Dartblog

The last decade has brought Dartmouth a third category to go with pre-med and pre-law: pre-wealth, the expression used by ambitious undergrads who see investment banking (now just called “banking” — as if commercial banks did not exist), hedge funds and private equity as the road to great fortunes. Well, it ain’t so easy. Wealth-X, a firm that specializes in research on Ultra High Net Worth (UHNW) individuals, has published a study of where people with a total worth of more than $30 million went to school. Here are its results for private U.S. colleges, including grad schools:

Harvard leads the pack with 2,964 super-wealthy alumni. That’s 0.92% of the Crimson’s 323,000 graduates. Is it possible that Dartmouth has only 292 alumni who are in the UHNW classification? That seems a small fraction to me — only 0.42% of all alumni. If true, however, this is a sobering figure. I bet that a great many more than one in every 238 undergrads today believes that he or she will become jet-rich.

Addendum: The percentage odds of grabbing the brass ring (the gold ring?) at Penn are 0.51%, at Stanford 0.55%, and at fourth ranked Columbia only 0.30%. The College is doing pretty well, given that Tuck is only a third the size of Harvard’s B-school. The Wealth-X report does not break out how many of these successful people went to the various undergrad institutions as opposed to graduate schools.