<p>This list is limited to undergraduate alumni billionaires (unlike an earlier list that included both undergraduate and graduate programs).</p>
<p>
[quote]
University of Pennsylvania — 25</p>
<ol>
<li><p>Harvard University — 22</p></li>
<li><p>Yale University — 20</p></li>
<li><p>University of Southern California — 16</p></li>
<li><p>Cornell University — 14</p></li>
<li><p>Princeton University — 14</p></li>
<li><p>Stanford University — 14</p></li>
<li><p>University of California, Berkeley — 12</p></li>
<li><p>University of Mumbai (India) — 12</p></li>
<li><p>London School of Economics (United Kingdom) — 11</p></li>
<li><p>Lomonosov Moscow State University (Russia) — 11</p></li>
<li><p>Dartmouth College — 10</p></li>
<li><p>University of Michigan — 10</p></li>
<li><p>University of Texas — 10</p></li>
<li><p>Duke University — 9</p></li>
<li><p>New York University — 9</p></li>
<li><p>Brown University — 8</p></li>
<li><p>Columbia University — 8</p></li>
<li><p>Massachusetts Institute of Technology — 7</p></li>
<li><p>Eth Zurich (Switzerland) — 6
<p>Probably because economic reforms which enable the creation of a large upper-middle class…not to say uberwealthy started in the 1980’s and didn’t start producing a critical enough mass to be noticed internationally until the late '90’s and moreso, the '00s. </p>
<p>That and China’s economic living standards were exceedingly low in the late '70s/early '80s thanks to Maoist economic policies…especially those implemented during the Chinese Cultural Revolution when educational institutions from elementary to university were effectively shut down for a decade. </p>
<p>I agree. But I would guess that most billionaires were not “wealthy” to begin with. Gates was a run-of-the-mill upper class kid with educated parents. Buffett’s dad was a congressman, so we know he couldn’t have been very smart or well-off, especially if he never left Nebraska. </p>
<p>My guess is that the personal characteristics required to create the economic footprint of a billionaire manifest themselves early in both ability and ambition. The schools listed attract those people.</p>
<p>The quality most related to becoming a billionaire is a combination of intellectual ability, energy, and the willingness and ability to direct the efforts of other people. Most people (myself included) don’t have a big appetite for relying on others or directing them. That point is the biggest differentiator…by far. </p>
<p>Gates father was a senior and founding partner at Bogle and Gates, a major Seattle Law Firm that had Boeing and Weyerhauser and major Seattle banks as clients. While Mr. Gates Sr. wasnt a billionaire…he was wealthy. They lived in an exclusive Seattle waterfront neighborhood and sent Bill to Lakeside Prep, an elite school for the very posh. Bill could afford to quit Harvard with his “idea” because he knew if he got a big “no” from IBM (he didn’t) and failed he could return to Harvard and his parents would cover his expenses and trouble. It was a no fail program. </p>
<p>never mind what he “borrowed” from Apple (and got sued over…and fought for decades…until he settled and then by then it was too late…and also Jobs decided to take Apple in another direction completely.)</p>
<p>The list that might be interesting is the schools which produced the most CEO’s in the United States. I have heard in some circles that the majority of CEO’s in America came from state universities not elite private schools. </p>
<p>Likewise on the CEO’s- UW (Madison) has made that list I believe.</p>
<p>Another troublesome list for me is numbers of NM- scholars and not finalists listed as who gets the money can depend on the school listed for it.</p>
<p>While we’re on this topic. Making tons of money isn’t the goal of many highly intelligent people. It applies to business but many more fields are not oriented towards that goal (duh- making money is business, then there’s the rest).</p>
<p>It took(five years) to get to the supplying of DOS for IBM from the time that Gates left Harvard. He and Allen flailed around doing this, that, and the other for quite a while before that opportunity was even a remote possibility. The implication that he knew about that when he left Harvard not supported by fact. </p>
<p>Those interested should read this fortune interview from 1995. It shows how persistent you have to be in starting a business. </p>
<p>If he started off wealthy - meaning no worries about money and a soft landing if he’d failed, then yeah, that’s not what I’m as interested in. A list of schools that facilitate social mobility in a major way would be most interesting to me.</p>
<p>As much as I feel Bill Gates has been overhyped by folks outside the computer tech community as a “computer techie genius” when his real innovations were mainly in areas of marketing and Intellectual Property, one does need to be fair about the above.</p>
<p>While Bill Gates and Microsoft did “borrow” from Apple, both Microsoft and Apple also “borrowed” heavily from Xerox’s Parc labs in creating what we now know as windowed-based operating systems whether it’s Apple OS/OSX or Microsoft Windows. </p>
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</p>
<p>And they managed to produce MS-DOS by buying it from a Seattle area programmer Tim Paterson for $75k and tweaking it to make it seem like their own. </p>
<p>Yes, the epitome of CS tech innovation indeed. </p>
<p>Yes, although I think they only paid 50K for it. Isn’t the story that IBM had approached others first and they were turned down by some who didn’t want to deal with them? Gates was pretty smart about this stuff. </p>
<p>And does it really matter if someone who is a billionaire started with family income of 40k, or 400k? If you’re really looking for social mobility facilitators, my guess is that the Ivy’s are at the top of that group in terms of colleges. Maybe the service academies too. All because of their ability to let qualified people attend for free. </p>
<p>It matters a lot. If your parents are wealthy and connected enough that you can easily bum at their place and/or gain some skills to get another job (if MS had failed, Gates could have easily gotten a degree from somewhere, bankrolled by parents, and started anew) it’s much easier to take risk than if you <em>don’t</em> have a fallback option.</p>
<p>As for the Chinese billionaires, aren’t most of them not that educated but just hard-charging immense ballsy risk-takers (some politically connected as well) who made it big in materials, manufacturing, and other Old Economy industries?</p>
<p>I would think most of the Chinese billionaires are well educated and more importantly, well connected. You don’t succeed in China without governmental support. </p>
<p>In China (and Asia in general), much more than in the US, the school you go to determines your network, and what companies will hire you. It’s one reason so much effort goes into passing those test standardized test (like the gaokao). It’s not so much how you do in college, as it is about which college you get into.</p>
<p>I think the Wealth-X report (reference by the main article), list inheritance as a major reason for the growth of billionaires (world wide). If your parents are billionaires, you likely went to an elite school. </p>
<p>I think you’re jumping to assumptions here.</p>
<p>The billionaires in China didn’t make billions because people hired them. A lot of them are self-made (yes, certainly many with the help of connections, but they didn’t get those connections through college, usually; remember that blood is thicker than water . . . and so is the Communist Party).</p>