How many billionaires are from Harvard?
According to a 2022 Forbes report, among the alumni of Harvard University there are 188 billionaires. This is more than any other school in the world.
Counting all degrees, Harvard University comes in first place in terms of the total number of billionaire alumni. The University of Pennsylvania comes in first if only bachelor's degrees are counted, according to the most recent 2022 Forbes report.
The most common college degrees among billionaires are business (22), economics (12) and engineering (11). Spanish businessman Amancio Ortega Gaona, worth $93 billion, is one of 10 billionaires on the list without any degree at all.
Harvard and Yale tied for second place with 11 graduates each from the list of wealthiest Americans. The Boston school slipped from the top spot, which it held in 2021. The richest Harvard grad is the owner of the Los Angeles Clippers and former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, who ranked No. 8 on the Forbes 400 list.
Harvard remains by far the most successful centi-millionaire incubator, with 1,088 such graduates in 2023.
Children of the top one percent, earning more than $611,000 a year, are significantly overrepresented in the Ivy League — more likely to attend selective private colleges than students from any other income bracket with comparable SAT and ACT scores.
Yale University
Yale University has 21 billionaire alumni. This include Alibaba cofounder and Brooklyn Nets owner Joe Tsai and Stephen Schwarzman, CEO of Blackstone, an investment firm.
He graduated from Princeton University in 1986 with degrees in electrical engineering and computer science. He worked on Wall Street in a variety of related fields from 1986 to early 1994. Bezos founded Amazon in mid 1994 on a road trip from New York City to Seattle.
The Bachelor of Arts and Bachelor of Business Administration was the most popular undergraduate degrees among Fortune 100 CEOs, with 53% of CEOs identified as having obtained one of these two degrees.
Occupations that often produce many millionaires include entrepreneurship, finance and investment banking, technology, medicine, real estate, law, consulting, entertainment, sports, and high-level sales and marketing.
What billionaire dropped out of Harvard?
Bill Gates Dropped Out of Harvard. Now, He's Helping College Students Succeed. The billionaire famously dropped out of Harvard to found Microsoft. Today, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is helping students make better choices about where to go to college.
Yes, Bill Gates did drop out of Harvard University in 1975, after completing two years of his undergraduate studies. Along with his friend Paul Allen, Gates founded Microsoft Corporation, which went on to become one of the most successful and influential technology companies in the world.
The richest colleges in the U.S.
Many Ivy League and other top universities have tapped donors and alumni to bolster their wealth, which can rival the GDP of many nations. Universities, including Harvard, have typically built their endowments through two pathways: donations and investment gains.
The U.S. is still the dominant capital of entrepreneurship and centi-millionaires, with 38% of the global population worth $100 million or more, according to the report. Countries with the most centi-millionaires: U.S.: 10,660. China: 2,358.
Undergraduate Tuition and Fees
Students spent approximately $57,261 for Harvard University tuition in the 2022-23 school year. Additionally, costs for room and board total $19,502, bringing the total cost of attendance to $76,763. This is substantially higher than the average for private schools in the U.S. of $53,430.
The median family income of a student from Harvard is $168,800, and 67% come from the top 20 percent.
"Ivy plus" colleges — the eight Ivy League colleges along with MIT, Stanford, Duke and University of Chicago — admit children from families in the top 1% at more than twice the rate of students in any other income group with similar SAT or ACT scores, according to the new analysis from the Opportunity Insights, a group ...
Harvard University and college life (1909–1914)
Although the university had previously refused to let his father enroll him at age 9 because he was still a child, in 1909, at age 11, Sidis set a record by becoming the youngest person to enroll at Harvard University.
- #1. The Early College at Guilford. Greensboro, NC.
- #2. Signature School. Evansville, IN.
- #3. School for Advanced Studies (SAS) Miami, FL.
The wealthiest person in the country to have made a fortune without attending college is oil tycoon Harold Hamm. The youngest of 13 children, Hamm grew up on a farm in Oklahoma, picking cotton as a child and working at a gas station as a teenager.
Did any billionaires not go to college?
Although a college degree can certainly help you land a dream job and snag a high salary, it's not the only key to success. In fact, rich people have been able to achieve millionaire and billionaire status without ever setting foot on campus or completing higher education.
Jeff Bezos said he was not smart enough to study physics yet he had a 4.2 GPA at an Ivy League school in electrical engineering.
| No. | Name | Primary source(s) of wealth |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Elon Musk | Tesla, SpaceX |
| 2 | Jeff Bezos | Amazon |
| 3 | Bernard Arnault & family | LVMH |
| 4 | Bill Gates | Microsoft |
Amazon founder reclaims title for the first time since the fall of 2021. Jeff Bezos is back on top. .com founder is once again the world's richest person, eclipsing Elon Musk and jumping atop the Bloomberg Billionaires Index for the first time since the fall of 2021.
Craig Jelinek and Chevron CEO Mike Wirth, hold no graduate degree, proving that it's not a requirement to reach the highest level in business. Generally, if someone is “resilient and smart” and works very hard, it doesn't matter if they go to Harvard or a state school, Kang said.
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