Ummmm how about: “Going to a top college isn’t important to being a billionaire”?
You’re implying that billionaires make not attending great schools somehow diminished. You’re making a correlation vs. causation mistake here.
I was just quoting the title; I just thought the article was interesting :c
“Only” 45% of billionaires have elite-school degrees.
What? Ambitious and well-connected people (the kind likely to get admitted to top schools) do well post-college? Nah… I don’t believe it.
I think it shows that attending one of a handful of elite colleges is INCREDIBLY important if you want to be a billionaire. Or a federal judge.
If “only” 45% of people died after being exposed to a pathogen, people would be freaking out!!!
It would be the lead story on every news outlet, and the CDC would declare a public health emergency and quarantine.
Come on, @GMTplus7, you know that is one of the fundamental fallacies in debate. How is dying from a pathogen in the same conversation as being a billionaire and where you went to school? There is no analogy there, and no useful insight to be gleaned from such a statement. If “only” 45% of major league baseball players hit 40 home runs per season, …(fill in the rest). What does that have to do with the price of potatoes?
Having said that, I agree that 45% is actually a very high number for what is being discussed. I would take those odds if it were actually some kind of random phenomenon, which of course it is anything but.
I was only making the point that 45% is a high proportion.
Being a billionaire has a ton of luck involved obviously. Almost anyone willing to do the work and who has a reasonable amount of talent can go to college, obtain a higher-paying and better job, and enjoy a 4 year college experience.
One must also wonder what kind of numbers we would see if it were people that had assets of $100,000,000+, and on down the ladder. I would also be interested in knowing if any of those billionaires are non-liquid and to what extent, especially those claiming stock of non-public start-ups, or those that are public but cannot sell for some extended time period. Often things are not as they seem.
The two most financially successful people I know, IRL - neither one has a bachelor’s degree, period, much less a degree from an elite college.
I’m a little surprised that the number above (45%) is as high as it is.
While an interesting read at first glance, the information gained isn’t exactly new, and is more of a scientific confirmation of common sense. Of course the students who do well enough to gain admissions to an elite institution will do well anywhere. Or, going even further as the article does, just applying would indicate a high level of achievement and work ethic. My guess is most people willing to shell out the time and money to apply to top schools don’t bother unless they know they have a good chance, which usually means they’re top students and on the path to success anyway.
The title of the article is quite misleading. The substance of article seems to suggest that going to a well known school is extremely important in any number of fields (and clearly almost essential if you want to be invited to Davos or be on the Supreme Court) .
I found Wai’s comment about the SAT to be interesting especially with all the current discussions about how useful or not standardized testing is.
45% have elite school degrees, out of hundreds of millions of people only a fraction go to an elite school. The fact that almost half of billionaire have an elite degree definitely says something
But then you have the how many billionaires actually did it on their own/didn’t inherit it question.
It’ a bad interpretation of statistics.
From the article,
“To put these numbers in perspective, here’s some very rough math. Consider that in the early '90s, about 1.2 million people received bachelor’s degrees a year (the number is closer to 1.9 million now). The elite undergraduate programs on Wai’s list probably produce about 40,000 graduates a year — or about 3 to 4 percent of the annual supply of bachelor’s degrees back in the day. (The number is probably closer to 2 percent now.)”
From 40K graduates , the elites produce half the billionaires.
From 1.16 million other graduates, the other schools produce half the billionaires.
The conclusion one should draw from this is : Attending elite colleges is very important. it improves your chance of becoming a billionaire by 1.16 mil / 40k = 29 times = 2900%
When Donald Trump’s children become billionaires after attending an elite school it is clearly not a result of the school. Causation/correlation
Ambitious kids like me don’t go to college to become billionaires
You gotta have money to make money :))