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’s Bill Gates or Facebook’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 third. M.I.T., sixth on the list with 15 billionaires,
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.
