This article is pretty unprofessional. Count the number of times the word “fancy” is used. “Fancy colleges”, really??
I am getting kind of tired of anti-Ivy bias. Honestly, some kids go to these schools because the education is good, and peers are interesting. Not everyone is chasing big bucks.
And some go to these types of school with very little awareness of prestige, but attend because they offer fantastic financial aid for students from more modest financial backgrounds.
Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that most important factor for many . Glad you did!
Becoming a billionaire has little to with a formal undergraduate education. I think a much better study would be seeing what percentage of people with an eight or more digit net worth went to elite schools. Not only is it more relatable, but there’s a much larger population to collect data from.
If you read the research behind the article, it seems to point to the opposite conclusion. Wai, who did the study that includes the billionaire data, would probably say that “attending an elite college” doesn’t “improve your chance of become a billionaire” at all. Instead, elite colleges disproportionately attract the kinds of hyperintelligent, hypermotivated people (“the top 1% in ability status,” Wai calls them) who go on to become billionaires—though of course, not all hyperintelligent, hypermotivated people choose making a lot of money as the central goal of their life’s work. Other research indicates that if you’re one of these hyperintelligent, hypermotivated people, you’re about equally likely to be successful in your chosen field of endeavor whether you attend an elite college or not. From this perspective, the value added of attending an elite college is approximately zero. Elite colleges are just a sorting mechanism; hyperintelligent, hypermotivated people self-select for these colleges, and the colleges reciprocate by selecting for these traits in their admissions process. So you end up with disproportionate numbers of such people at a handful of elite colleges, and a much higher percentage of people of this type go on to become billionaires, not because of anything they learned in college, and not because of any social connections they made while in college, but because they’re the types of people they were before they ever attended college
I personally would use a different set of metrics. The value of a college education isn’t how much it increases your lifetime earnings, it’s the educational opportunities it affords you. Elite colleges offer an outstanding educational experience, but excellent educational opportunities are also available elsewhere.
Oh, and by the way, Wai’s figures show that only 31% of billionaires attended elite undergraduate schools. The other 14% in that 45% figure attended elite law or business schools. Which in a way proves you don’t need to attend an elite undergraduate institution in order to become a billionaire, since many people get there by way of a non-elite undergraduate education combined with an elite professional school education, and even larger numbers get there without elite undergrad or professional school educations. Wai’s model suggests, however, that the billionaires without elite undergrad or professional school credentials are also probably disproportionately hyperintelligent, hypermotivated people; he just doesn’t have a way of identifying them as such if they didn’t attend elite schools.
@GMTplus7 are you saying that attending an elite school is like being exposed to a pathogen ?!? 
I think this article and all discussions of its ilk prove that critical reading and math skills are in short supply in America. One can only hope that the billionaires that are described in such “studies” are far more gifted analytically.
bclintonk
You have a long winded way to tell people that you don’t understand statistics.
Somewhere recently I saw a link for a report about the ROI of schools. It showed that not all ivies produce the biggest money makers. Yale loses to Harvard. 10 years out, more Yale grads work non profit, or government than Harvard, i.e.
In other words don’t make the mistake of thinking Ivy=bucks. Depends on the ivy and its charism.
And if I were being equally rude, I would say your have amply demonstrated that you don’t know how to read a research study. Not to mention that you commit the classic fallacy of leaping from correlation to causation when you say that “attending an elite college” will “improve your chances of become a billionaire.” The researcher who established the correlation made no such causal claim, which in fact flies in the face of his central hypothesis.
But I’m not into being rude, so I won’t say it.
I don’t believe the study proves that attending an elite college improves your chances at becoming a billionaire, nor do I believe that it proves that attending one is a waste of time if your goal is to become a billionaire, nor does it prove that where you go to college is irrelevant when it comes to your long term financial stability.
The “ingredients” (for lack of a more scientific term) that determine if someone will become wildly successful financially, moderately successful, or insanely successful have both hard and soft elements to them. Warren Buffet’s trajectory and life story; Mark Zuckerberg’s life story; David Bonderman; Melissa Gates; Steve Jobs; Queen Elizabeth II; what exactly can you extract from this pool except that if you aren’t born a Windsor you will need to work incredibly hard for either a very long period of time (Buffet) or a relatively short period of time (Zuckerberg) while being an iconoclastic visionary??? Or work relatively hard while being married to someone working incredibly hard (Mrs. Gates).
These “studies” ought to be used in a HS statistics course on why you shouldn’t let “studies” either prove or disprove anything unless you understand the sample and what it took to get into the pool being studied.
I bet you’ll find a lot of undiagnosed gum disease among dancers in the Bolshoi ballet. This tells you nothing useful about gum disease and oral hygiene. But it likely tells you a lot about eating disorders among ballet dancers- which of course, was not the question you were asking when you tried to “prove” the correlation between Bolshoi and lack of regular flossing.
My opinion is that attending an elite institution makes it more likely that you will be able to choose what constitutes success for you. For many, it isn’t money. (Please note that I said “more likely.”)
No, I did not leap, the research did. I just pointed out while they did, they did not know the math. Nor did you,
To be a little clearer, besides the math, you can offer all the causes for making it rich, and while I may even agree with you, you and I can offer no proof and that is not even the point of the article which is what is discussed here.
They were just as long winded and then jumped to a conclusion using bad math. That is all I am saying.
Oprah Winfrey, Queen Elizabeth II, Melissa Gates- what does these women have in common besides the fact that they are extremely wealthy? What causation can you tease out which will help you or your kids pick a college?
So confused.
You can’t use those women as examples to help your kids pick college. They are outliners.
Further more, as for Q Elizabeth, you have already failed your daughter.
:))
All billionaires are outliers once you read their stories- that’s kind of why these “studies” are so pointless.
Drop out of Harvard like Mark Zuckerberg. Get fired from your company like Steve Jobs.
What can you possibly learn from their examples except that innovation, hard work and creativity are not equally distributed among the world’s population???
I suspect it doesn’t hurt that some kids attending Ivy League schools have parents with a net worth of $1 billion well before starting college.
I also don’t think the middle-class or low SES students at these schools are hurt by their acquaintance with a billionaire/heir to a multibillion dollar fortune when they need $5-10 million in seed money for a startup. Investors, being rather fallible and human like the rest of us, may also be more impressed by a Harvard degree - whether the graduate was a C student or on the Dean’s List - than by one from BC. Outliers aside, you aren’t likely to make such acquaintances at Rutgers, and most school’s don’t have the ability to wow a certain prestige-oriented segment of the population.
I would just like to add, the use of “outliers” here is remarkably similar to that of Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers in the sense that luck plays a big factor, but Gladwell also notes going to a prestigious college will increase your chances of success, so same for this situation (probably).
My opinion is that people who become billionaires take big risks. What percentage of people who take big risks achieve success, and what percentage end up worse off than they would have if they hadn’t taken those risks? That’s a study I’d like to see.