Most Popular Undergraduate Degree of America’s Richest Graduates is Business

Collegebound students with a goal of someday finding their name on the Forbes 400 List of the Richest Americans will want to consider the latest statistics. There are twelve schools that collectively claim as alumni more than a quarter of this year’s Forbes 400 Richest Americans.  Harvard tops the list with 15 graduates on the list. (That doesn’t include two of its most famous dropouts: Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg.)  The University of Pennsylvania follows closely behind with 14 graduates on the list.  Yale and Stanford tie for third place, each with 12 alumni on the prestigious roster, followed by the University of Southern California (USC), Cornell, Princeton, Columbia and University of Michigan (tied for eighth place), and University of California – Berkeley, Dartmouth and Duke (all tied for tenth place).

“Clearly, graduating from a top 12 school isn’t a requirement for admission to The Forbes 400.  Nor is it a guaranteed ticket on the list,” reported Forbes. “But this select group of schools must offer some advantage, given their disproportionate share of the country’s wealthiest graduates.” 

The Forbes 400 List of Richest Americans further reported that nearly half of the nation’s wealthiest people majored in one of three subjects while in college. Despite the fact that many on the list made their fortunes in “tech” fields, Computer Science is not one of these fields.

The most popular undergraduate degree of America’s richest graduates is business.  That was the major chosen by Dallas Mavericks owner (and Shark Tank host) Mark Cuban, Oracle of Omaha’s Warren Buffett, Salesforce’s Marc Benioff, and Walmart heir Jim Walton.

The other two “majors” of the nation’s wealthiest college graduates are Economics and Engineering.  The wealthiest Economics majors include New York Mets owner and hedge fund investor Steve Cohen, who hails from University of Pennsylvania, the bitcoin billionaire twins Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, representing Harvard, and brokerage firm founder Charles Schwab, graduate of Stanford. 

Billionaires who were Engineering majors include former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, and Amazon’s founder Jeff Bezos who studied both Engineering and Computer Science.  

Of course, there are anomalies to every list.  Nineteen of the Forbes 400 Richest Americans never attended college, and another 37 dropped out before graduation –- often to jumpstart their entrepreneurial careers.

While there are no guarantees in life, the colleges on Forbes’ list and the majors that billionaires in the past have found fruitful are certainly worth consideration by the current class of collegebound students.  

Susan Alaimo is the founder and director of Collegebound Review that, for the past 25 years, has offered PSAT/SAT® preparation and private college advising by Ivy League educated instructors. Visit CollegeboundReview.com or call 908-369-5362