Forget the biased and manipulated [2]US News and World Report ranking of top US colleges, when it comes to college reputation ranking, only one thing really matters: success, which for better or worse in our day and age is measured, with apologies to all the emotional romantics, by money. So courtesy of the most recent Wealth-X and UBS Billionaire Census for the year 2014, here are the universities who undergraduate ranks have spawned the highest number of billionaires. Sorry Harvard.
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From the report:
Pursuing higher education is not a prerequisite for attaining billionaire status: 35% of the world’s billionaires do not have a bachelor’s degree and some even dropped out of high school. Nonetheless, of the 65% who have been awarded a bachelor’s degree, many go on to pursue further studies. For example, 21% of “educated” billionaires have an MBA and 11% of “educated” billionaires hold a Ph.D.
Of the top 20 most popular schools for billionaires – in terms of the number of billionaires who have obtained their bachelor’s degree at these institutions – 16 were in the United States. The United States is the country with the largest number of billionaires, however that fact alone does not fully explain the disproportionate representation of American universities in this list. At the undergraduate level, more than a quarter of the students who obtained their bachelor’s degrees from these American institutions were born outside of the United States. It is apparent that these institutions top the ranking not just because of the United States’ large number of billionaires, but also because they have strong international reputations, which attract students from around the globe. This is particularly true beyond the bachelor’s degree: more than 39% of students who attended these top American institutions for postgraduate studies were born outside the United States.
And yet: "Despite the international repute of these top-ranking higher education institutions, it is worth noting that only 16% of the world’s “educated” billionaires attended these schools; 84% did not. Today’s billionaires were awarded their bachelor’s degrees from over 700 different universities around the world."