Princeton billionaire

Marsden
Thu, 06 May 2010 22:25:58 +0000

Forbes Magazine:

The Top Billionaire Universities

No. 1 Harvard University

Number of billionaire alumni: 54

Harvard has churned out more 10-figure titans than any other school on the planet (counting both undergraduate and graduate degrees). The school’s roster of billionaire alumni includes Michael Bloomberg, Sumner Redstone, David Rockefeller, Sr. and William Randolph Hearst III.

No. 2 Stanford University

Number of billionaire alumni: 25
Stanford has the second-highest number of billionaire grads in the world, including Charles Schwab. Still, the Harvard of the West is probably better known for its billionaire dropouts. Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page earned master’s degrees in computer science from Stanford before leaving Stanford doctorate programs to start the famously profitable search engine. Another (very rich) quitter: Microsoft Chief Exec Steve Ballmer.

No. 3 University of Pennsylvania

Number of billionaire alumni: 18
Early last year, U. Penn had 27 billionaire graduates, thanks to its famous business school, Wharton. But the financial meltdown last year shaved off almost a third of that list, including hedge fund tycoon Peter Briger Jr. and money maven Marc Rowan. Amongst the school’s remaining billionaire grads: Ronald and Leonard Lauder, and Michael Milken.

No. 4 Columbia University (tie)

Number of billionaire alumni: 16
Amongst Columbia’s grads is affable billionaire Warren Buffett, the world’s second-richest man. While studying in New York (class of 1951), the Berkshire Hathaway chief learned from value-investing legend Benjamin Graham. Other rich alum: Wal-Mart Chairman S. Robson Walton and Henry Kravis.

No. 4 Yale University (tie)

Number of billionaire alumni: 16
Yale is alma mater to a slew of billionaire clans, including the Mars chocolate fortune (Forrest Mars Jr. and John Mars) and Cargill agricultural fortune (Cargill MacMillan Jr. and Whitney MacMillan). Investor Eddie Lampert and Blackstone Group co-founder Stephen Schwarzman also graduated from Yale; both were members of the infamous secret society Skull & Bones.

Rounding out the list: Massachusetts Institute of Technology (11 billionaires), Northwestern University (10), the University of Chicago (10), Cornell University (9), University of California, Berkeley (9), University of Southern California (9) and University of Texas, Austin (9).



You’d think Forbes would have the sense to control for the size of the school, Princeton being smaller than any of these–in nearly every case, *much *smaller. Maybe there aren’t any quants on Forbes’s staff?