Can you also track back what kind of money their families had to seed them and get them started on their business ventures, and what they inherited? Without that information, this is pretty meaningless. It may not be the school that matters.
Its true that we have no way of knowing what effect of the school has in making billionaires. It could very well be that billionaires are more likely to send their kids there or go to Harvard for a degree after they realize their career or business need it.
I’d wondered why you had compared Harvard to the total for the 2nd, 5th and 7th place schools, then I opened the link. The (similarly inherited) numbering system appears a bit weird as well. Tied schools should not, logically, elevate the ranks of those succeeding them. More substantively – at least for those who find the concept interesting – the data would be more meaningfully represented if it were normalized for number of graduates and other relevant factors (such as whether a university houses a law school, etc.).
We can’t know if these people “got” something from these universities or if their smarts, drive, creativity, and family wealth caused them to be sorted into them. It is the classic Post hoc ergo propter hoc logical fallacy. Would attending Michigan State instead of Harvard really change their trajectory? Plenty of big shot CEOs did not go to elite schools; Warren Buffett at U of Nebraska for one.
In fact, of the top 10 Fortune 500 CEOs, only one went to undergrad at an Ivy. The others went to places like University of Pittsburgh, University of Central Oklahoma, Illinois State. I thinks that kids should know that you don’t have to go to an elite school to do well in business, or many other professions. https://www.cnbc.com/2018/06/15/where-fortune-500-ceos-went-to-college.html
Jeff Bezos, who as of today is far and away the richest person on earth, earned his undergraduate degree at Princeton and never went to graduate school. I’d be surprised if Princeton didn’t produce a disproportionate number of billionaires, but I believe it doesn’t make this list because it has no business school producing people who go into business and then make a lot of money, possibly becoming billionaires.
I would guess that a significant number of the world’s billionaires went to business school, and that a lot of them went to business school at Harvard, Stanford or Wharton, three of the largest, richest and most prestigious business schools, resulting in this ranking. Yale’s business school is smaller, younger and less-well-regarded than these competitors, which I think is why Yale doesn’t rank higher here. I’d be interested to see a version of this list reflecting where the billionaires went to college; I think as it stands, it’s just an imperfect indicator of where the super-rich went to business school.
Reading that list makes you want to refine the inquiry farther. I have a somewhat different attitude about the colleges the children/heirs of billionaires chose for themselves (or had chosen for them) vs. the colleges whose graduates became self-made billionaires. Also, I don’t think it’s really legitimate not to count the famous dropouts. Bill Gates’ time at Harvard was not unimportant in his development, if only for his relationship with Steve Ballmer and the math classes. And Mark Zuckerberg certainly benefited from the free exchange of ideas among Harvard students. Not that I want to promote Harvard any more than it already gets promoted around here, but if you add those two to the list it’s tied with Stanford and Yale for second place.