{"id":45682,"date":"2019-05-21T11:42:10","date_gmt":"2019-05-21T18:42:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/gmatclub.com\/blog\/2019\/05\/where-billionaires-went-to-school\/"},"modified":"2019-05-21T11:42:10","modified_gmt":"2019-05-21T18:42:10","slug":"where-billionaires-went-to-school","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gmatclub.com\/blog\/where-billionaires-went-to-school\/","title":{"rendered":"Where Billionaires Went to School"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Billionaire<\/figure>\n

Billionaires\u2014love them, hate them, or love to hate them\u2014run our world. <\/p>\n

The top one percent controls 45% of all wealth<\/a> according to Credit Suisse, a number which doesn\u2019t even try to take into account the $32 trillion hidden in tax havens<\/a> (about half of planetary GDP). This small group is very important, but we often don\u2019t know much about who they are and how they think. <\/p>\n

Education is the key to this puzzle. Whether you want to curb billionaires\u2019 power or become one of them, it\u2019s important to know where they spent their formative years. Or, maybe not<\/a>. But if you\u2019re curious, here are the 18 universities that educated the world\u2019s top 20 richest people<\/a>, ranked by number of affiliations.<\/p>\n

Harvard University<\/h4>\n

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Harvard is tied for the top spot. Four of the world\u2019s 20 richest people spent some time at Harvard, but the two richest\u2014Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg\u2014famously didn\u2019t graduate. Given that, it seems fair to assume that Harvard does not create billionaires through amazing courses and professors. It simply attracts the sort of people who go on to become billionaires. <\/p>\n

That type of person can, of course, do quite well at Harvard if they choose to, as proven by Gates\u2019 classmate and collaborator Steve Ballmer, who graduated magna cum laude. The remaining Harvard alum in the top 20 is Michael Bloomberg, who earned a Harvard Business School MBA in 1964 immediately after his undergraduate education. <\/p>\n

Stanford University<\/h4>\n

Stanford also boasts four entries, but shockingly only one graduate. Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page met at Stanford when Brin (a computer science PhD student) was assigned to give a campus tour to Page (a prospective student). They started collaborating in 1996, and soon their website\u2019s massive growth pulled them away from their studies. Page, our sole graduate, truncated his PhD to a master\u2019s, while Brin was technically still on leave from his PhD as of 2008.<\/p>\n

Stanford\u2019s non-Google billionaires include Steve Ballmer,
\nwho Gates enticed to drop out of the Graduate School of Business and join
\nMicrosoft, and Mukesh Ambani, who left his MBA to help his father run Reliance
\nIndustries. <\/p>\n

Columbia University<\/h4>\n

A first on this list, both of Columbia\u2019s affiliated
\nbillionaires actually graduated! This may have something to do with industry\u2014no
\ntop tech founders here. Instead, Columbia boasts Warren Buffet, who got a
\nmaster\u2019s in economics at Columbia Business school and appears to have put it to
\ngood use.  The other Columbian is Rob
\nWalton, a Walmart heir who got a JD at the law school.<\/p>\n

Massachusetts Institute of Technology<\/h4>\n

MIT is the alma mater of the two richer Koch heirs, multiple times over. David Koch got a bachelor\u2019s and master\u2019s in chemical engineering, while Charles Koch got a bachelor\u2019s in general engineering, a master\u2019s in nuclear engineering, and another master\u2019s in chemical engineering. <\/p>\n

It is also the alma mater of their slightly less wealthy billionaire brother, Bill Koch, and their late father Fred Koch, who himself was heir to a substantial fortune. While the Koch family\u2019s MIT education may have played a role in the growth of Koch Industries, a more important factor was Fred Koch\u2019s willingness to do business with Hitler and Stalin, who were happy to overlook the many patent infringement cases pending against him in the United States.<\/p>\n

University of Arkansas<\/h4>\n

If you guessed \u201cWalmart heirs,\u201d congratulations! Sam Walton himself never attended the University of Arkansas, but he built his company and raised his family a couple of towns over from the campus in Fayetteville. Jim and Rob Walton both got bachelor\u2019s in business administration at the university.<\/p>\n

Other Institutions<\/h3>\n

Beyond these five universities are 13 others with only one
\nalumnus in the top 20. They are: Princeton (Jeff Bezos, undergrad), Wharton
\n(Buffett, transferred), University of Nebraska (Buffet, undergrad), \u00c9cole
\nPolytechnique de Paris (Bernard Arnault, undergrad), National Autonomous
\nUniversity of Mexico (Carlos Slim, undergrad), University of Illinois at
\nUrbana\u2013Champaign (Larry Ellison, transferred), Unviersity of Chicago (Larry
\nEllison, dropped out), Johns Hopkins (Michael Bloomberg, undergrad), University
\nof Michigan (Larry Page, undergrad), Trinity University (Alice Walton,
\nundergrad), The College of Wooster (Rob Walton, transferred), and Shenzhen
\nUniversity (Ma Huateng, undergrad).<\/p>\n

Honorable Mention<\/h3>\n

Finally, it\u2019s worth noting the one person in the top 20 who never went to college at all: Amancio Ortega, the founder of Zara. Currently the sixth richest person in the world, Ortega left school at the age of 14 to work as a delivery boy for a textiles company in A Coru\u00f1a. His rags to riches story is well known in Spain, though the man himself almost never gives interviews.<\/p>\n

===<\/p>\n

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The post Where Billionaires Went to School<\/a> appeared first on Admissionado<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Billionaires\u2014love them, hate them, or love to hate them\u2014run our world. The top one percent controls 45% of all wealth according to Credit Suisse, a number which doesn\u2019t even try…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":140,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,817,775],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-45682","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mba","category-admissionado","category-admission-consultants","entry"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gmatclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45682","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gmatclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gmatclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gmatclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/140"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gmatclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=45682"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/gmatclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45682\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gmatclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=45682"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gmatclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=45682"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gmatclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=45682"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}