In 1999, after Fortune released its Fortune 500, David Kang wondered where the chief executives of the companies on the list attended college. To keep track, he did some research and manually entered their alma maters into a spreadsheet. When done, Kang, then a government and business professor at Dartmouths 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 single 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 Leagues lack of dominance, he said. But the numbers told all: A fancy degree isnt required for business success, and the top tier of corporate executives usually dont have an elite education.
Kang continued to track the Fortune 500 CEO education for the following two decades, and said there was little change over the years from the initial findings. The consistent pattern for 20 years has been top leaders attending a great diversity of colleges, he said.
Its an extraordinary testament to the vitality of this country, the incredible range of universities that these people went to, Kang said. Its a country that has a massive economy, and many of these companies in the top 500 are not white shoe law firms, theyre pharmaceutical, theyre manufacturing, et cetera.
Of the 2023 Fortune 100 CEOs, only 11.8% attended an Ivy for undergrad and only 9.8% hold an Ivy League MBA. Doug McMillon, CEO of Walmart, the top company on Fortunes list, got his undergraduate degree from University of Arkansas and his MBA from the University of Tulsa. Exxon CEO Darren Woods attended Texas A&M and Northwestern, and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella went to Indias Manipal Institute of Technology and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Of the 20 CEOs at the nations biggest companies by revenue, only one attended an Ivy for undergradAmazons Andy Jassy, who graduated from Harvard.
Moreover, fourteen of the 20 CEOs went to public colleges. Apples Tim Cook graduated from Auburn, Berkshire Hathaways Warren Buffett graduated from the University of Nebraska, and McKessons Brian S. Tyler graduated from University of California at Santa Cruz.
Corporate success is primarily performance-based, so business people dont need fancy degrees to get ahead, said Brian Chabowski, chair of management, marketing, and international business at 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 arent 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 doesnt exist to the extent that it does in academia, Chabowski said. 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 500s 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 its not a requirement to reach the highest level in business.
Generally, if someone is resilient and smart and works very hard, it doesnt 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.
