No Chicago school cracked the Top 20 in a ranking of universities with the most alumni entrepreneurs who have founded venture capital-backed companies.
Bay Area and Boston schools topped the list, which PitchBook compiles annually by analyzing more than 144,000 VC-back founders.
The undergrad list was topped by Stanford University at No. 1, followed by the University of California at Berkeley, Harvard University, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Northwestern University was the top-ranked Chicago-area school, coming in at No. 23. The University of Chicago was ranked at No. 65.
The top Illinois school was the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, ranked No. 14.
Stanford led the undergrad list with a founder count of 1,427. Illinois had a founder count of 581, Northwestern 464, and UofC 231.
The University of Michigan (no. 7 with 814 founders) was the only Midwest school ranked above U of I.
For universities with more than 30,000 students, U of I's undergrad program ranked seventh globally for startup founders.
Northwestern also ranked 7th for universities with 15,000 to 29,999 students.
Chicago schools fared better when looking at graduate programs.
Both Northwestern and UofC were in the top 11 with Northwestern coming in at No. 9 with 1,064 founders. UofC — no. 11 — had 880 founders.
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.
Pitchbook also broke down the top schools for female founders, with Northwestern outpacing the other Illinois-based schools.
Here are Pitchbook's top 10 schools in each category. You can read the full list from Pitchbook here.
