Where Did the Global Elite Go to School? Hierarchy, Harvard, Home and Hegemony

We examine the educational backgrounds of the global elite, using new data on a diversity of organizational leadership roles as well as the population of the super-rich across the world. Four trends emerge when examining the university education of the global elite. First, we find a small number of globally prestigious universities to take on super prominent roles, suggesting a strongly hierarchical distribution of credentials among the global elite. Second, we find a consistent and unique place for Harvard University within this system. Third, we find evidence for a significant yet variable ‘home-bias’ in the education of the global elite. This is moderated by the fourth regularity, the hegemony of Anglo-American credentials. These four global regularities can enhance ongoing research on global elite populations. Our findings are robust to both the removal of all American elites in the sample, to dynamic stratified sampling of the network boundary and to disaggregating the sample into different elite roles. The analysis of this article is the first of its kind to offer a large-scale descriptive mapping of central tendencies in global elite university education.