The
Massachusetts Institute of Technology has its hedge-fund quants, the
University of Southern California has its movie moguls. But if you
really want your child to be a billionaire, you might want to send them
to Harvard. Harvard
has graduated some 52 billionaires, with a collective fortune of $205
billion, to lead Wealth-X's global list of universities ranked by alumni
worth $1 billion or more. That's nearly twice as many as the No. 2
school, the University of Pennsylvania, which has 28 billionaire alumni
worth a collective $112 billion.
And these numbers don't include either Microsoft (MSFT)'s Bill Gates or Facebook (FB)'s Mark Zuckerberg both of whom attended Harvard but didn't stay to get their degree. Together they are worth some $45 billion. Before
dismissing Harvard is a domain of rich kids who mostly inherit their
wealth, consider that the school also claimed the highest percentage of
self-made billionaires in the study. Seventy-four percent of the
school's billionaire alumni "built that," Wealth-X found.
"It
shows the power of networks," said David Friedman, president of
Wealth-X. "Harvard has this entrenched, powerful network that extends
across so many sectors and is incredibly pro-active about connecting its
alumni. You get a great education, but you also get access." Harvard's
success, said Friedman, "validates what we all whisper and now we know:
It's not just what you know, it's who you know."
Other
schools can boast about their networks, too, particularly those with
lines into technology and other leading fields for growing wealth. As
the chart below shows, Stanford University, in the heart of Silicon
Valley, has 27 billionaires to its credit, ranking No. 3. M.I.T., whose
alumni beat Harvard's for highest average net worth, at $257 million,
has sprinkled its number-crunching analysts throughout Wall Street and
hedge funds. The University of Cambridge, the only school outside the
United States to make the top 10, is a high-tech leader in the U.K.
And
in the broader category of ultra-high-net-worth individuals, which
Wealth-X defines as those worth $30 million or more, "there are smaller
clusters of successful graduates who have drawn in other alumni,"
Friedman noted. The University of Virginia, for instance, has many fewer
billionaires, but outdid Harvard for the highest percentage of
self-made wealthy, at 79 percent.
Monash
University, in Melbourne, Australia, is a launching pad for women.
Seventeen percent of their ultra-high-net-worth graduates are women.
Among top American universities, Northwestern and Brown are conducive to
female wealth with 15 percent and 14 percent. But
Harvard led in every other category in the Wealth-X rankings. Its
ultra-high-net-worth graduates' sheer numbers - totaling close to 3,000 -
and their outsized total net worth of $622 billion is enough to make
parents whose children won't be going feel left out.
Some
quick math, Friedman pointed out, provides a little balm for those
suffering from elite education envy. In all, the universities mentioned
in Wealth-X's report have helped create 14,355 ultra-high-net-worth
individuals out of a total global population of more than 186,000, or
about 7 percent. "That leaves 93 percent of the world's super-rich,"
Friedman said, "who did just fine without attending a top ranked
school."
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