The Top Billionaire Universities

Want to start your journey to becoming a billionaire and ruler of the world.  Attending Harvard University would be a good place to pass go. The Cambridge, Mass., school tops the first-ever billionaire college study with an alumni base that features 54 10-figure titans, more than 5% of the world’s billionaires. Of those 54 plutocrats, 11 received an undergraduate degree, 41 earned a master’s, doctorate or juris doctorate, and two earned two degrees.

Harvard’s 10-figure grads include Philip Falcone, who studied economics, John Paulson, who earned his M.B.A. there, and hedge fund manager Ken Griffin, who began trading from his dorm room while an undergrad before creating money management outfit Citadel in 1990.  Bruce Kovner earned a bachelor’s degree in government from Harvard. He later dropped out of the Ph.D. program at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, studied harpsichord at Juilliard and drove a New York City taxi, all before founding hedge fund Caxton Associates.

Famous Harvard dropouts include Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, the world’s richest man, and Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg, who ranked 321st on the most recent Forbes list of the 400 richest Americans with an estimated net worth of $1.5 billion.

Harvard’s hall of billionaires is more than double that of Stanford, which grabbed the second-place spot with 25 10-figure alumni.  The University of Pennsylvania was third, with 18 billionaires, 14 of them graduates of the university’s famous Wharton business school. Among them: Steven Cohen, Ronald Perelman and Ronald Lauder.

Columbia tied with Yale for fourth place on the list, each graduating 16 billionaires. Rounding out the list: Massachusetts Institute of Technology (11 billionaires), Northwestern University (10), the University of Chicago (10), Cornell University (9), University of California, Berkeley (9), University of Southern California (9) and University of Texas, Austin (9).

Several billionaires have studied at two top schools. Buyout billionaire Wilbur Ross Jr. is one of 16 Yale alumni. He also earned an M.B.A. from Harvard. Junk bond king Michael Milken earned his bachelor’s degree from Berkeley before getting his M.B.A. from Wharton. James Simons, of Renaissance Technologies, studied mathematics at MIT before earning his doctorate from Berkeley.

To the joy of eager fundraisers–but, perhaps, to the chagrin of their children–many billionaires give a large portion of their fortunes back to their alma maters. John Kluge donated $400 million to Columbia in 2007, one of the largest single gifts ever to an American university. Kluge, who was the world’s richest man from 1989 to 1992, earned a bachelor’s degree from Columbia in economics.

Nike co-founder Philip Knight earmarked $105 million for the Knight Management Center at Stanford Graduate School of Business, where he earned his M.B.A.

David Koch donated $100 million to MIT in 2007; the David H. Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research will open in 2010.

Of course, you don’t necessarily need a degree from Harvard or Stanford to become a billionaire. Of last year’s Forbes 400, at least 46 billionaires did not have a college degree.

No. 1 Harvard University

Number of billionaire alumni: 54

Harvard has churned out more 10-figure titans than any other school on the planet (counting both undergraduate and graduate degrees). The school’s roster of billionaire alumni includes Michael Bloomberg, Sumner Redstone, David Rockefeller, Sr. and William Randolph Hearst III.

No. 2 Stanford University

Number of billionaire alumni: 25
Stanford has the second-highest number of billionaire grads in the world, including Charles Schwab. Still, the Harvard of the West is probably better known for its billionaire dropouts. Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page earned master’s degrees in computer science from Stanford before leaving Stanford doctorate programs to start the famously profitable search engine. Another (very rich) quitter: Microsoft Chief Exec Steve Ballmer.

No. 3 University of Pennsylvania

Number of billionaire alumni: 18
Early last year, U. Penn had 27 billionaire graduates, thanks to its famous business school, Wharton. But the financial meltdown last year shaved off almost a third of that list, including hedge fund tycoon Peter Briger Jr. and money maven Marc Rowan. Amongst the school’s remaining billionaire grads: Ronald and Leonard Lauder, and Michael Milken.

No. 4 Columbia University (tie)

Number of billionaire alumni: 16
Amongst Columbia’s grads is affable billionaire Warren Buffett, the world’s second-richest man. While studying in New York (class of 1951), the Berkshire Hathaway chief learned from value-investing legend Benjamin Graham. Other rich alum: Wal-Mart Chairman S. Robson Walton and Henry Kravis.

No. 4 Yale University (tie)

Number of billionaire alumni: 16
Yale is alma mater to a slew of billionaire clans, including the Mars chocolate fortune (Forrest Mars Jr. and John Mars) and Cargill agricultural fortune (Cargill MacMillan Jr. and Whitney MacMillan). Investor Eddie Lampert and Blackstone Group co-founder Stephen Schwarzman also graduated from Yale; both were members of the infamous secret society Skull & Bones.

*Information Courtesy of Yahoo Finance

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