A brief history of the Goldman Sachs internship acceptance rate

So you want an internship at Goldman Sachs? Well, it turns out that 360,000 other people do too. 

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Goldman only had 2,600 internships available this year. There were 138 applicants per place and an acceptance rate of only 0.72%. 

Having a lot of applicants and accepting almost no one is a source of pride in the financial services industry. Citadel and Citadel Securities received 108,000 applicants for its own internships this year and boasted that it accepted only 0.4% of them. If you thought getting into Goldman is hard, getting into Citadel and Citadel Securities is 80% harder. 

Internships are becoming more unobtainable. Last year, Goldman accepted 0.8% of its internship applicants; in 2022 it accepted 1.27%. In 2013, Goldman's intern acceptance rate was 2%. At Citadel Securities, the acceptance rate was 0.5% in 2023. 

The problem is one of demand and of supply. The supply of students who want to be financial services interns is increasing. Financial services firms' demand for interns is not. 

In 2024, for example, 315,000 people wanted to be interns at Goldman and 2,600 were accepted. In 2022, 236,000 people wanted to be interns at Goldman and 3,000 were accepted. At Citadel and Citadel Securities, applications increased 20% in the past year.

There's a danger that things will get harder still. Banks typically pay interns a prorated amount of the $100k+ salaries earned by analysts. Citadel and Citadel Securities pay interns $20k+ per week. There aren't many other places you can earn that kind of money. Students are increasingly coming to realize this. Banks, meanwhile, are starting to realize that they need fewer interns in the age of AI.

Successful interns must be increasingly polished. It wasn't always like this. Writing on LinkedIn, Dan Dees, the co-head of Goldman Sachs global banking and markets, says that when he arrived for his own Goldman internship in 1992 he had "zero banking experience" and "only a few years' lawn mowing money" to his name. Good luck getting accepted in this state now.

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