Where do billionaires go to university?
16:42, 30 Oct 2014
Are the super-rich more likely to be better educated? Or have they
spurned scholarship and dedicated themselves to the serious business
of being seriously rich?
According to a global census of dollar billionaires, almost two-thirds
have a university degree. That means that even for countries with a
high level of graduates, billionaires are disproportionately likely to
have gone to university, Sean Coughlan writes in an article published
by the BBC.
In the UK, more than four out of five billionaires were in higher
education – not so much rags to riches as rag week to riches.
The educational insights are from an annual profile of the uber-rich,
the Wealth-X and UBS Billionaire Census, produced by the Swiss banking
group and a Singapore-based financial intelligence firm.
It examines the wealth and background of more than 2,300 billionaires
– and the findings undermine the image of the wealthy as being
self-taught self-starters trained on the market stall.
As well as being much more likely to be graduates, a quarter have
postgraduate degrees and more than one in 10 has a doctorate.
The University of Pennsylvania has produced more than any other
institution, followed by Harvard, Yale, the University of Southern
California, Princeton, Cornell and Stanford.
And the most likely way of making money is by dealing in money, with
billionaires mostly making their fortunes through finance, banking and
investment.
But there are also some indications that the geography of the super
rich is changing. Reflecting India’s growing economy, the University
of Mumbai is in ninth place in the league table.
The only UK university in this wealth list is the London School of
Economics, in 10th place, with no place for Oxford or Cambridge.
The rise of Russia’s wealthy is reflected in the 11th place for
Lomonosov Moscow State University.
But the dominance of the US universities is not simply about the US
producing more billionaires. More than a quarter of the billionaires
who attended US universities to take undergraduate degrees were from
other countries.
This was even more the case for postgraduate courses in the US, where
39% came from overseas.
Most billionaire graduates:
University of Pennsylvania
Harvard University
Yale University
University of Southern California
Princeton University
Cornell University
Stanford University
University of California, Berkeley
University of Mumbai
London School of Economics
Lomonosov Moscow State University
University of Texas
Dartmouth College
University of Michigan
New York University
Duke University
Columbia University
Brown University
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
ETH Zurich