Investment Banking interview preparation
Every question below is either traced to a named firm from a public candidate report, or tagged at desk level when we could not trace it. Answers are written the way you would actually say them out loud — answer first, then the mechanism, then the limitation.
100 questions, mapped to the firms that asked them
- Questions
- 100
- Traced to a firm
- 100
- Firms
- 46
- Updated
- September 2026
083How would a college increase its revenue?Harris WilliamsInvestment Banking · Richmond · 2018
Say this
Price, volume, mix, and new revenue lines. Raise net tuition by discounting less, grow enrolment, shift mix toward full-fee and postgraduate students, and monetise the assets that sit idle.
Then walk it
- Price: the lever is usually the discount rate, not the headline tuition. Most institutions discount heavily; recovering a few points of net tuition is worth more than a sticker price rise and is less visible.
- Volume: more students, but constrained by capacity and by admissions standards, since taking weaker students damages the brand that supports the price.
- Mix is the highest-return lever. International and out-of-state students pay multiples of the domestic rate. Postgraduate and professional programmes carry better margins. Executive education has almost no marginal cost against existing faculty.
- New lines: online programmes that break the capacity constraint entirely, summer and short courses that use the campus in the off-season, conference and event hire, and licensing the brand.
- And the asset side: parking, retail on campus, research commercialisation and licensing, plus the fundraising engine, since alumni giving is a genuine revenue line that responds to investment.
- The reason mix beats price and volume: operating leverage. Faculty cost is already committed, so an incremental full-fee student in an existing class is almost entirely margin.
Where candidates lose it
Listing ideas without ranking them by margin impact. The interviewer wants commercial prioritisation. Naming operating leverage as the reason mix wins turns a brainstorm into an analysis.
Expect next
- Which would you do first?
- What is the risk of the online strategy?
- How would you value the business after those changes?
Reported by candidates at Harris Williams (Investment Banking, Richmond, 2018). Source: Wall Street Oasis.
Firm tags come from public, anonymous candidate reports on Wall Street Oasis: strong signal, not sworn testimony. Firms are named as the places a question was reported, not as partners of Fin Maverick. Answers are written for this page to show how to think out loud; they are not scripts to recite.