consists of smaller colleges and liberal arts colleges with widely recognized finance, economics and management programs. 

Here are the ten colleges with the highest job placement in financial services on LinkedIn’s Top Colleges list:

1. Bentley University: 25.7%
2. Washington and Lee University: 22.1%
3. Babson College: 20.6%
4. University of Chicago: 18%
5. Bryant University: 16.3%
6. Southern Methodist University 15.8%
7. Wake Forest University 15.5%
8. Dartmouth College: 14%
9. Georgetown University: 13.7%
10. Villanova University: 13.6%

The finance sector – especially the big banks – has been notorious for hiring exclusively from elite and expensive private universities. But professors and career development staff at these smaller institutions argue that they have crafted more desirable degree programs in recent years that have attracted employers. 

Leaders told LinkedIn that graduates from smaller colleges and liberal arts schools come prepared with robust soft skills that are in demand with employers. 

“It's not necessarily about who you know anymore, although that does help. It’s about communicating who you are and how you can make a contribution,” said Todd Alessandri , dean of the college of business at Bryant University . “At some of the smaller institutions, the students are hungrier, and I think that hunger makes a big difference.”

Washington and Lee University doesn’t have a finance major. But Aliaa Bassiouny , professor of finance and faculty adviser for the student-run organization that manages a portion of the university’s endowment fund, said that a holistic education provides a knowledge base that allows economics, history and psychology students to succeed in landing a career in finance. 

But the student playbook has changed – even just in the past five years. In order to get ahead of their fellow students in the internship and job search, they have to start networking and developing their resumes earlier.

Internship recruiting could start up to two years before the start date. Firms are currently in an arms race for talent, often establishing reliable talent pipelines to their internship programs through exclusive partnerships with business schools that they trust. 

All of this has made competition for those positions stronger, pitting classmates against each other. Recruiters at larger firms are often looking for prior internships, sometimes even before students reach their junior year, said MaryEllen Ryan , senior associate director of undergraduate career development at Bentley University .

“Co-curricular experiences are mission critical now that the recruiting has escalated so severely,” added Brenda Schuck Stover , assistant dean of undergraduate student services at Villanova School of Business . “So if a student doesn't tap into the infrastructure that we've built starting freshman year, they're going to be behind the eight ball. It’s going to be a thousand times more difficult.”

Even the “Big Four” accounting firms – consisting of EY, KPMG, Deloitte and PwC – now start their recruiting process earlier than most banks, typically at the beginning of students’ sophomore year. 

Because of this, leaders at business schools are increasingly pushing students to get financial certifications such as the CFP or gain experience like working for a fund as early as possible. 

“The idea is we want our students to be ready on day one. Anything a student can do to signal that is important,” said Alessandri. “You're more likely to get that interview or that callback if you’re one step ahead.”

But college career development professionals told LinkedIn News that not having extracurriculars, internships or certifications early doesn't necessarily break a resume for employers. Mark Potter , professor of finance at Babson College , said students still largely have the power to choose when it comes to internships in finance, and students should worry more about whether firms will be the right fit for their career goals.

One advantage that many college students have in the job market is expertise using AI tools. Many firms are looking for younger staff who can reverse-mentor older staff on emerging technologies or fill spots that call for experience with LLMs in financial work, Potter said.

Finance has faced fierce competition from the tech sector for talented students. But in many ways, the burden of firms trying to attract the best talent makes the work harder for students, disproportionately affecting those who have other obligations outside of school such as jobs or children.

“I have a love-hate relationship with the speed of recruiting. I love that it's getting everybody in the game faster,” said Mercy Eyadiel , associate vice president of career development and corporate engagement at Wake Forest University . “Especially for our first generation students, they can be at a disadvantage because of all of the other things they face while navigating college.”

Click here to see LinkedIn's list of the 50 best colleges for long-term career success in the U.S.

Less than a third of artificial intelligence use cases report outcomes, according to new data from Evident . While two-thirds of large banks have documented outcomes for at least one use case this year, only 30% of the 173 use cases reported include key impact metrics such as efficiency gains, revenue uplift, risk reduction or customer satisfaction.

It’s somewhat underwhelming for an industry that has poured billions of dollars into AI investment. Last year Daniel Pinto, chief operating officer at JPMorganChase , projected $2 billion in benefits for the bank in 2024 from artificial intelligence, largely from its use in fraud prevention. Yet he’s the exception, and few finance leaders have even been able to pinpoint how much return companies expect to see. 

Part of the challenge of measuring ROI for banks is the time-lag between deployment and measurable impact. But banks are now beginning to establish frameworks to determine how effective AI investments are in increasing their bottom dollar.

"Measuring value from AI use cases consistently and reliably can be challenging,” said Alexandra Mousavizadeh , co-CEO of Evident. “But it's also clear that this is changing rapidly, as leading banks leverage new measurement frameworks to capture the ROI from expanding gen AI deployments and early experimentation with agentic AI."

We take a quick dive into a company making a bet that others are running from.

While many portfolio managers argue that AI will never be able to outperform an experienced and well-studied active fund manager, that might not be necessary for asset management firms to decide to replace human managers with machines, writes longtime fund manager Caroline Hedges in The Financial Times.

Hedges argues that the name of the game for fund families isn’t performance. Instead they want to lower their costs as much as possible while maintaining their clients. This comes at a time when owning publicly-traded securities is getting cheaper and more investors are flocking to low-cost passively-managed funds. 

Asset managers are also facing extreme competition from roboadvisors and automated direct-indexing tools from fintech companies. Firms are now building out proprietary AI models – instead of using already-available LLMs – that can analyze data from earnings calls and regulatory filings that would otherwise be prohibitively expensive for human labor, Hedges wrote.

Michelle Gill is general manager of the small business and financial services group at PayPal .

Chang: Tell me about your career journey leading up to your current role at PayPal. 

Gill: I started out my career as a lawyer – which didn't last very long – and ended up moving over to working in mortgage backed securities, first at Lehman Brothers. And then at Goldman Sachs I covered fintech running the structured finance business, including trying to help founders sell or securitize assets. The thing I loved about that was watching an industry form and trying to think through how to help all of these tech founders – who were not that well versed in the capital markets – think about how to manage a new problem and come up with solutions for them. When I went to SoFi, we needed to think through our path to profitability. It was my first time in an operating role; I went over as the CFO in 2018 and then ended up becoming the GM of the largest business.

I took a break after we went public through a SPAC. I took six months to sort of figure out what I wanted to do and what my priorities were in the next role. I care about the mission of the company and I care about the notion that you're uniquely qualified to be able to do a job in that role because of the skills you bring to the table that is somewhat differentiated. I spent a bunch of time looking; it's harder to achieve all of those. At SoFi, we were constantly trying to find customers, and PayPal had 400 million consumers and 20 million businesses, and all I kept thinking the entire time was if only I had the assets PayPal had. I like going into situations where the underlying core assets are amazing, and it's really a canvas off of which you can build something new. 

Chang: You listed the factors that you were looking for in a job when you left SoFi and how it was hard to find a position that had everything you wanted. How did you find a job that fulfilled all of those variables, especially in finance where roles are very structured? 

Gill: Nothing about my journey has been a straight line. As structured as you try to make a search for your next thing, it is always somewhat opportunistic. There needs to be somebody who's looking, and that needs to fit what you want to do. I clearly wasn't in a rush having taken six months to make a decision. The thing that I found really rewarding during that time is I actually spent a lot of time with some smaller companies helping them and ultimately becoming either a member of their board or a board advisor. And the thing that I had promised myself is that I really wanted to work with women founders, and I felt like that was a meaningful way in which I could give back and pay it forward. 

There are lots of people in your life that you come across that are trying to talk you into this role or that role, and for me did it really check these boxes or am I talking myself into it because I got offered a number of CEO roles. I didn’t want to do that for my ego. You have to keep going back to the things that matter to you. It's hard to keep that in check to be totally honest. But you never know the next thing that you might see or find or create. 

Chang: What would you say are some of the biggest financial challenges you see today with small businesses?

Gill: Cashflow ends up being one of the biggest issues for small businesses, including putting forward products like a working capital product. Why is the working capital product so compelling? Well, you can borrow against future receivables, and unlike a regular loan where you have to pay on a fixed repayment schedule, you don't repay until you receive the receivables. If you think about what happened when the tariffs were announced, many people wanted to forward order inventory to get lower prices before prices went up. That's super scary when you don't know what consumption is going to be on the other side because of potential price increases in the economy. 

The latest development is that commerce is going to shift from web stores or e-commerce into conversational commerce through the likes of Perplexity, ChatGPT, Google, Meta, etc. How do we ensure that when that change happens, small businesses are equipped to be discovered through those large language models? That's a new thing that we're spending time on to ensure that their catalog is discoverable [and] the tagging of their items is such that it will be picked up by these large language models. 

Chang: I'd like to get your views when it comes to hiring. What kinds of skills or experience would someone in finance need to come and work on your team at PayPal?

Gill: The people who do well in financial and operating companies tend to take a much more holistic view of the business and try to understand the business beyond the finance function. Having worked in finance, both at a financial institution and now in an operating role, I think the thing that you have to be willing to spend time on is getting really clean data. You often assume that is easier to do working in larger organizations. But it’s very important having the ability to help make data-driven decisions at a company, knowing which data matters and creating frameworks for people when you're sitting in a finance seat. 

Let's assume that you are driving marketing, finance or budgets. All of a sudden you see, a certain channel is really outperforming. There’s a lot of questions that come from that. Why don't we double down on that channel? What's the marginal next dollar that could be spent? Why do we even use this channel? What's the point? How do these channels interact with one another? When this channel goes up, do we see the other channels also go up? And the reality is none of that's in the job description. You could just do your job exactly. But those insights and that drive is what really creates the ability to rise, because all of a sudden you're adding value in a totally new way that no one was expecting.

Here are the latest updates in the world of finance, private equity, banking, real estate, markets and more:

Alternatives allowed in 401(k) accounts: Last week President Donald Trump signed an executive order paving the way for 401(k) retirement plans to include alternative assets, expanding the potential investment options for millions of Americans. An estimated $12.5 trillion in 401(k) accounts are expected to have access to private equity, cryptocurrencies and real estate investments. The order directs the Labor Department, Treasury Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission to assess whether rules and regulations need to be altered in order to facilitate the move.

RTO picks up as office needs change: Most companies are seeing steady progress getting workers back to their desks. This year, 72% of companies in the U.S., Canada and Latin America surveyed by CBRE say attendance is in line with expectations, with employees averaging 2.9 days in the office per week. Use of office space is evolving in a variety of ways; just 25% of companies say their offices have assigned seating, for instance, down from 56% in 2023.

Stock buybacks approach record: American companies are expected to buy back a record $1.1 trillion of their own shares this year. Tech giants such as Apple and Alphabet and big banks including JPMorgan Chase are making the biggest purchases. Tax cuts and healthy earnings growth have created cash piles for a lot of businesses, and given the ongoing trade instability, many see buybacks as a good use of those funds. Skeptics argue that opting for repurchases over longer-term options such as investing in production indicates the trade chaos will ultimately hurt growth.

Institutional demand spurs crypto: Bitcoin is taking another run at a fresh all-time high, rebounding from a pullback at the start of the month, fueled by demand from institutional investors and corporate treasuries. The largest cryptocurrency jumped 2.2% to $122,000 on Monday, close to the previous record high of $123,205, per Bloomberg data. The uptrend comes amid growing adoption of digital assets by corporate treasury companies, which have collectively snapped up $113 billion worth of bitcoin. Meanwhile, Ether, the second-largest cryptocurrency, rose above $4,300 for the first time since December 2021.

BofA cautions junior bankers: Another top Wall Street firm is cracking down on junior bankers accepting future dated jobs. Investment banking analysts at Bank of America now face the prospect of reassignment to other parts of the firm if they have signed on to job offers elsewhere, Bloomberg reported, citing anonymous sources. It follows similar clamp downs at JPMorgan Chase and Citibank amid competition for talent with private equity firms that increasingly poach junior bankers, sometimes with offers dated several years in the future.

LinkedIn News published this year’s Top Colleges List, analyzing the best schools for career development, alumni job placement and network strength based on our data. Those with the highest rate of job placement in financial services include many smaller colleges, who are finding better ways for students to get in front of hiring managers.

We want to hear from you: What can students do to get ahead in the finance job search process?

Join the conversation in the comments section below.