Because I am tired of lists that rank schools by number of billionaires, here is a list of universities which have alumni who have a net worth above $30 million:
Harvard
Stanford
UPenn
Columbia
NYU
MIT
Univ. of Cambridge
Northwestern University
USC
Chicago
Yale
UCal-Berkeley
Oxford
Cornell
Univ. of Texas at Austin
Princeton
Notre Dame
Michigan
INSEAD
UCLA
Handy list for those limited to applying to 20 or fewer schools.
Princeton University is the only school on this list of 20 universities which does not have a graduate business school.
I hope that both of my kids do well enough financially, but not necessarily that well. FWIW D’s undergrad and S’s grad school are both on the list.
Perhaps a silly question, but, how would they know? Net worth is not - generally - public unless the holders choose to make it so, no? I understand it would be public in the case where an individual’s wealth is related to his/her role as one of the most highly compensated in a public company where compensation/value of stock in that company is made public in SEC filings - but beyond that I don’t know how/why it would be public. I always have the same question when school’s (or rankings about schools) address the wealth/income of college students’ parents. If not applying for financial aid - no financial information is required to be provided to schools. What am I missing/where are they coming up with that information?
Looking at the methodology. it sounds like the look for public information online and then extrapolate to the total number of living alunni. It’s also important to note that they include persons with any degree from the listed school – not just undergrad. I expect professional degrees are primarily the ones that are driving this list, such as MBA, perhaps executive education certificates as well, if they are included.
Are they including athletes? I mean Michael Jordan is worth 1.6billion according to the Googles and he has a degree from UNC. Seems like there would be plenty of similar stories of athletes.
That seems unlikely for Oxford and Cambridge, since their business schools weren’t established until the late 1980s and still aren’t as well regarded as INSEAD. The higher ranking of Cambridge compared to Oxford suggests to me that at least in the UK, many of these wealthy people made their money in tech or finance, not managing public companies.
The real question is “how many of these high net worth alumni have high net worth parents?” It’s really easy to be rich when you start off that way.
As the schools on the list have thousands of HWN individuals, I doubt athletes make much of a dent. How many athletes accumulate $30M in assets? How many NBA Players have a college degree in these one-and-done days? Many top MLB stars are drafted out of high school.
The average NFL/MLB career is 2.5-5.5 years. The average NFL salary is under $1M and the MLB median is ~$1.2M. Those numbers don’t generate $30M in career earnings, let alone accumulated wealth.
They list the portion of wealth by inherited vs self-made, which I realize is not the same as having high net worth parents. Having high net worth parents helps, even if not a direct inheritance. Among US colleges, the extremes are below:
Highest Inherited
Boston U – 10% Inherited, 35% Mixed (Women = 33% Full, 42% Mixed)
I agree that athletes are unlikely to affect the results in a significant fashion.
Articles that I have read over the past decade suggest that a high percentage of highly paid athletes end up bankrupt shortly after their playing career ends.
“ On average, only 7% of these UHNW alumni inherited all of their fortunes. Columbia University had the highest number of wealthy heirs but, at 12%, the figure is still a relatively low one.”
While I often find such lists interesting and amusing, a list of which colleges have the largest number of estimated >$30 million wealth living alumni (almost entirely older + male) doesn’t tell an individual student much of anything about his “eventual earnings prospects.”
The list in Deb22’s post also doesn’t do this well since it operates under the assumption that the college name is driving the earnings, rather than characteristics of students attending the college, including things like quality of students, choice of major, family earnings/connections, etc. In short, it’s assuming that the student inputs have no influence on the earnings outputs.
If you control for some individual student characteristics such as test scores + major, I expect the list of highest earnings colleges would not resemble the published one. Again the list may be interesting and amusing, but not particularly useful for an individual student deciding at which college to attend.
That is a terrible first sentence. If I was grading that in an essay it would definitely get marked down for me. It means nothing when you put “some students” in. Two students is “some students” so is two million. Just meaningless blather and wretched writing. Newsweek has really been on a big slide in the quality of their journalism.
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