11 Colleges With the Most Billionaire Alumni
Obtaining a college degree has always been one of the best ways to increase your lifetime earnings. According to Forbes, which cites a Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce report, adults with a bachelor's degree earn an average of $2.8 million over the life of their careers, which is a significant $1.2 million more than those with only a high school diploma.
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Most people don't expect to earn billions in college, but some colleges have a track record for producing more billionaires than average. As you might expect, the colleges that produce the most billionaires are largely Ivy League universities.
But even for those who never reach 10 figures, Ivy League universities can still generate wealth. On average, Ivy League graduates do earn quite a bit more than those who graduate from other kinds of four-year colleges and universities.
According to Crimson Education, which cites data from PayScale of over 1,500 schools, Ivy League graduates earned a median pay of $86,025 in 2022. Those who graduated from other universities only earned $58,643 These numbers increased significantly by mid-career, with the Ivy League graduates earning $161,888 mid-career compared to $101,777 at other universities.
By contrast, though, billionaires are in a league of their own. With 735 billionaires in the United States, according to Forbes, having more than 10 billionaire graduates is a considerable feat. All data comes from Forbes, and is accurate as of 2021. That is what we'll walk through in this gallery, as the top 11 universities with the most billionaire graduates all have at least 10 of them.
9. (tie) Columbia University
Location: New York
Country: USA
# of Billionaire Alumni: 11
Total Net Worth of Billionaire Alumni: $40.9 billion
Billionaire Alumni Example: Hedge fund managers Daniel Loeb and Noam Gottesman; New England Patriots' owner Robert Kraft and James Scapa, CEO of the software company Altair.
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9. (tie) University of California, Berkeley
Location: Berkeley, California
Country: USA
# of Billionaire Alumni: 11
Total Net Worth of Billionaire Alumni: $82.6 billion
Billionaire Alumni Example: Intel co-founder Gordon Moore; Silicon Valley bankroller, Masayoshi Son; and DoorDash CEO Tony Xu.
9. (tie) Princeton University
Location: Princeton, New Jersey
Country: USA
# of Billionaire Alumni: 11
Total Net Worth of Billionaire Alumni: $288.4 billion
Billionaire Alumni Example: Gap retail heirs, John, Robert and William Fisher; Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt; Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and his ex-wife Mackenzie Scott.
8. Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Location: Cambridge, Massachusetts
Country: USA
# of Billionaire Alumni: *14
Total Net Worth of Billionaire Alumni: $104 billion
Billionaire Alumni Example: Koch Industries CEO Charles Koch and brother William Koch; BeiGene CEO John Olyer; And, notably, former MIT billionaire Sam-Bankman-Fried, founder of cryptocurrency firms Alameda Research and FTX, who lost most of his billions through bad business dealings and crypto losses at the end of 2022. His net worth reportedly fell from over $26 billion to only around $4 million today, according to Forbes, which technically reduces the number of MIT billionaires to 13.
7. University of Southern California
Location: Los Angeles
Country: USA
# of Billionaire Alumni: 15
Total Net Worth of Billionaire Alumni: $58.5 billion
Billionaire Alumni Example: Star Wars Creator, George Lucas and Brazilian director Walter Salles; CEO of Salesforce, Marc Benioff; Co-founder of Public Storage, B. Wayne Hughes and his children Tamara Gustavon and B. Wayne Hughes Jr.
6. Cornell University
Location: Ithaca, New York
Country: USA
# of Billionaire Alumni: 18
Total Net Worth of Billionaire Alumni: $65.1 billion
Billionaire Alumni Example: Former Citigroup head, Sandy Weill; Robert F. Smith, whom the university's medical school is named after; David Dufield, software entrepreneur; and MIT scientist Robert Langer, a scientist who earned his billions with a 3% stake in biotech firm Moderna, after the Covid-19 vaccine raised stock prices.
5. Mumbai University
Location: Mumbai
Country: India
# of Billionaire Alumni: 20
Total Net Worth of Billionaire Alumni: $162.8 billion
Billionaire Alumni Example: Most of its billionaire alumni inherited their wealth, including Mukesh Ambani, Asia's richest person, who oversees Reliance Industries, in the oil and gas sector; Uday Kotak, founded one of India's largest banks in the private sector.
4. Yale University
Location: New Haven, Connecticut
Country: USA
# of Billionaire Alumni: 21
Total Net Worth of Billionaire Alumni: $140.8 billion
Billionaire Alumni Example: Candy heirs John, Valerie and Victoria Mars; Oil heirs Lee, Edward, Robert and Sid Bass; Brooklyn Nets owners Joe Tsai; and Paul Sciarra, cofounder of Pinterest.
2. (tie) Stanford University
Location: Stanford, California
Country: USA
# of Billionaire Alumni: 28
Total Net Worth of Billionaire Alumni: $124.4 billion
Billionaire Alumni Example: Vlad Tenev, Robinhood founder; Jerry Yang, Yahoo co-founder; David Velez, built digital bank Nubank; Ben Huston, Carvana co-founder; and Rich Barton, co-founder of Zillow.
2. (tie) University of Pennsylvania
Location: Philadelphia
Country: USA
# of Billionaire Alumni: 28
Total Net Worth of Billionaire Alumni: $284.8 billion
Billionaire Alumni Example: Quite a few of the Penn billionaire alumni got their undergrad degrees from the Wharton School. Former U.S. President Donald J. Trump; Tesla CEO Elon Musk; Laurene Powell Jobs, Steve Jobs' daughter
1. Harvard University
Location: Cambridge, Massachusetts
Country: USA
# of Billionaire Alumni: 29
Total Net Worth of Billionaire Alumni: $207 billion
Billionaire Alumni Example: Former Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein; Los Angeles Clippers owner Steve Ballmer; Brazilian investment banker Jorge Paulo Lemann; and Cameron and Tyler Winkelvoss, who made-and lost-billions in Bitcoin. They're still billionaires but their net worth shrank significantly in 2022.
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Methodology: For this piece GOBankingRates used Forbes 2021 Billionaire data to find the colleges with the most billionaire alumni. GOBankingRates found the 11 colleges with the most billionaire alumni while collecting the following data points: (1) name of college; (2) location of college; (3) country of college; (4) number of billionaire alumni, meaning had to graduate with a degree from said college; (5) total net worth of billionaire alumni; (6) average billionaire alumni net worth; and (7) some examples of the billionaire alumni from each college. All data was collected Aug. 17, 2022 and is up to date as of Mar. 1, 2023.
Jordan Rosenfeld contributed to the reporting of this article.
This article originally appeared on GOBankingRates.com: 11 Colleges With the Most Billionaire Alumni
