Top 20 Colleges With Most Billionaire Alumni

You don’t have to have a college degree to become a billionaire. In fact, 35% of the world’s billionaires don’t have a bachelor’s degree — or in some cases, even a high school diploma, according to the latest billionaire census published by UBS and Wealth-X.

Still, the majority of billionaires have a bachelor’s degree, and of those 26% have a master’s degree, 21% an MBA and 11% a doctorate.

According to the census, the U.S. has a disproportionate number of the top 20 schools where billionaires obtained their bachelor’s degree.

This isn’t just because the U.S. is the country with the largest number of billionaires. According to UBS and Wealth-X, more than a quarter of nascent billionaires who received their undergraduate degree from American institutions were born outside the U.S.

And beyond the bachelor’s degree, some 39% of students who attended the top American schools for postgraduate studies were born outside the U.S.

“It is apparent that these institutions top the ranking not just because of the United States’ large number of billionaires, but also because they have strong international reputations, which attract students from around the globe,” the report said.

The schools on the top 20 list all have international reputations for excellence. However, only 16% of the world’s “educated” billionaires attended these institutions, the census report noted; 84% did not.

It pointed out that today’s billionaires received their bachelor’s degrees from more than 700 different universities around the world.

(If you aren’t a billionaire and need to work for a living, check out Top 10 Best Paying Jobs: 2014).

Following are the top 20 schools whose undergraduate programs have the most billionaire alumni:

20. ETH Zürich/Switzerland

Billionaire undergraduate alumni: 6

19. Massachusetts Institute of Technology/U.S.

Billionaire undergraduate alumni: 7

18. Brown University/U.S.

Billionaire undergraduate alumni: 8

17. Columbia University/U.S.

Billionaire undergraduate alumni: 8

16. Duke University/U.S.

Billionaire undergraduate alumni: 9

15. New York University/U.S.

Billionaire undergraduate alumni: 9

14. University of Michigan/U.S.

Billionaire undergraduate alumni: 10

13. Dartmouth College/U.S.

Billionaire undergraduate alumni: 10

12. University of Texas/U.S.

Billionaire undergraduate alumni: 10

11. Lomonosov Moscow State University/Russia