If you’re mapping out your future – and wealth carries the highest importance – it might be worth glancing at where the billionaires went to university.

According to Bruno Venditti over at Visual Capitalist, who used the latest data from Salas Díaz & Young (2024), the university-to-billionaire path is paved with Ivy League bricks and Silicon Valley ambition.

Leading the pack is Harvard University, which has claims to 125 billionaires with a combined net worth approaching $600 billion. That’s not even counting dropout legends like Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg.

Stanford University, located in the heart of Silicon Valley, ranks second and is known as the alma mater of tech giants like Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang and DoorDash’s Andy Fang. The University of Pennsylvania counts Tesla CEO Elon Musk among its alumni, while Columbia University proudly lists Warren Buffett among its most iconic grads. MIT, meanwhile, was the alma mater to Charles Koch of Koch Industries.

ASIA’S PLACE IN THE LINEUP

Asia’s economy is very much on the rise. Though just one Asian school made it into the top 10 – Tsinghua University – there were a good number of Asian universities graduating billionaire alumni in the top 20.

Having graduated 12-14 billionaire alumni each, the University of Mumbai, Tsinghua University, Fudan University, Moscow State University, Peking University, and Seoul National University is part of this list. Peking University, for example, has Baidu co-founder Robin Li among its standout grads. Or the University of Mumbai, where Mukesh Ambani – India’s richest man and chairman of Reliance Industries – studied chemical engineering.

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