There’s no degree requirement to be founder of a venture-backed startup. Nevertheless, attending a top-tier university definitely boosts the likelihood of success.
Those were once again the findings of our annual look at which U.S. colleges and universities graduate the highest number of funded startup founders, based on Crunchbase data.
As usual, four universities — Stanford, Harvard, MIT and UC Berkeley — hung on to the top four slots. The remaining names on our list mostly include a mix of large state research universities, Ivy League institutions and private schools known for tech and business.
For a more detailed overview, we posted the full ranking below. It tracks the number of founders affiliated with each school whose startups raised seed through growth-stage funding this past year.
Leading schools are also hard to get into
When we look at the top-ranked schools on our list, all are known for providing a rigorous education. What they also share in common are highly competitive admissions processes.
This is particularly true for undergrads. For the Class of 2028, for example, Stanford admitted just 3.6% of applicants, followed by Harvard at 3.7%, and MIT at 4.6%.
Many of those accepted are likely people well-poised to succeed in entrepreneurship regardless of degree. For evidence, look at the history of prestigious university dropouts going on to found valuable companies such as Microsoft, Apple and Meta. That said, of course, we also see co-founders in areas that rely on their academic expertise, particularly among AI and biotech unicorns.
Public university outperformers
Public universities, which have higher acceptance rates for in-state residents, are harder to measure for admissions competitiveness. But when it comes to funded-founder track records, it’s clear that a few names stand out.
The far-and-away leader in this category is UC Berkeley, which benefits from its highly regarded STEM programs as well as its location in the San Francisco Bay Area, the global capital of the venture industry.
UCLA ranks a distant second, with just over 100 grads going on to launch companies funded in the past year. Georgia Tech and University of Michigan are close behind, with 97 and 93 funded founders, respectively, followed by The University of Texas at Austin, with 86.
Ivies and hard-to-get-into private schools round out the list
All eight schools in the Ivy League made our list, which is what we’ve seen in past years as well. After Harvard, the next-biggest Ivies for funded startup founders were Columbia, University of Pennsylvania and Cornell.
Of course, there are also other private, non-Ivy universities that are notoriously hard to get into or known for particularly demanding STEM curriculum. Not surprisingly, these churn out a lot of funded founders as well. In this category, beyond the aforementioned Stanford and MIT, Carnegie Mellon, Duke and University of Southern California also ranked high on our list.
Since size is a consideration here as well, we also ought to give a shout-out to some smaller schools that produce a disproportionately high number of funded founders. For instance, Caltech, with only about 2,500 students, outperforms many much larger well-regarded schools.
Business schools play an outsized role
Several of the schools on our list also got there to a large degree as a result of business school grads.
Per Crunchbase data, standout business schools for funded founders include Harvard Business School, Stanford Graduate School of Business, Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management and Penn’s Wharton School, among others.
Business schools have also factored in favorably in prior research looking at universities that produce the highest numbers of startup CEOs.
No big changes
While it may seem like the world is changing at a faster rate than ever, funded founder and university rankings are one of the more stable indicators. Over the years we’ve been crunching these numbers, the component universities of our list, and their respective rankings, haven’t budged dramatically.
Bottom line: If your plan is to be a unicorn founder, attending Stanford is still probably not a bad idea.
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