Want to be a billionaire? Penn might be the school for you
Is the University of Pennsylvania worth the roughly $70,000 price tag? Possibly - especially if you become one of the Ivy League school's billionaire alumni.
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Is the University of Pennsylvania worth the roughly $70,000 price tag?
Possibly - especially if you become one of the Ivy League school's billionaire alumni.
Forbes magazine looked at the nation's top colleges based on the number of billionaires minted by each, and found that Penn's Quakers number the most among the Forbes 400.
The cost of attendance for Penn's 2016-17 academic year totals $69,340 for an undergraduate, according to its website (http://www.sfs.upenn.edu/paying/cost-of-attendance.htm). That includes the all-in bill for tuition, housing on or off campus (not with parents, that is), and other fees.
Not a bad return on investment if you make that billion dollars.
The full list of Forbes 400 members for 2015 places Penn at No. 1 with 21 billionaire alumni, followed by Harvard University and Yale University (tied with 14 each), Stanford University (13 billionaires), and the University of Southern California (11).
Ivy League neighbor Princeton University ranked seventh, with seven billionaires.
Penn's 21 among the 406 names on the Forbes 400 represents about 5 percent of the list. (More than 400 people appeared on the Forbes 400 because of fortunes shared among multiple people.)
One luminary and Penn grad: Elon Musk. The PayPal cofounder and current CEO of both Tesla Motors and SpaceX transferred in from a school in Canada and paid his way through Penn by turning his house into a nightclub on weekends, according to Forbes. Musk earned economics and physics degrees, then dropped out of a physics doctoral program at Stanford to pursue his first start-up.
Other billionaire Penn alums include businesswoman Laurene Powell Jobs, Steve Jobs' widow, and casino magnate Steve Wynn.
These days, the school's most famous graduate is Donald Trump, who transferred from Fordham University. He received an economics degree from Penn's Wharton School in 1968. His son Donald Trump Jr. and daughters Ivanka and Tiffany Trump also attended Penn.
Overall, Penn did not rank in the Top 10 - placing 11th - on Forbes' list of the top 25 private U.S. colleges. The criteria include graduation rate and postgraduate success, among others.
University representatives did not respond to requests for comment.
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