Twenty-five billionaires obtained their bachelor's degrees from the University of Pennsylvania, making it the top university in the world in terms of number of billionaire undergraduate alumni, according to this year’s Wealth-X and UBS Billionaire Census.
 
The annual Wealth-X and UBS study also showed that higher education is not a prerequisite to achieving billionaire status as 35 per cent of the 2,325 billionaires in the world have not obtained a tertiary-level degree.

Notable university dropouts include Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg, it said.

Both walked out of Harvard during their undergraduate years to start their businesses.
 
Among those billionaires who hold a tertiary-level degree, 42 per cent graduated with a bachelor’s degree, 26 per cent have a master’s degree, 21 per cent finished their MBA, and 11 per cent attained a PhD.
 
As many as 16 out of the top 20 billionaire schools are in the United States and with 12 billionaire alumni, India’s University of Mumbai has the most billionaire graduates of any university based outside the US.

The London School of Economics and Political Science in the UK, Lomonosov Moscow State University and ETH Zurich in Switzerland are other schools outside the US that made it to the top 20 billionaire schools list.
 
The top five schools with the most billionaire undergraduate alumni University of Pennsylvania, Harvard University, Yale University, University of Southern California and Princeton University.

Meanwhile, the Wealth-X and UBS Billionaire Census 2014 showed that more than a quarter of the billionaires who obtained their undergraduate degrees in the 16 American universities on the list were born outside of the United States.

Nearly 40 per cent who attended these top American schools for their post-graduate studies were not US citizens, it added. - TradeArabia News Service