This Is Where the 100 Richest Billionaires Went to School

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Published
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This Is Where the 100 Richest Billionaires Went to School

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How do billionaires become billionaires? Is it creativity? Education? Family life? Some, like Larry Ellison, founder of Oracle, and Bill Gates, co-founder of Microsoft, did not get college degrees at all. However, several universities dominate the list of places from which the world’s 100 richest billionaires went to school.

Match College looked at the world’s 100 richest billionaires based on net worth data from Forbes. It then matched them with the colleges from which they graduated. Their methodology was such that the people on the list did not have to graduate, which means people in the Gates category of no degree made the cut. Data were available on 70 of the 100. People who gained a graduate degree from a university counted along with those who got bachelor’s degrees.

Harvard was the top school by far. It had eight people on the list. This should be no surprise. Harvard often ranks among the world’s best universities, and it tops several lists. US News ranks Harvard number one among its 2021 Best Global Universities Rankings. Its list includes approximately 1,500 universities across 80 countries and uses 13 metrics. It is the only university to score 100 in the rankings. The list’s editors commented: “The university has the largest endowment of any school in the world. Harvard research takes place across a range of disciplines in more than 100 centers.”
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Harvard ranks third on The Times Higher Education World University Rankings 2021, which includes 1,500 universities in 83 countries. Oxford and Stanford topped it.

Wall Street Journal/Times Higher Education College Rankings 2021 also ranks Harvard first among almost 800 universities measured on 15 performance indicators. Its data shows that Harvard graduates make a salary of $92,033 a year. That is high, but not nearly billionaire level.

Click here to see the most expensive college in each state.
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Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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