Notre Dame Alumni Are More Than Three Times as Likely as Yale Alumni to Have Worked at the Big Four

Media buyers who build finance and audit audiences often start with Ivy League letterhead. The name feels like a shortcut to the right people. In the AllSource identity graph, the shortcut points the wrong way for at least one high-value pipeline: the Big Four accounting firms.

In AllSource IDGraph (EducationHistory_V5 joined to EmploymentHistory_V5, counted as unique people), 6.20% of University of Notre Dame alumni have worked at a Big Four accounting firm (Deloitte, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Ernst & Young or KPMG), compared with 1.86% of Yale University alumni.

• University of Notre Dame: 6.20% of alumni (3,135 of 50,553 people)
• Yale University: 1.86% of alumni (1,042 of 55,894 people)

That is more than three times the share. Notre Dame also wins on headcount, even though Yale has more alumni in the graph overall.

How the numbers were built

Each school's denominator is every person in IDGraph with an education record matching that school. For Notre Dame, that includes the University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame Law School and the Mendoza College of Business, and excludes high schools and similarly named institutions elsewhere. For Yale, it includes Yale University and its named schools, such as Yale Law School and Yale College.

The numerator is people from that school with a past employer record, not a current one, that matches Deloitte, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Ernst & Young or KPMG, including LLP, consulting and country variants. Capgemini records are excluded so that a similar name does not inflate the count.

Coverage, and why the direction holds

Not every person in the graph has employment history on file. Past-employer data is populated for 83.88% of Notre Dame alumni and 82.73% of Yale alumni, so coverage is nearly identical for the two schools. Among only the people with populated past-employer data, the rates are 7.39% for Notre Dame and 2.25% for Yale. That is the same direction as the headline, so the gap is not an artifact of one school simply having more records.

The headline uses the share of each school's total alumni in the graph. That keeps the comparison fair between schools of different sizes, and it is the number a planner should start with before looking at raw headcount.

Why it matters for activation

School is a hiring pipeline, and pipelines are very different from one school to the next. A finance, audit, tax or advisory audience built only from Ivy League alumni can miss a large share of people who already carried a Big Four employer label earlier in their careers. If your plan targets people with audit or advisory experience, the employer label is the signal to buy, and the school label is only a proxy for it.

Prestige and pipeline are different things. Both can be useful in a plan. Treating one as the other wastes budget.

What to do with the finding

1. Size alumni segments by employer path, not by school prestige alone.
2. Ask your data vendor for the join method: school match, then employer set, then unique people, not record rows.
3. Lead with the share of each school's alumni, then check headcount, so a large school does not win on size alone.
4. Keep coverage notes next to any school comparison, and check that the rate among populated records points the same direction.
5. Test past-employer audiences, such as former Big Four people, alongside alumni audiences rather than assuming one replaces the other.

This is owned AllSource identity analysis for media buyers evaluating education and past-company audiences. It is not a claim about admissions, campus culture or hiring merit. It is a measurement of people who carry both a school label and a Big Four employer label in the graph.