If by “super rich kids go” you mean universities attended by people who later became billionaires, a ranking reported by Fortune on March 4, 2025, puts Harvard first, followed by Stanford and the University of Pennsylvania. It is not a ranking of where wealthy families currently send their children, and attendance figures do not show that a university caused anyone to become rich.
The 10 universities in the reported U.S. ranking
Fortune attributes the ranking below to a Class Central report. Its article reports how many billionaires attended each institution and the average net worth of those billionaire attendees. The article does not lay out the full counting rules, so treat these as figures from that report—not a timeless census or a measure of current student wealth. Read Fortune’s account of the ranking.
| Rank | University or system | Billionaire attendees reported | Reported average net worth | Examples named by Fortune |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Harvard University | 144 | $9.65 billion | Mark Zuckerberg, Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, Lloyd Blankfein |
| 2 | Stanford University | 94 | $11.76 billion | Larry Page, Vlad Tenev, Jerry Yang |
| 3 | University of Pennsylvania | 56 | $12.36 billion | Elon Musk, Gary Lauder, Laurene Powell Jobs, Donald Trump |
| 4 | University of California system | 51 | $8.06 billion | Masayoshi Son, Gordon Moore, Tony Xu |
| 5 | Columbia University | 41 | $11.35 billion | Warren Buffett, Robert Kraft, Jim Scapa |
| 6 | Massachusetts Institute of Technology | 38 | $7.29 billion | Charles Koch, Drew Houston, Sam Bankman-Fried |
| 7 | Yale University | 25 | $8.11 billion | Stephen Schwarzman, Joe Tsai, the Bass brothers |
| 8 | Cornell University | 24 | $4.64 billion | David Duffield, Sandy Weill, Chuck Feeney |
| 9 | University of Southern California | 23 | $6.46 billion | Sarath Ratanavadi, Marc Benioff, George Lucas |
| 10 | New York University | 22 | $7.12 billion | Thomas Peterffy, Leonard Stern, Israel Englander |
All counts, averages and examples in the table are reported by Fortune from the Class Central ranking. The fourth entry is the University of California system as labeled in the article; it does not identify a particular campus.
What the ranking does—and does not—measure
Attending a university is not the same as graduating
The 2025 list uses “attended” in its descriptions. That does not establish that every person counted completed a degree. The distinction matters: a separate Wealth-X census published in 2018 counted billionaires who had completed undergraduate or postgraduate degrees, and its figures refer to 2017. It ranked Harvard first with 188, followed by Stanford (74), Penn (64), Columbia (53), MIT (38), Cornell (35), Yale (31), USC and the University of Chicago (29 each), and the University of Michigan (26). Those numbers should not be read as a clean year-over-year comparison with the 2025 list because the degree criterion differs. Wealth-X’s 2018 Billionaire Census.
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Billionaire counts are different from broader wealth estimates
Altrata’s May 2025 report asks a broader question: how many alumni have more than $30 million in net worth. It estimates 18,000 such Harvard alumni and ranks Harvard first among U.S. universities, followed by Penn, Stanford, Columbia and NYU. Outside the United States, it ranks Oxford first, followed by Cambridge, the National University of Singapore, INSEAD and the London School of Economics. These are estimates of alumni above a $30 million threshold—not counts of billionaires who attended. Altrata’s World Ultra Wealth Report 2025.
Sample-based studies use another method
An ERIC-indexed study reports that 89.01% of people in its sample attended U.S. universities and 25.97% attended Ivy League institutions. In that sample, Harvard accounted for 115 attendees (11.19%), Penn 57 (5.54%), Columbia 38 (3.70%), Yale 30 (2.92%), Cornell 22 (2.14%), Princeton 17 (1.65%), Dartmouth 13 (1.26%) and Brown 9 (0.88%). These are sample results, not the Fortune list’s institution counts. The authors say education data were missing for 5% of the sample and classify those cases as non-Ivy attendance, a choice that may affect the Ivy League estimate. ERIC-indexed study record.
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Why the rankings differ
A school’s position depends on who is counted and how. Before comparing figures, check the wealth threshold, the population and geographic scope, whether “attended” or “completed a degree” is the rule, the reference year, and whether the result is an estimate or a defined study sample. Those choices can produce different rankings without any of the lists measuring the same thing.
Harvard’s lead in the Fortune-reported attendance count is a descriptive result, not evidence that attending Harvard—or any university on the list—causes billionaire-level wealth. Class Central founder and CEO Dhawal Shah, quoted by Fortune, described a close link between prestigious institutions and wealth creation and pointed to mentors, resources, insider knowledge and networks as possible advantages. That is his interpretation; the ranking itself does not establish causation.
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