America's youngest game-changers don't need to go to the highest-ranked colleges to shine—but it doesn't hurt.
Stanford University, Harvard University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology top the list of schools with the most members of the Forbes 30 Under 30 2019 list. Among the very best schools in the nation, the three land on the Forbes Top Colleges list at No. 3, No. 1 and No. 4, respectively.
The advantage of these schools is clear: more spending on research, more clout among investors and more ambitious classmates to team up with. Stanford specifically is an absolute haymaker in the higher education research world, with 6,000 externally sponsored projects and a $1.6 billion research budget. Over 7% of the Under 30 list members this year have a Stanford degree.
"There was so much activity, especially at a place like Stanford, commercializing various technologies out of the lab," says Trevor Martin, the 29-year-old former Cardinal and cofounder of Mammoth Biosciences. "Especially in areas like therapeutics and machine learning. There's maybe a new startup every day it seems."
The University of California, Berkeley was the top public school on the list, landing at No. 5 with 22 graduates. It's the only public school in the top 10, which more or less mirrors the Top Colleges ranking; Berkeley is also Forbes' highest-ranked public school in the nation at No. 14 overall.
Top-producing schools you won't find on the U.s.-based Forbes Top Colleges list: the U.K.'s University of Cambridge and Canada's University of Waterloo. With 10 Under 30's each, they are the non-American schools with the most alumni honorees, including Deon Nicholas, cofounder of the AI search company Forethought.
Regardless of the rank or whereabouts of each school, the college environment lends itself to entrepreneurship. The best schools pair plucky young self-starters with mentors, incubators, funding, and other resources to start their own businesses. Take the University of Michigan, which ties for 13th with 10 Under 30's: The Wolverines can choose from 15 entrepreneurship programs and centers and more than 30 entrepreneurial student organizations.
Geography also matters. The University of Pennsylvania is the only school to puncture the top five that doesn't come from San Francisco, New York or Boston—markets that combine for over 60% of the nation's venture capital spending. But as entrepreneurship becomes more geographically democratized, other schools are poised to shine. Columbus, St. Louis and Atlanta topped Forbes' list of the top 10 rising cities for startups, and while none of their respective academic powerhouses of Ohio State, Washington University and Emory University were even in the top 25 producers, the increase of VC activity in these areas should catch the eye of upstart students.
Sometimes, though, the best resource is simply the collegiate atmosphere, where students are already trained to work hard and at all hours. Founders like Mark Zuckerberg have changed the world from their dorm rooms, and the most recent crop of change agents hope to follow suit. Humor and entertainment brand Betches Media was founded as a WordPress blog by four seniors at Cornell—Jordana Abraham, Samantha Fishbein and Aleen Kuperman. University of Michigan students Alex Lieberman and Austin Rief started Morning Brew at school, and the newsletter now has over 700,000 subscribers. And Jon Mattingly and Grechen Huebner cofounded the youth coding program Kodable from Mattingly's Louisville dorm room.
Here are the ten schools that produced the most members of the Forbes 30 Under 30 2019 Class:
1. Stanford University, 54
2. Harvard University, 46
3. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 34
4. University of Pennsylvania, 24
5. University of California, Berkeley, 22
T-6. New York University, 19
T-6. Yale University, 19
8. Cornell University, 15
9. University of Southern California, 14
10. Duke University, 13
