Calling all soon-to-be college students and undergrads with time left to transfer: Your choice of school might affect how much investment capital you'll get if you start a business. The first-ever University Entrepreneurship Report, published by information services firm CB Insights, found that in the last four years, more Stanford and Harvard alumni got VC and angel money for their companies than students from other top schools.
Six top-tier universities were included in the report: Stanford, Harvard, New York University, University of California Berkeley, University of Pennsylvania, and The Massachusetts Institute of Technology. From 2007 to 2011, $12.6 billion from 559 funding deals was invested in startups founded or led by alumni from those six schools. Companies started by students who attended one of those schools but who dropped out to pursue their entrepreneurship dreams were also counted in the study's results.
Stanford ranks top among the six for most deals and most money with 203 deals totaling $4.1 billion. Harvard comes in second with $3.8 billion, though if you leave out Facebook (founded by a certain Harvard dropout), the Ivy League school's graduates have only fetched $1.8 billion in 112 financing rounds. Just across the Bay from Stanford the money didn't flow as freely, with UC Berkeley grads pulling in $1.3 billion from 90 deals.
While it's not surprising to see Stanford students pulling in money from venture capitalists and angels (especially since the school is a stone's throw from the biggest VC firms), the study did reveal interesting insight about where that money stays. San Francisco Bay Area university alumni overwhelmingly tend to establish their businesses close to Silicon Valley, with 85 percent of Stanford students and 88 percent of Berkeley grads opening their first offices in California. In contrast, only 35 percent of Harvard and Penn graduates set up shop in the same states where they got their degrees.
And while you might get the best shot at angel and venture capital cash at Stanford, to protect your company from failing you should go to New York University. None of the companies founded by NYU grads died out in the past four years, according to the study. Whatever you do, stay away from UPenn and its 9 percent startup failure rate � the highest of the group.
Finally, those who are hoping to start a company that gets acquired by someone else should study hard (and ace their SATs) to get into MIT. Twenty-two percent of startups from the science- and technology-focused university were purchased in the four-year period.
