Unsurprisingly, the educational institutions from which the best entrepreneurs graduate, have taken the top spot in all other categories.
According to the annual MBA program ranking produced by Pitchbook, there have not been any significant changes compared to last year: the schools that have taught the best entrepreneurs are still the same, and no new contestants have arrived for now. The top three business schools are the same as last year: Harvard, Stanford and Wharton. Still, there are some details worth mentioning, even with the big picture largely unchanged, Poets and Quants reports.
More Than a 1000 Businesses Started by Harvard Graduates
Pitchbook’s top business schools, such as Harvard, Stanford, Wharton, INSEAD, Kellogg, Columbia, MIT and others also hold top spots in most other rankings. However, there is come surprising information to be read in Pitchbook’s latest report:
The largest number of new female entrepreneurs (202) have graduated from Harvard Business School. It is the best result by far, leaving Stanford (119) and Columbia (77) far behind. Among new businesses launched by these female entrepreneurs are Nextdoor, Cloud, Grab, Rent the Runway and Gilt. These startups have raised much more funds than their counterparts at other best universities: $4.5 million for Harvard, and $1.79 million for Stanford.
All in all, 1,086 companies have been launched by 1,203 Harvard graduates. Harvard Business School became the only educational institution to make more than 1,000 companies happen. Results for other business schools include: 802 entrepreneurs and 716 companies for Stanford, 666/585 for Wharton, 455/406 for INSEAD and 445/417 for Kellogg.
Harvard also became the best school producing founders of unicorn startups: Zynga, Grab, Jet, GO-JEK and Oscar. For Stanford, it’s Sea, Funding Circle, SoFi, Sunrun and Fab; for Wharton – Jet, Deliveroo, Flipkart, Dianping.com and HelloFresh. There are also a few new schools at the very bottom of the rankings: UCLA, Graziadio School of Business and Olin Business School have risen three notches up, each of them with two unicorn startups.
There is also the part of the Pitchbook ranking which lists “serial” entrepreneurs (those who have launched two or more businesses obtaining funding). The three top spots are, of course, taken by Harvard, Stanford and Wharton. The fourth place belongs to MIT, the fifth to INSEAD, and CBS, Kellogg, Chicago Booth, Berkeley Haas and UCLA follow them.
The Growing Popularity of Software Businesses
In Pitchbook’s top-25 rankings, only 4 schools are from overseas: INSEAD (4th place, as well as 7th place for the number of female entrepreneurs – 40 – and 4th for the number of unicorns), London Business School (12th place), Tel Aviv University (13th place) and University of Oxford (22nd place).
Another interesting thing to see in Pitchbook’s rankings is its breakdown by business sectors. Harvard’s graduates mostly dabble in software – 41.7% of all launched startups belong to this sector. For other top schools, the most popular business sector is also software: 40%-44% of their graduates founded companies dealing with it. Most of these businesses are, of course, headquartered in the Silicon Valley. The second popular category is “Other”, and the third is Commercial Services (9.39% for Harvard and 9.5% for Stanford). Only Wharton’s third place was taken by Healthcare (9.3%).
Pitchbook also supplies rankings for undergraduate programs, where one can notice some differences compared with the graduate trend. According to this list, Stanford has the 1st place and is followed by such schools as Berkeley Haas, MIT, Harvard and Wharton. The sixth place belongs to Cornell, and the top-10 is filled in by Ross School of Business, McCombs, Tel Aviv and Urbana-Champaign.
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