Where Top MBAs Work In Private Equity

School TPG Capital Carlyle Group Blackstone Group KKR Warburg Pincus Advent Int’l Apollo Mgt. Bain Capital CVC Capital
Harvard 23 41 43 24 20 28 8 77 5
Stanford 10 7 8 13 13 4 1 18 2
Chicago 2 9 16 2 1 1 5 6 0
Wharton 16 30 70 22 26 19 17 37 5
Kellogg 6 7 8 1 3 0 2 3 1
MIT 1 1 8 2 2 3 2 5 1
Columbia 8 18 28 6 2 2 10 3 2
Tuck 2 4 2 1 0 0 0 7 1
Duke 0 6 4 1 0 2 1 2 0
NYU 6 12 45 12 4 5 12 3 0

Source: Poets&Quants analysis of LinkedIn member profiles representing MBA jobs in private equity (Created with the HTML Table Generator)

By far, the biggest single PE employer of MBAs appears to be The Blackstone Group, with some 250 MBAs from just ten business schools on its payroll. It’s followed by Bain Capital (161), which received plenty of unwanted publicity during the Presidential campaign of Mitt Romney, and The Carlyle Group, with 135 MBAs. You can count 71 MBAs from these schools at Warburg Pincus, and 74 MBAs at TPG Capital.

And when it comes to playing favorites, Bain Capital seems to have a thing for Harvard Business School. Of the 161 MBAs from ten schools at the firm, 77 of them are Harvard grads. Similar favoritism seems to be in play for Wharton grads at The Blackstone Group where 70 of its 250 MBAs from these ten schools had their degrees stamped at Wharton.

Though the easy route to a top PE player may be through Harvard or Wharton, there are plenty of MBAs in PE from many other schools. Blackstone’s finance chief, Laurence Tosi, for example, has an M.B.A. from Georgetown’s McDonough School.

DON’T MISS: WHERE TOP MBAs WORK IN FINANCE or WHERE TOP MBAs WORK IN CONSULTING