New Delhi: The University of Mumbai has beaten the MIT in producing maximum number of billionaires.
Mumbai University is the only Indian university to feature on the list of Wealth-X and UBS Billionaire Census 2014. It is also amongst the top 10 varsities from across the world.
American universities dominate the list of “Which Universities Produce The Most Billionaires” with 16 amongst the top 20 entries. The University of Mumbai is ranked nine on the list but figures higher than MIT, NYU or even the University of Michigan or Columbia.
The University of Pennsylvania has topped the list with 25 billionaire undergraduate alumni. This is followed by Harvard with 22 billionaires, Yale with 20 billionaire alumni, University of Southern California with 16, Princeton and Cornell with 14 billionaire alumni.
Reputed British universities like the Oxford or Cambridge did not make it to the list. It is the London School of Economics (LSE) that has been ranked 10th on the list for producing 11 billionaires.
Lomonosov Moscow State University and ETH Zurich in Switzerland are other schools outside the US have also made it to the top 20 billionaire schools list.
The annual Wealth-X and UBS study also came up with an interesting finding. It showed that higher education is not a prerequisite to achieving billionaire status as 35% of the 2,325 billionaires in the world have not obtained a tertiary-level degree.
Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg are amongst the list of University dropouts who made it big. Both walked out of Harvard during their undergraduate years to start their businesses.
Among those billionaires who hold a tertiary-level degree, 42% graduated with a bachelor’s degree, 26% have a master’s degree, 21% finished their MBA, and 11% attained a PhD.