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What’s Wrong With This Picture? Georgia Tech Is 1 Of The Top 13 Undergrad Universities For Fostering Unicorns

What’s Wrong With This Picture? Georgia Tech Is 1 Of The Top 13 Undergrad Universities For Fostering Unicorns

The Georgia Institute of Technology — a public research university in one of the largest majority-black metro areas in the U.S. — ranks among the top 13 undergraduate programs for fostering founders of billion-dollar companies.

Five companies with Georgia Tech students-turned-founders have collectively raised $3.551 billion in capital.

But don’t get too excited about what this does or doesn’t say for diversity at the university. Just 6.5 percent of Georgia Tech‘s freshman admissions in 2016 were black or African American.

Harvard and Stanford universities cultivate the most billion-dollar company founders, according to data from the most recent PitchBook Universities Report. Further down the rankings, you’ll find several schools that are more accessible to a diverse student body when it comes to tuition and acceptance rate.

Georgia Tech is one of them, along with UC Berkeley, University of Michigan and University of Pennsylvania.

Pitchbook’s annual universities report ranks schools from several different perspectives, including enrolling more-than-average numbers of students who became founders of unicorn companies.

Georgia Tech landed on the list because of these billion-dollar-plus-valuation companies: Peloton, Credit Karma, CrowdStrike, AppDirect and AirWatch, PitchBook reported:

John Foley graduated from Georgia Tech in 1994. In 2012, he founded Peloton, a startup that’s developed one of the trendiest pieces of exercise equipment around: in-home cycles connected to live feeds of spinning classes. Peloton was worth $1.4 billion as of May. Cybersecurity startup CrowdStrike, valued at north of $1 billion earlier this year, represents another success story for the school. Dmitri Alperovitch, one of the company’s founders, has a bachelor’s in computer science and a master’s in information security from Georgia Tech.

With an annual in-state tuition of around $9,812, Georgia Tech has an acceptance rate of 32.2 percent and undergraduate enrollment of 15,142.

Georgia is home to 10 historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs). Georgia Tech is not one of them.

The 10 Georgia HBCUs include Albany State University, Clark Atlanta University, Fort Valley State University, Interdenominational Theological Center, Morehouse College, Morehouse School of Medicine, Morris Brown College, Paine College, Savannah State University, and Spelman College.

Atlanta has the second-largest majority black metro area, with 45 percent Black or African American population, according to the 2010 Census, World Population Review reported. African Americans in the city have been moving to the suburbs. The city’s black population shrank from 61.4 percent in 2000 to 54 percent in 2010.

It’s surprising that just 6.5 percent of Georgia Tech‘s freshman admissions in 2016 was listed as black or African American, according to Georgia Tech. By contrast, Georgia Tech’s 2016 freshman student admissions were 50 percent white, 25 percent Asian and 8 percent Hispanic.

https://twitter.com/GeorgiaTechISyE/status/900396723436126209

Turns out just 50–to-55 percent of all Georgia Tech students are residents of Georgia, around 20 percent come from overseas, and 25–to-30 percent are residents of other U.S. states. The top states of origin for all non-Georgia U.S. students include Florida.

Here’s a closer look at the top 13 undergraduate programs for founders of billion-dollar companies:

The Ivy League schools on the list are safe bets when it comes to receiving a quality education and developing the tools to launch a valuable startup, according to PitchBook. But what if you have eyes on founding a unicorn company without shelling out hundreds of thousands for tuition?

Tuition costs at Harvard and Stanford are $43,230 and $47,331, respectively, for the 2016-2017 academic year. Acceptance rate at each school is around 5 percent for the same period.

Georgia Tech won’t break the bank, PitchBook reported.