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
082Why should I buy your college, and how much would you sell it for?Wellington ManagementInvestment Research · Boston · 2024Wellington ManagementEquity Research · Boston · 2024
Say this
Pitch it as a subscription business with pricing power and a real estate portfolio attached. Revenue is tuition times enrolment plus research grants and endowment income; the assets are the campus and the brand.
Then walk it
- The investment case: extremely sticky revenue, since a student enrolled is contracted for three or four years, pricing power that has historically exceeded inflation, and a brand that is effectively impossible to replicate.
- Revenue build: enrolment times net tuition after scholarships, plus housing and dining, plus research funding, plus endowment draw. Be explicit that gross tuition overstates it badly because of discounting.
- Cost base: mostly faculty and staff, largely fixed, which means high operating leverage in both directions. A 10 percent enrolment drop is devastating; a 10 percent rise is almost pure margin.
- Valuation on two bases and take the higher. As a going concern, a DCF or an EBITDA multiple on the operating surplus. As an asset play, the campus real estate plus the endowment, which for many institutions exceeds the operating value.
- Then the risks that make the price: demographic decline in the applicant pool, regulatory dependence on public funding and visa policy for international students, and the fact that you cannot actually cut faculty quickly. And I would flag that the brand is inseparable from the non-profit status, so a buyer might destroy the asset by acquiring it.
Where candidates lose it
Treating it as a whimsical question. It is a full valuation case wearing a joke. The two highest-value moves are separating gross from net tuition, and recognising that the real estate and endowment may be worth more than the operations.
Expect next
- How would you IPO it?
- How would a college increase revenue?
- What would you do in the first year as owner?
Reported by candidates at Wellington Management (Investment Research, Boston, 2024); Wellington Management (Equity Research, Boston, 2024). 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.