PitchBook Universities: Top 100 colleges ranked by startup founders

Methodology

The 2022 rankings are based on the number of founders whose companies received a first round of venture funding between Jan. 1, 2012, and Oct. 21, 2022. Our methodology analyzes educational data on more than 144,000 founders.

The data on entrepreneurs, companies and capital raised comes from the PitchBook Platform. Data on founders’ educational background as well as data on universities are collected from publicly available and primary sources.

Since companies can have more than one founder, and founders could have attended multiple schools, it is possible for the same company or founder to count toward multiple universities.

New in 2022

PitchBook made a number of changes to its list of universities in 2022, including new features and adjustments to how the list is created and compiled.

• New filter functionality: Users can now filter the rankings by school enrollment size, geographic region and whether a university is public or private.
• Expanded graduate program ranking: All postgraduate degree holders are now included in our graduate rankings. Previously, the graduate ranking only included founders who had an MBA.
• Timeframe: The rankings now capture founders who received funding in the preceding decade. Previously, the list captured all founders who raised financing since 2006.
• Public university system tagging: We improved our data on founders to ensure that those who attended US public universities were tagged to the campus they attended rather than the university system as a whole.
• More schools: The undergraduate and graduate lists now rank up to 100 schools when filters are applied. The female founders’ lists rank up to 50 schools.
• Social sharing: You can now share your school’s ranking on Twitter.

Because of these changes from prior years, there is no year-to-year change shown in the 2022 list.