Schools With Top CEO Alumni

Harvard Business School

If you want to be a CEO of a venture-backed company, you may want to attend Harvard or Stanford.

Crunch Base found that these two schools are among the top educations affiliated for CEOs of startups that raised $1 million or more in the past year.

“Business schools are big. While MBA programs may be seeing fewer applicants, the degree remains quite popular among startup CEOs,” Joanna Glasner, a contributor at Tech Crunch, writes. “At Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania, more than half of the CEOs on our list graduated as business school alum.”

Harvard fares better than Stanford when it comes to education future CEOs than founders, Glasner says.

Here Are The Top Schools That Startup Ceos Attended.

Among the data, Ivy Leage schools and large research universities tend to be popular schools for graduation successful CEOs.

Another interesting finding from the data is that a number of these top business schools enroll only a small percentage of students at their respective universities. Yet, these schools produce the mass majority of CEOs.

“Wharton School of Business degrees, for instance, accounted for the majority of CEO alumni from the University of Pennsylvania,” Glasner writes. “Harvard Business School also graduated more than half of the Harvard-affiliated CEOs. And at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management, the share was nearly half.”

Methodology

It’s important to note that the data is based on an entire school and not just solely MBA programs. While this doesn’t significantly impact rankings, Crunchbase notes that it does create some margin of error.

In addition, a number of business schools also issue advanced or executive MBA degrees. While Crunchbase includes both MBAs and advanced MBAs in the total number of funded startups, it doesn’t include short-term degree recipients for the largest rounds in the listing of funding totals.

Sources: Crunch Base, Tech Crunch