It’s no secret that investment banks recruit at a small batch of schools. An article from eFinancialCareers quantifies just how hard it is to get a job at an i-bank if you’re attending a non-Ivy, non-elite school.

You and everybody else.

Banks hire approximately 70 to 88 percent of the analyst class from elite schools and in the neighborhood of 85 percent of MBA-hires from top schools, according to the article. They don’t cite a source so it’s unclear where the numbers are from.

The article quotes recruiters from Citigroup and Goldman Sachs that basically advise i-banking wannabes to “work smarter, not harder.” Just kidding, that’s from Scrooge McDuck. The recruiters recommend working harder and working connections.

Like we haven’t heard that one before.

Meanwhile, one unidentified recruiter is quoted as saying: “If a student from a non-targeted school says I’m very interested in working for you and I’m going to be in New York, it’s hard to turn them down.”

How about no it’s not, and it probably happens everyday!

But brand name everything isn’t always good either. One banker recently told Bballe that a Wharton-Wharton (undergrad, MBA) candidate was just as unappealing as a non-Ivy one.

Why? The short of it is that we don’t know. But BankersBall is looking for people from non-brand name beginnings who have succeeded in banking. Even though we at BankersBall are huge snobs and from elite colleges, if you tell us how you did it at, we’ll publish your story and give your comrades a leg up. Write to us at editor@bankersball.com.