The world’s wealthiest people study engineering

WANT to be a billionaire? Study engineering.

That’s the findings of a latest study that shows more than a fifth (22 per cent) of the world’s wealthiest people studied engineering as a subject at university.

According to the study by Approved Index, a UK-based business-to-business platform, engineering was the most popular degree among Forbes list of the world’s top 100 billionaires.

Only 12 per cent of billionaires had a business degree, just nine per cent had an arts degree and six per cent studied either science, maths or law.

Engineering graduates are also the richest of their prosperous peers, with an average wealth of $33.2 billion, compared with a net worth of $31 billion for billionaires without a degree and $29 billion for those who studied finance

But the study also highlights that having a degree doesn’t necessarily mean a large pay packet. A third of the world’s top 100 billionaires had no university degree at all.

In fact some of the world’s biggest companies all have founders that dropped out of university. Mark Zuckerberg from Facebook never finished university and Bill Gates from Microsoft dropped out of the prestigious Harvard University. Gates tops the Forbes list of billionaires with a net worth of $101 billion.

So which country produces the most billionaires? That would be the USA with 39 per cent of the world’s richest people. Australia has just one billionaire, Gina Rinehart, who scraped in at 94th on Forbes list of 100.