Which universities did private equity professionals at some of the largest firms attend?

We came across a post at the College Confidential forum (posted by user Alexandre) with some excellent information collected from public profiles of professionals at some of the largest private equity firms, including Blackstone, Carlyle, Bain Capital, Silverlake Partners, Warburg Pincus and Providence Equity Partners. We decided to add the latest U.S. News rankings for both undergraduate and graduate schools to see if we could draw some conclusions, assuming that the question we are trying to answer is something along the lines of — which schools do PE firms recruit from, or considered another way — which schools are “represented” according to their rank in the field of private equity?

Of course we realize there are tons of factors influencing proportional representation in terms of rank, including geographic location of the school, self-selection (i.e. Wharton), class size, etc. For instance, some of the top schools were not represented in the data at all, like Cal Tech, MIT and Johns Hopkins — as you can see, self-selection plays a big part.

Check out the two columns at the far right — they indicate the difference in US News Rank vs. “Real” rank (Rank as observed in publicly available profiles of the top firms).

Thoughts? Meaningful? Meaningless?