No surprise here (at least to me).

For more than 20 years - first as a professor at Tuck (Dartmouth's business school), and later at USC - David Kang has kept track of the colleges and business schools that the CEO's of Fortune 500's attended. And he was shocked by what he found. 

“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.” (Source: Yahoo News)

My parents always told us that the Rogers kids were not like everyone else - this when we wanted, say, to stay out playing late with all the other kids in the neighborhood, or go swimming at Coes Pond (which they considered dirty, which it probably was; the one time my sister Kath and I were allowed to go there with friends - late grammar school/early high school - Kath ended up with an ear infection) - and here is a case where my parents, decades after the fact, are proven to have known best. When it comes to thinking the "Ivy Leagues would dominate" the Fortune 500 corner offices, I never would have predicted it at all. In fact, that's a finding I would have found stunning.

Maybe the fact that "no college" came out on top surprised me. (But not if I really think about it. "No college" may had only seven or eight mentions, but those mentions were one more than graduates from specific schools like Ohio State or Texas A&M.)

Anyway, I'm not stunned by the lack of Ivy League undergrads among the ranks of Fortune 500 CEO's.

I know plenty of folks who have Ivy League undergraduate degrees. Some of them (probably most, now that I think of it) are lawyers. Some of them are doctors. Some of them are management consultants. Some of them went into finance. Some went into social services or teaching or politics. Some went into the arts. 

Sure, this may be an artifact of where I live and who I rub shoulders with, but I don't know a lot of folks who crawled up through the ranks of Exxon-Mobile or Walmart to grab the brass ring of CEO-dom.

And my understanding of the undergraduate recruitment process is that students who want to succeed in business - i.e. go to a prestige B-school and make a lot of dough - vie for post-college jobs at a high-end management consulting firm (like Bain) or a high-end financial outfit (like Goldman). 

Or they're going to make a go at being an entrepreneur. Or taking a flyer on some startup in hopes that it would turn into a unicorn and make them enough to retire by thirty.

Decades ago - we're talking mid-1970's - I had a crappy office-temp job at a manufacturing company in Boston that made blue jeans. (I probably didn't have to say mid-1970's here, because mid-1970's was probably the last time any clothing was manufactured in Boston.) I can't remember the name of the company; it wasn't a brand I knew of. (I wore Levi's or Wrangler's.) But it's tag had something to do with the American flag. Anyway, I was talking to one of the managers one day - a fellow a few years older than I - and was shocked to find out that he'd graduated from Harvard.

What was he doing at a down-market dungaree company in Boston? Why wasn't he in law school or med school?

I'm guessing now that whatever it was called, it was a family business, But even back then I found it "stunning" that a Harvard grad was working there. 

Fast forward, and I'd still find it stunning to discover many folks with an Ivy League degree working for CVS, Caterpillar, Ford. (Less stunning to find one at, say, a Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon or the like.)

In any case, it's good to know that:

A fancy degree isn’t required for business success, and top-tier corporate executives usually don’t have elite educations...

“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.”

Which is not to say that an Ivy League undergrad won't help you claw your way to the top in other careers.

Just look at the Supreme Court.

John Roberts, Harvard/Harvard Law. Sam Alito, Princeton/ Yale Law. Neil Gorsuch, Columbia/Harvard Law. Ketanji Brown Jackson, Harvard/Harvard Law. Elena Kagan, Princeton/Harvard Law. Brett Kavanaugh, Yale/Yale Law. Sonia Sotomayor, Princeton/Yale Law.

Give another hoya and a chu-chu-ra-ra* for Clarence Thomas, who went to lowly Holy Cross, but gained ground by getting his law degree from Yale.

Only Amy Coney-Barrett, considered the most under-credentialed supreme in recent memory, graduated from the relatively unknown Rhodes College, and got her law degree at Notre Dame. (Her being on the Court is somewhat stunning, but she did have impeccable political leanings, which made her a darling of the Federalist Society, which pretty much rubber stamps the judges when conservatives are in charge.)

So, if you want to become a Supreme Court Justice, you've got a better chance to achieve your goal if you've gone to an Ivy. (And an upper echelon Ivy like Harvard, Yale, or Princeton, at that. If you only manage to make it into Cornell you're probably better off aspiring to be a Fortune 500 CEO.)

But if you want to be a Fortune 500 CEO, YAY Good Old State U! (By the way, Jack Welch, late of GE and this world, got his undergraduate degree at UMass and a PhD from Illinois.)

And that's a good thing. (State U. Jack Welch wasn't necessarily a good thing.)

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. 

Indeed!

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* Personally, I would never give another hoya and a chu-chu-rah-rah for Clarence Thomas, but, having grown up in Holy Cross' hometown of Worcester, Mass, I do happen to know the college's fight song.