An analy­sis of the edu­ca­tional back­grounds of tech com­pany founders has shown that an elite edu­ca­tion  does not pro­vide as much of an advan­tage as many expect. In fact the results seem to show that where one stud­ies has no cor­re­la­tion to entre­pre­neur­ial suc­cess, as long as one actu­ally does study.

The 628 U.S.-born tech founders [sur­veyed] received their edu­ca­tion from 287 unique uni­ver­si­ties. Almost every major U.S. uni­ver­sity was rep­re­sented. The top ten insti­tu­tions in this group accounted for only 19 per­cent of the entire sam­ple. In other words, 81% of the tech com­pany founders came from “reg­u­lar” schools. […]

The aver­age sales rev­enue of all star­tups in one of our sam­ples was around $5.7 mil­lion, and these com­pa­nies employed an aver­age of forty-two work­ers. Star­tups estab­lished by tech founders with Ivy League degrees had aver­age sales and employ­ment of $6.7 mil­lion and fifty-five work­ers, respec­tively. The suc­cess of these two groups markedly con­trasted with star­tups estab­lished by tech founders with only a high school degree. Those founders had aver­age rev­enues and employ­ees of $2.2 mil­lion and eigh­teen, respec­tively. […] In other words, it didn’t mat­ter so much if you grad­u­ated from an Ivy. What made the great­est dif­fer­ence was hav­ing a higher degree.

Sim­i­lar results were uncov­ered in an analy­sis of com­pany founders from India and China.

The analy­sis also chal­lenges the belief that entre­pre­neurs start their ven­tures fresh out of full-time edu­ca­tion, with the fol­low­ing results shown for how long after grad­u­a­tion dif­fer­ent grad­u­ates found their companies:

  • MBA grad­u­ates: 13–15 years
  • Com­puter Science/IT grad­u­ates:  13 years
  • Bachelor’s degree hold­ers: 17 years
  • Applied sci­ence majors: 20 years
  • PhD hold­ers: 21 years

The crux of the argu­ment: “The Ivy-Leaguers may be able to get their bud­dies from [big-name VC firms] to return emails, but they aren’t going to be any more suc­cess­ful at build­ing companies.”