Why are "elite schools" still a thing?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:It seems to be pretty common knowledge that for the vast majority of applicants, getting accepted to a school like Harvard or Yale is pretty much a lottery. So why are these insanely selective schools still considered better than all of the others? Why haven't we let the idea of "prestigious" colleges go? Many students get equal or better educations at their state school.

Because they don't get an equal or better education at a state school. As one who started at one then transferred to another...the difference is vast. The middle-50s state school with good engineering was not anywhere close to the pace and depth of classes, and without professor guided research opportunities at the elite private school with amazing engineering. The peers from the better school have gone far and wide, with startups or into academia or high up in industry. The midlevel state peers have midlevel tech-type jobs that are closer to IT jobs than innovative engineering. They make 70-100k in their 40s and hit their ceiling long ago. Their bosses are almost all top engineering program grads. Professors, who are great at both, will be the first to admit they have to dumb down for the state schools, and do not have the resources to take on and pay undergraduates for research. Fast forward 25 yrs and sophomore history kid and peers at a top10 uni had to explain primary sources and tips on keeping up with reading to a junior transfer from a LAC ranked in the 20s. The lac kid was completely unprepared for the transfer. Yet had a 4.0 from the prior school. They said the workload was almost double, in the humanities no less, which dcum often mocks and does not understand is also much more rigorous at elite schools.

Cool, here’s my anecdote. I went to a state school and I work with a bunch of people that went to ivies and I keep getting promoted over them. Don’t worry, it’s not because I went to a state school, it’s that no one cares where anyone went to undergrad and undergrad education has such little impact on our work. Life is not a series of exams.

Where do you work and what is your job?

Sounds like you are just one of thousands of posters with an unnamed person and unnamed position claiming something.

The verifiable most successful people in the world are heavily concentrated in top schools.

So, I guess you lose the anecdote contest?

DP: So are you.

One what? Go look at the Forbes 400 and where they went to school and the concentration in a small group of schools.

Hence, the verifiable successful people.

https://fortune.com/2023/06/14/fortune-500-ceo-colleges-ivy-league/


A professor has tracked the colleges of Fortune 500 CEOs for 20 years. He was stunned to learn Ivy Leagues don’t matter that much.
Rachel Shin
Since 1999, David Kang has pursued a peculiar hobby. That year, after Fortune released its annual Fortune 500 issue, Kang began to wonder about where chief executives of companies on the list had attended college. To keep track, the college professor did some research and manually entered their alma maters into a spreadsheet. After completing the task, Kang, then a professor at Dartmouth College’s Tuck School of Business, was shocked by what the data revealed.

“The results were stunning,” he told Fortune. “Like everyone else, I thought Ivy Leagues would dominate. But the largest place they had gone to was no college at all.”

Of the 500 CEOs on the list, seven or eight had no undergraduate degree, more than the combined degrees from any other college in the pool, according to Kang, who is now a professor of international relations and business at the University of Southern California. He presented the results to his Dartmouth graduate students, who tried to explain away the Ivy League’s lack of dominance, he said. But the numbers told all: A fancy degree isn’t required for business success, and top-tier corporate executives usually don’t have elite educations.

Kang continued to track Fortune 500 CEO education numbers over the following two decades, and said there was little change through the years from the initial findings. The consistent pattern for 20 years has been top leaders attending a diversity of colleges, he said.

“It’s an extraordinary testament to the vitality of this country, the incredible range of universities that these people went to,” Kang said. “It’s a country that has a massive economy, and many of these companies in the top 500 are not white-shoe law firms, they’re pharmaceutical, they’re manufacturing, et cetera.”

Here’s what the 2023 Fortune 500 reveals about CEO colleges.

Unexpected tallies

Of the 2023 Fortune 100 CEOs, only 11.8% attended an Ivy as undergrads, and only 9.8% hold an Ivy League MBA. Doug McMillon, CEO of Walmart, the top company on Fortune’s list, got his undergraduate degree from the University of Arkansas and his MBA from the University of Tulsa. Exxon CEO Darren Woods attended Texas A&M University and Northwestern University, and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella went to India’s Manipal Institute of Technology and the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. Of the 20 CEOs at the nation’s biggest companies by revenue, only one attended an Ivy as an undergrad—Amazon’s Andy Jassy, an alum of Harvard University.

Moreover, 14 of the 20 CEOs went to public colleges. Apple’s Tim Cook graduated from Auburn University, Berkshire Hathaway’s Warren Buffett graduated from the University of Nebraska, and McKesson’s Brian S. Tyler graduated from the University of California at Santa Cruz.

Corporate success is primarily performance-based, so businesspeople don’t need fancy degrees to get ahead, said Brian Chabowski, chair of management, marketing, and international business at the University of Tulsa. Reaching the executive level is all about delivering, and sometimes about location, he added. Certain businesses recruit from specific regions or business schools, and those schools aren’t usually Ivy League.

“If you have the drive, and if the system is based on performance, it goes without saying that the elitism isn’t nearly what it could be elsewhere,” Chabowski told Fortune.

College elitism in business doesn’t exist to the extent that it does in academia, Chabowski noted. Individual talents have much more bearing on accomplishment than where someone got their degree, and traits that usually forecast success in students are attention to detail, perseverance, groundedness, and understanding of complexity, he added.

In terms of graduate degrees, 75% of the Fortune 500’s top 20 CEOs received an MBA or other graduate degree, however some returned to school later in life after already achieving some professional success. And the CEOs of five top 20 companies, including Costco CEO W. Craig Jelinek and Chevron CEO Mike Wirth, hold no graduate degree, proving that it’s not a requirement to reach the highest level in business.

Generally, if someone is “resilient and smart” and works very hard, it doesn’t matter if they go to Harvard or a state school, Kang said. If anything, he added, going to a school that affords them less privilege will force them to “learn more business and people skills” earlier.

[Anonymous]

Fortune 500 CEOs aren't the richest people in the US if they didn't found their companies.

Even then, the CEO of Blackstone (top 20 richest in US) won't show up on the Fortune 500 list because Blackstone the company doesn't employ that many people...even though they own lots of companies that employ lots of people.

How many hedge fund founder/owners, VC managing partners, etc. are on the Forbes 400 but their companies will never be in the Fortune 500.

Hence, go look at the Forbes 400 list of richest people.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Fortune 500 CEOs aren't the richest people in the US if they didn't found their companies.

Even then, the CEO of Blackstone (top 20 richest in US) won't show up on the Fortune 500 list because Blackstone the company doesn't employ that many people...even though they own lots of companies that employ lots of people.

How many hedge fund founder/owners, VC managing partners, etc. are on the Forbes 400 but their companies will never be in the Fortune 500.

Hence, go look at the Forbes 400 list of richest people.

The type of wealthy people you're talking about are mostly those whose outcomes are already determined, regardless of which school they attended.
This group could easily get into top schools anyway.
Therefore, your argument that 'the verifiable most successful people in the world are heavily concentrated in top schools' is largely because they are sent to those schools and recruited by the firms, rather than because they became rich by attending those schools.

So mostly it's people, not schools.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Fortune 500 CEOs aren't the richest people in the US if they didn't found their companies.

Even then, the CEO of Blackstone (top 20 richest in US) won't show up on the Fortune 500 list because Blackstone the company doesn't employ that many people...even though they own lots of companies that employ lots of people.

How many hedge fund founder/owners, VC managing partners, etc. are on the Forbes 400 but their companies will never be in the Fortune 500.

Hence, go look at the Forbes 400 list of richest people.

The type of wealthy people you're talking about are mostly those whose outcomes are already determined, regardless of which school they attended.
This group could easily get into top schools anyway.
Therefore, your argument that 'the verifiable most successful people in the world are heavily concentrated in top schools' is largely because they are sent to those schools and recruited by the firms, rather than because they became rich by attending those schools.

So mostly it's people, not schools.

It's the age-old question...just making it clear that anecdotes are meaningless, so anytime someone is tempted to write their BS anecdote, just don't.

However, the founder of Blackstone went to public schools in the Queens. Ken Griffin, founder of Citadel, attended a suburban public school in Illinois, but not from a loaded family, etc.

Not sure how their outcomes were already determined. Mark Zuckerberg's parents were dentists...again, UMC but not exactly screaming massive billionaire status.

[Anonymous]

Unfortunately, it human nature to want to feel like you are in a class above at least one other group of people, if not more. Elite anything will always exist in one way or another for that reason.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:It seems to be pretty common knowledge that for the vast majority of applicants, getting accepted to a school like Harvard or Yale is pretty much a lottery. So why are these insanely selective schools still considered better than all of the others? Why haven't we let the idea of "prestigious" colleges go? Many students get equal or better educations at their state school.

It's a lottery among the elite students. Let's be clear it's not just a lottery and little Larlo got in with a 2.8 GPA and no AP classes.

Education can vary by institution, major, professor and the student. No doubt some state schools provide a great education but there are a limited number of them.
The elite schools also provide a great education. The SLACs provide a very individualized education experience stressing writing and research skills that may not be common at larger state institutions.
Networking is also important. I have friends from my SLAC from all walks of life but most are doing pretty impressive things. Some have impressive contacts and some are those impressive contacts. Who you know can be important in life and the elite schools are packed with people who do remarkable things.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:It seems to be pretty common knowledge that for the vast majority of applicants, getting accepted to a school like Harvard or Yale is pretty much a lottery. So why are these insanely selective schools still considered better than all of the others? Why haven't we let the idea of "prestigious" colleges go? Many students get equal or better educations at their state school.

Because they don't get an equal or better education at a state school. As one who started at one then transferred to another...the difference is vast. The middle-50s state school with good engineering was not anywhere close to the pace and depth of classes, and without professor guided research opportunities at the elite private school with amazing engineering. The peers from the better school have gone far and wide, with startups or into academia or high up in industry. The midlevel state peers have midlevel tech-type jobs that are closer to IT jobs than innovative engineering. They make 70-100k in their 40s and hit their ceiling long ago. Their bosses are almost all top engineering program grads. Professors, who are great at both, will be the first to admit they have to dumb down for the state schools, and do not have the resources to take on and pay undergraduates for research. Fast forward 25 yrs and sophomore history kid and peers at a top10 uni had to explain primary sources and tips on keeping up with reading to a junior transfer from a LAC ranked in the 20s. The lac kid was completely unprepared for the transfer. Yet had a 4.0 from the prior school. They said the workload was almost double, in the humanities no less, which dcum often mocks and does not understand is also much more rigorous at elite schools.

Cool, here’s my anecdote. I went to a state school and I work with a bunch of people that went to ivies and I keep getting promoted over them. Don’t worry, it’s not because I went to a state school, it’s that no one cares where anyone went to undergrad and undergrad education has such little impact on our work. Life is not a series of exams.

Where do you work and what is your job?

Sounds like you are just one of thousands of posters with an unnamed person and unnamed position claiming something.

The verifiable most successful people in the world are heavily concentrated in top schools.

So, I guess you lose the anecdote contest?

DP: So are you.

One what? Go look at the Forbes 400 and where they went to school and the concentration in a small group of schools.

Hence, the verifiable successful people.

https://fortune.com/2023/06/14/fortune-500-ceo-colleges-ivy-league/


A professor has tracked the colleges of Fortune 500 CEOs for 20 years. He was stunned to learn Ivy Leagues don’t matter that much.
Rachel Shin
Since 1999, David Kang has pursued a peculiar hobby. That year, after Fortune released its annual Fortune 500 issue, Kang began to wonder about where chief executives of companies on the list had attended college. To keep track, the college professor did some research and manually entered their alma maters into a spreadsheet. After completing the task, Kang, then a professor at Dartmouth College’s Tuck School of Business, was shocked by what the data revealed.

“The results were stunning,” he told Fortune. “Like everyone else, I thought Ivy Leagues would dominate. But the largest place they had gone to was no college at all.”

Of the 500 CEOs on the list, seven or eight had no undergraduate degree, more than the combined degrees from any other college in the pool, according to Kang, who is now a professor of international relations and business at the University of Southern California. He presented the results to his Dartmouth graduate students, who tried to explain away the Ivy League’s lack of dominance, he said. But the numbers told all: A fancy degree isn’t required for business success, and top-tier corporate executives usually don’t have elite educations.

Kang continued to track Fortune 500 CEO education numbers over the following two decades, and said there was little change through the years from the initial findings. The consistent pattern for 20 years has been top leaders attending a diversity of colleges, he said.

“It’s an extraordinary testament to the vitality of this country, the incredible range of universities that these people went to,” Kang said. “It’s a country that has a massive economy, and many of these companies in the top 500 are not white-shoe law firms, they’re pharmaceutical, they’re manufacturing, et cetera.”

Here’s what the 2023 Fortune 500 reveals about CEO colleges.

Unexpected tallies

Of the 2023 Fortune 100 CEOs, only 11.8% attended an Ivy as undergrads, and only 9.8% hold an Ivy League MBA. Doug McMillon, CEO of Walmart, the top company on Fortune’s list, got his undergraduate degree from the University of Arkansas and his MBA from the University of Tulsa. Exxon CEO Darren Woods attended Texas A&M University and Northwestern University, and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella went to India’s Manipal Institute of Technology and the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. Of the 20 CEOs at the nation’s biggest companies by revenue, only one attended an Ivy as an undergrad—Amazon’s Andy Jassy, an alum of Harvard University.

Moreover, 14 of the 20 CEOs went to public colleges. Apple’s Tim Cook graduated from Auburn University, Berkshire Hathaway’s Warren Buffett graduated from the University of Nebraska, and McKesson’s Brian S. Tyler graduated from the University of California at Santa Cruz.

Corporate success is primarily performance-based, so businesspeople don’t need fancy degrees to get ahead, said Brian Chabowski, chair of management, marketing, and international business at the University of Tulsa. Reaching the executive level is all about delivering, and sometimes about location, he added. Certain businesses recruit from specific regions or business schools, and those schools aren’t usually Ivy League.

“If you have the drive, and if the system is based on performance, it goes without saying that the elitism isn’t nearly what it could be elsewhere,” Chabowski told Fortune.

College elitism in business doesn’t exist to the extent that it does in academia, Chabowski noted. Individual talents have much more bearing on accomplishment than where someone got their degree, and traits that usually forecast success in students are attention to detail, perseverance, groundedness, and understanding of complexity, he added.

In terms of graduate degrees, 75% of the Fortune 500’s top 20 CEOs received an MBA or other graduate degree, however some returned to school later in life after already achieving some professional success. And the CEOs of five top 20 companies, including Costco CEO W. Craig Jelinek and Chevron CEO Mike Wirth, hold no graduate degree, proving that it’s not a requirement to reach the highest level in business.

Generally, if someone is “resilient and smart” and works very hard, it doesn’t matter if they go to Harvard or a state school, Kang said. If anything, he added, going to a school that affords them less privilege will force them to “learn more business and people skills” earlier.

Lol a bunch of strivers’ heads just exploded.

[Anonymous]

I think it's fair to say that for the people that are going to one day be billionaires, they are going to be successful regardless of where they attend college; however that's not most people. A LMC,MC or UMC person who just wants to be normal rich very well may have opportunities to do by attending an elite university/college that they would not have otherwise had. Especially if they are a minority.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:It seems to be pretty common knowledge that for the vast majority of applicants, getting accepted to a school like Harvard or Yale is pretty much a lottery. So why are these insanely selective schools still considered better than all of the others? Why haven't we let the idea of "prestigious" colleges go? Many students get equal or better educations at their state school.

Because they don't get an equal or better education at a state school. As one who started at one then transferred to another...the difference is vast. The middle-50s state school with good engineering was not anywhere close to the pace and depth of classes, and without professor guided research opportunities at the elite private school with amazing engineering. The peers from the better school have gone far and wide, with startups or into academia or high up in industry. The midlevel state peers have midlevel tech-type jobs that are closer to IT jobs than innovative engineering. They make 70-100k in their 40s and hit their ceiling long ago. Their bosses are almost all top engineering program grads. Professors, who are great at both, will be the first to admit they have to dumb down for the state schools, and do not have the resources to take on and pay undergraduates for research. Fast forward 25 yrs and sophomore history kid and peers at a top10 uni had to explain primary sources and tips on keeping up with reading to a junior transfer from a LAC ranked in the 20s. The lac kid was completely unprepared for the transfer. Yet had a 4.0 from the prior school. They said the workload was almost double, in the humanities no less, which dcum often mocks and does not understand is also much more rigorous at elite schools.

Cool, here’s my anecdote. I went to a state school and I work with a bunch of people that went to ivies and I keep getting promoted over them. Don’t worry, it’s not because I went to a state school, it’s that no one cares where anyone went to undergrad and undergrad education has such little impact on our work. Life is not a series of exams.

Where do you work and what is your job?

Sounds like you are just one of thousands of posters with an unnamed person and unnamed position claiming something.

The verifiable most successful people in the world are heavily concentrated in top schools.

So, I guess you lose the anecdote contest?

Heavily?

Out of the fortune 500 ceos, maybe 10% went to HYPSM, maybe 20% went to IVY+

If you are a lawyer, then your undergrad degree barely matters.
Doctors care where you had your residency more than your medical school, never mind your undergrad.
Tech people seem to care about demonstrated skill and ability a lot more than pedigree.

If I had a choice I would pick HYPSM over JMU but It's not FML if I go to JMU. I just have something to prove after college that I didn't necessarily prove before college when i was 16.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:It seems to be pretty common knowledge that for the vast majority of applicants, getting accepted to a school like Harvard or Yale is pretty much a lottery. So why are these insanely selective schools still considered better than all of the others? Why haven't we let the idea of "prestigious" colleges go? Many students get equal or better educations at their state school.

Because they don't get an equal or better education at a state school. As one who started at one then transferred to another...the difference is vast. The middle-50s state school with good engineering was not anywhere close to the pace and depth of classes, and without professor guided research opportunities at the elite private school with amazing engineering. The peers from the better school have gone far and wide, with startups or into academia or high up in industry. The midlevel state peers have midlevel tech-type jobs that are closer to IT jobs than innovative engineering. They make 70-100k in their 40s and hit their ceiling long ago. Their bosses are almost all top engineering program grads. Professors, who are great at both, will be the first to admit they have to dumb down for the state schools, and do not have the resources to take on and pay undergraduates for research. Fast forward 25 yrs and sophomore history kid and peers at a top10 uni had to explain primary sources and tips on keeping up with reading to a junior transfer from a LAC ranked in the 20s. The lac kid was completely unprepared for the transfer. Yet had a 4.0 from the prior school. They said the workload was almost double, in the humanities no less, which dcum often mocks and does not understand is also much more rigorous at elite schools.

Cool, here’s my anecdote. I went to a state school and I work with a bunch of people that went to ivies and I keep getting promoted over them. Don’t worry, it’s not because I went to a state school, it’s that no one cares where anyone went to undergrad and undergrad education has such little impact on our work. Life is not a series of exams.

Where do you work and what is your job?

Sounds like you are just one of thousands of posters with an unnamed person and unnamed position claiming something.

The verifiable most successful people in the world are heavily concentrated in top schools.

So, I guess you lose the anecdote contest?

DP: So are you.

One what? Go look at the Forbes 400 and where they went to school and the concentration in a small group of schools.

Hence, the verifiable successful people.

"So which schools produce the most Forbes 400 members? Altogether, 24% of the college graduates went to Ivy League schools. However, if you count only Ivy League grads who are designated by Forbes as self-made, having earned their fortunes rather than inheriting them, the percentage drops to 14%." - Forbes

"Just over a fifth of Forbes 400 members never graduated from college. Another 243 went to schools that were not Ivies." - also Forbes

If you count fortune 500 CEOs the numbers are even less IVY+ oriented.

IVY+ is pretty important in academia, management consulting, finance (this is where a lot of the Forbes 400 IVY+ folks come from).

Jack Welch (perhaps the best businessman I have ever met) went to Amherst. A great school but probably not up to your standards.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:It seems to be pretty common knowledge that for the vast majority of applicants, getting accepted to a school like Harvard or Yale is pretty much a lottery. So why are these insanely selective schools still considered better than all of the others? Why haven't we let the idea of "prestigious" colleges go? Many students get equal or better educations at their state school.

Employers that focus mainly on hiring Ivy League grads, not just great students, are hoping to mine the students’ contact lists. The real focus of interest is the student’s access to rich people.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Because elites want their offspring to stay elite.

+1

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:It seems to be pretty common knowledge that for the vast majority of applicants, getting accepted to a school like Harvard or Yale is pretty much a lottery. So why are these insanely selective schools still considered better than all of the others? Why haven't we let the idea of "prestigious" colleges go? Many students get equal or better educations at their state school.

Employers that focus mainly on hiring Ivy League grads, not just great students, are hoping to mine the students’ contact lists. The real focus of interest is the student’s access to rich people.

This seems to be the case for schools known for finance in general. Not so much for schools known for STEM.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I think they are on their way out: cost, high profile stupid alumni like Trump, DeSantis and Vance, idiotic protesters and bad leadership in the news...People are waking up to it all.

Vance went to college at Ohio State. Maybe if you’d gone to an elite school you would know how to use Google.

You don’t consider Yale Law School elite? If you knew how to use Google, you would know he went to YLS.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Fortune 500 CEOs aren't the richest people in the US if they didn't found their companies.

Even then, the CEO of Blackstone (top 20 richest in US) won't show up on the Fortune 500 list because Blackstone the company doesn't employ that many people...even though they own lots of companies that employ lots of people.

How many hedge fund founder/owners, VC managing partners, etc. are on the Forbes 400 but their companies will never be in the Fortune 500.

Hence, go look at the Forbes 400 list of richest people.

The type of wealthy people you're talking about are mostly those whose outcomes are already determined, regardless of which school they attended.
This group could easily get into top schools anyway.
Therefore, your argument that 'the verifiable most successful people in the world are heavily concentrated in top schools' is largely because they are sent to those schools and recruited by the firms, rather than because they became rich by attending those schools.

So mostly it's people, not schools.

It's the age-old question...just making it clear that anecdotes are meaningless, so anytime someone is tempted to write their BS anecdote, just don't.

However, the founder of Blackstone went to public schools in the Queens. Ken Griffin, founder of Citadel, attended a suburban public school in Illinois, but not from a loaded family, etc.

Not sure how their outcomes were already determined. Mark Zuckerberg's parents were dentists...again, UMC but not exactly screaming massive billionaire status.

NP--An enormous percentage of the wealthiest people in the world inherited their wealth. You can cherry pick those who didn't all you want, but that doesn't change the facts. And since it's been shown many times that wealth and happiness don't correlate after you get beyond a certain threshold (I think it's around $125k/year now), why do we continue to equate wealth with success anyway?