Education of billionaires: did they go to university?

Analysis of the list of the richest people on the planet led to the following conclusion: most of the billionaires still received a university degree. Moreover, among them there are more often holders of a degree higher than bachelor's degree than those who did not study at the university at all. This conclusion is hardly reassuring to self-taught entrepreneurs daydreaming about how, thanks to their brains and a drop of luck, they achieve high results in business.

Billionaires and their degrees

The insurance company GoCompare has studied the education level of hundreds of the richest people in the world according to Forbes magazine over the past 20 years.It turned out that 76 percent of them have higher education: 47 percent of them completed only bachelor's degree, 23 percent - master's degree, and 6 percent became candidates of science (PhD ). It also means that nearly a quarter of the super-rich either did not attend university at all or left before graduating.In terms of the number of undergraduate graduates, billionaires have overtaken the adult population of the United States - their figure is 68 percent higher.Billionaires are also three times more likely to hold a master's or PhD.

The most popular qualifications in the top 100 were related in one way or another to economics and engineering. The number of billionaires who studied sciences exceeded the number of billionaires humanities .

Where are the forges of billionaires?

Harvard University in the United States can most often be found in the resume of a billionaire, however, like Harvard Business School. Although one of the most famous on the list, Bill Gates, left Harvard before graduating. Moscow turned out to be among the most popular places of study for Russian billionaires - Moscow State University and other Moscow specialized universities flashed on the list. Stanford University in California and Massachusetts Institute of Technology serve as starting pointssites for the multitude of billionaires who have made their fortunes in the IT industry. Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google, was a graduate student at Stanford.Among British universities in terms of the number of billionaire graduates, the leaders are the London School of Economics and Cambridge, and the Australian media mogul Rupert Murdoch studied at Oxford. In France, the largest number of former students who have become billionaires belongs to École Polytechnique in Paris.Future billionaires also studied in the city of Karlsruhe in Germany, Italian Milan and Swiss Zurich. In the United States, most billionaires graduated from universities such as: Princeton, Yale, Duke, Amherst and Bryn Mor-college .

Inherited or achieved everything yourself?

With the help of this study, it is impossible to find out which of the billionaires comes from the bottom and only thanks to their abilities was able to reach unprecedented heights, and who comes from a family of modest millionaires. But on the other hand, the study shows a reduction in the percentage of nuggets. The ratio between those who achieved everything on their own and those who inherited wealth declined in favor of the latter during the financial crisis, but has not yet recovered to its previous level. Now billionaire nuggets make up 58 percent of the list.

And now about the "poor"

However, this analysis focuses on the extremely rich - those who are at the top of the list of billionaires. Studies of the less affluent, garden billionaires by the Swiss banking groupand the Singapore-based finance company Wealth-X and UBS Billionaire Census also found a large college graduate rate among billionaires.

But other universities were on the top line: the first was the University of Pennsylvania, followed by Harvard, Yale, University of Southern California, Princeton, Cornell and Stanford. Among English universities, the London School of Economics was again in the lead. By the way, researchers from the Center for the Study of Cost-Effectiveness at the LSE found a link between grades and the subsequent ability to make a profit in the United Kingdom - those who graduated from the university with honors or simply with high grades received more financial returns.

Sir Peter Lumple, Chairman of the Sutton Trust, which aims to promote social mobility and equal access to university education, says that “it is no surprise that many of the richest people on the planetreceived degrees from leading universities. Our research shows that an advanced degree can add up to £ 200,000 to a lifetime earnings. We must be sure that the material benefits and opportunities that a degree brings with it are available not only to the wealthiest, but to everyone, regardless of their origin."

Original: http://www.bbc.com/news/business-35631029

2022-01-14 07:15:05
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