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Only 1.3% of millionaires have struck it rich without finishing college, so the first thing most aspiring millionaires should do to up their earning potential is get a degree.
Data firm WealthInsight, in partnership with the news site Verdict, has created a ranking of the universities that have produced the most millionaires around the world.
The ranking comes courtesy of WealthInsight’s ongoing database of more than 200,000 high-net-worth individuals. Based on liquidity events, such as IPOSs, the company has estimated the total number of millionaires that graduated from each school.
The top 10 are:
- Harvard University
- Stanford University
- University of Pennsylvania
- Columbia University
- Oxford University
- MIT
- New York University
- Cambridge University
- Northwestern University
- University of Chicago
Of those top 10 schools, eight are located in the US. The other two, Cambridge and Oxford, are in the UK. The highest-ranking university on the list outside those two countries is Tel Aviv University, which is in Israel and ranks 27th.
WealthInsight also found that US universities have produced more millionaires who live outside the country than any other nation’s schools have.
It’s also notable that only three of the top 10 schools are Ivy League universities: Harvard, UPenn, and Columbia. The other five Ivies (Cornell, Dartmouth, Princeton, Yale, and Brown) are overshadowed by schools that, while competitive, aren’t as exclusive. These include the University of Michigan and University of Texas at Austin, which are tied for the 11th slot in the ranking, ahead of 13th-place Cornell. The University of Southern California ranks 16th, above 17th-place Princeton.
If none of those educational routes to wealth seem feasible, there’s always the option to join the small pool of wealthy folks who dropped out of college or never attended. But even Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates managed to get into Harvard before building their fortunes.
