The hardest US bank to get into isn’t Goldman Sachs or JPMorgan, actually

Despite the rising number of applications and the falling number of internships, the hardest (major) investment bank to land an internship isn’t the venerable JPMorgan and its 0.91% acceptance rate or Goldman Sachs and its 0.8%. No, the toughest bank to land an internship at – statistically – is Morgan Stanley.

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So suggest figures sourced by Financial News, which we’ve collated into a neat little table below. The numbers suggest that Morgan Stanley’s acceptance rate for students was a miniscule 0.43% in EMEA, twice as competitive as Goldman Sachs and almost four times tougher than Citigroup’s 1.58%.

By comparison, the easiest global program to get into was Bank of America’s. It’s worth noting that BofA, having three times as many employees as Morgan Stanley and five times as many as Goldman, has more non-investment banking related roles to intern for. These are generally less prestigious and less well-paid, and therefore less competitive to get into.

Nonetheless, the numbers across the board are huge (or tiny, depending on how you look at it). Despite the unanimous unpopularity of banking work-life-balance, the industry is still attracting hordes of fresh-faced and bright students, all itching for a chance to earn some of the highest graduate salaries & bonuses available on the market today.

Outside of the big five Wall Street banks, it’s still tough to get into banking and finance. In the UK, for instance, each graduate program had 39 applications (implying an acceptance rate of 2.6%); each banking & finance graduate program had 59 applicants (implying an acceptance rate of 1.7%).

Those figures are for 2022, mind you. Research from Trackr, formerly the Bristol Tracker, indicates that the number in 2023 was inching close to 70 applicants per place in investment banking. That’s an acceptance rate approaching 1.4% across the industry, and not just the ultra-prestigious firms listed below.

If you thought the less-hard-working and less-paying European banks were easier to get into, by the way, forget it. Just as tough as any of the below, we found, was BNP Paribas - which had an acceptance rate in the Americas of just 0.45%. Its off-cycle internship had an even more competitive intake, with 2,490 applicants for 5 positions, or an acceptance rate of just 0.2%.

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