Theres a heated debate going on in economics about the root causes of inflation. Well, at least, some economists believe theres a heated debate. Others are brushing off the growing hype behind progressive ideas like greedflationwhich posits that corporations exploited rising consumer prices during the pandemic and after the Ukraine war to increase margins. Inflation, under this theory, was exacerbated by corporate profiteering. 

Mainstream economists argue the new profit-led inflation concept is merely a matter of semantics, however. They say their peers are just describing the standard cyclical component to profits that occurs during business cycles, as Brian Albrecht, chief economist at the International Center for Law & Economics, a non-profit, non-partisan research center, told Fortune last week. But Albert Edwards, a global strategist at the French investment bank Société Générale, is sticking by his theory that greedflation has been a key driver of the surge in consumer prices over the past few years.

Greedflation is a controversial topic. For me it is simpleI can find no precedent in history (including the inflationary 1970s) during which unit costs have risen sharply AND yet unit profits have also risen, except in this cycle. Things certainly are different this time, he wrote in a Wednesday note to clients. 

To back their theory, Edwards and other progressive economists point to evidence from sources like the Kansas City Federal Reserve, which found in a January study that corporate profit hikes accounted for more than half of the inflation in 2021. The Economic Policy Institute came to a similar conclusion about the causes of inflation in an April 2022 article. And now, Edwards is warning that greedflation may have set the U.S. up for a deeper and longer recession than even the most bearish of investors are anticipating.

Analysts reveling in companies higher margins at the micro level have not realised the macro-economic implications of Greedflation, he wrote on Wednesday, explaining that rising profits have driven inflation higher for longer, which, in turn, will force the Federal Reserve to keep interest rates elevated and hence the coming recession will be deeper for longer.

For over a year now Wall Street economists have warned that rising interest rates will eventually bring the economy to a standstill and spark a recession, but so far their predictions have provenat the very leastto be premature. The unemployment rate remains near pre-pandemic lows, inflation continues to fall from its four-decade high in 2022, and GDP growth was solid in the first quarter. 

Edwards argues that the reason so many on Wall Street jumped the gun with their recession predictions and bearish stock market forecasts was because they failed to recognize the economic impact of higher corporate profits. 

Although Greedflation has resulted in higher for longer interest rates to deal with entrenched inflation, it has also kept corporate profits higher for longer and hence delayed the onset of recession, which would have otherwise arrived much sooner this year. This is one key reason why most economists have been caught out, he explained, noting that many Wall Street analysts also scrambled to increase their profit estimates in the first quarter having expected a normal profits downturn.

Is the end of greedflation a recession signal?

While Edwards argued that rising corporate profit margins due to greedflation have delayed an upcoming economic downturn by keeping earnings elevated, he also warned that we may still be in a profits downcycle that will cause a recession.

After surging to record levels in 2021 and 2022, corporate profits have begun to drop in recent months. Total after-tax U.S. corporate profits sank roughly 12% between their peak in the second quarter of 2022 and the first quarter of this year, according to data from the St. Louis Federal Reserve. And Wall Streets consensus expectations for S&P 500 earnings over 2023 have declined from $250 per share, as forecast this time last year, to just $220 per share today.

While some economists say this profit downturn is the natural result of a maturing business cycle, Edwards believes corporate profits lead the economic cycle.

As corporate profits begin to decline, often due to rising costs and crimped demand, companies subsequently cut investment and jobs in an effort to maintain profitability and/or to improve cashflow, he wrote. Profit recessions cause economic recessions and not vice versa.

Theres clearly some disagreement as to who is leading this dance, but one thing is clear: The recent downward trend in profits is clearly not a good sign for the economy.

E-commerce may make shopping more convenient, but it has a dark side that most consumers never see.

Say you order an electric toothbrush for Fathers Day and two shirts for yourself from Amazon. You unpack your order and discover that the electric toothbrush wont charge and only one shirt fits you. So, you decide to return the unwanted shirt and the electric toothbrush.

Returns like this might seem simple, and often theyre free for the consumer. But managing those returns can get costly for retailers, so much so that many returned items are simply thrown out.

In 2022, returns cost retailers about $816 billion in lost sales. Thats nearly as much as the U.S. spent on public schools and almost twice the cost of returns in 2020. The return process, with transportation and packaging, also generated about 24 million metric tons of planet-warming carbon dioxide emissions in 2022.

Together, costs and emissions create a sustainability problem for retailers and the planet.

As a supply chain management researcher, I follow developments in retail logistics. Lets take a closer look inside the black box of product returns.

Returns start with miles of transportation

So, you repackaged your unwanted shirt and the electric toothbrush and drove them to UPS, which has an agreement with Amazon for free returns. Now what?

UPS transports those items to the retailers warehouses dedicated to processing returns. This step of the process costs the retailer money 66% of the cost of a $50 item by one estimate and emits carbon dioxide as trucks and planes carry items hundreds of miles. The plastic, paper or cardboard from the return package becomes waste.

Processing a return takes two to three times longer than initially shipping the item it has to be unpacked, inspected, repacked and rerouted. That adds more to the cost to the company, especially in a tight labor market. Workers have to manually unpack the items, inspect them and, based on the return reason, decide what will happen next.

Restocking and reselling means more miles

If a warehouse worker decides the shirt in our example can be resold, the shirt will be repackaged and sent to another warehouse.

Once another consumer orders the shirt, it will be ready to be packed and shipped.

In-store returns can significantly cut warehouse and transportation costs, but driving to a brick-and-mortar store might not be convenient for the consumer. Only about a quarter of online purchases are returned in person to the store.

Refurbishing, if repair costs less than the product

If the item is defective, like the electric toothbrush in our example, the warehouse worker might send it back to the manufacturer for fixing and refurbishing. It would be repackaged and loaded on a truck and possibly a plane to be sent to the manufacturer, leading to more carbon dioxide emissions.

If the electric toothbrush can be repaired, the refurbished product is ready to be sold into the consumer market again often at a lower price.

Refurbishing returned products helps to achieve a closed-loop supply chain where products are reused rather than disposed of as waste, making the process more sustainable than buying a new item.

Sometimes, however, repairs cost more than the product can be resold for. When it is more expensive to restock or refurbish a product, it may be cheaper for the retailer to throw the item away.

Landfills are a common end for returns

If the company cant resell the shirt or refurbish the electric toothbrush economically, the outlook for these items is grim. Some are sold in bulk to discount stores. Often, returned products simply end up in landfills, sometimes overseas.

In 2019, about 5 billion pounds of waste from returns were sent to landfills, according to an estimate by the return technology platform Optoro. By 2022, the estimated waste had nearly doubled to about 9.5 billion pounds.

Era of free returns might not last

In the past, customers who wanted to return items by mail were often expected to do so on their own dime. That changed after Amazon began offering free returns and providing easy-to-use drop-off locations at UPS or Kohls stores. Other retailers followed suit to compete, with many seeing free returns as a way to keep shoppers coming back.

But that pendulum may be starting to swing back. The percentage of retailers charging to ship returns increased from 33% to 41% in 2022.

Retailers are trying several other techniques to lower the return rate, waste and losses, which ultimately come back to consumers in the form of higher prices.

Some retailers have shortened the return window, limited frequented returns or stopped offering free returns. Other strategies include virtual dressing rooms and clearer fitting guides, which can help reduce clothing returns, as can high-quality photos and videos that reflect size and color accurately. If consumers use those tools and pay attention to sizing, they can help cut down on retails growing climate footprint.

Simone Peinkofer is Assistant Professor of Supply Chain Management, Michigan State University.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Brazils president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, a.k.a. Lula, signed legislation today that empowers the nations central bank to regulate crypto, a move that could catalyze growth for the industry in Latin Americas biggest economy.

The government decree Lula signed Wednesday will put in place rules outlined in a December law, which laid out a legal framework and definitions for crypto. The new rules go into effect on June 20 and will allow Brazils central bank to decide which companies can operate in the market. It also maintains the power to regulate tokens labeled securities with the countrys equivalent of the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Comissão de Valores Mobiliários, or CVM.

The law defines cryptocurrencies and virtual asset service providers, and it imposes laws to prevent money laundering and financing terrorism, with noncompliance possibly resulting in jail time, according to Bloomberg.

The central bank now has to establish a licensing system for virtual asset service providers, and all companies operating in the country must register. The framework for crypto could attract more companies and customers to the industry. Brazil is already home to Mercado Bitcoin, an exchange that has more than 3 million customers and hosts upward of $5 billion in trading volume.

Still, the law has some shortcomings. It does not address some segregation of assets for exchanges to prevent the commingling of customer funds, a key allegation in the case against FTX. It also does not clearly define which digital assets are securities.

But the new rules are a step forward in laying out clear expectations and punishments for the crypto industry, and they come weeks after Brazil launched a pilot program with major banks to test its central bank digital currency, the digital Real.

Brazils approach stands in contrast to that of the U.S. Last week, the Securities and Exchange Commission sued two of the biggest crypto companies, Binance and Coinbase, for allegedly offering unregistered securities to U.S. citizens. SEC Chairman Gary Gensler has often stated that the crypto industry is the Wild West, and has compared stablecoins to casino chips.

Learn more about all things crypto with short, easy-to-read lesson cards. Click here for Fortunes Crypto Crash Course.

Glass is a material of many faces: It is both ancient and modern, strong yet delicate, and able to adopt almost any shape or color. These properties of glass are why people use it to make everything from smartphone screens and fiber-optic cables to vials that hold vaccines.

Humankind has been using glass in some fashion for millennia, and researchers are still finding new uses for it today. Its not uncommon to hear the oft-repeated factoid that glass is actually a liquid, not a solid. But the reality is much more interesting glass does not fit neatly into either of those categories and is in many ways a state of matter all its own. As two materials scientists who study glass, we are constantly trying to improve our understanding of this unique material and discover new ways to use glass in the future.

What is glass?

The best way to understand glass is to understand how it is made.

The first step to make glass requires heating up a mixture of minerals often soda ash, limestone and quartz sand until they melt into a liquid at around 2,700 degrees Fahrenheit (1,480 Celsius). In this state, the minerals are freely flowing in the liquid and move in a disordered way. If this liquid cools down fast enough, instead of solidifying into an organized, crystalline structure like most solids, the mixture solidifies while maintaining the disordered structure. It is the atomically disordered structure that defines glass.

On short timescales, glass behaves much like a solid. But the liquidlike structure of glass means that over a long enough period of time, glass undergoes a process called relaxation. Relaxation is a continuous but extremely slow process where the atoms in a piece of glass will slowly rearrange themselves into a more stable structure. Over 1 billion years, a typical piece of glass will change shape by less than 1 nanometer about 1/70,000 the diameter of human hair. Due to the slow rate of change, the myth that old windows are thicker at the bottom due to centuries of gravity pulling on the slowly flowing glass is not true.

Colloquially, the word glass often refers to a hard, brittle, transparent substance made of fused sand, soda and lime. Yet there are many types of glass that are not transparent, and glass can be made from any combination of elements as long as the liquid mixture can be cooled fast enough to avoid crystallization.

From the Stone Age to today

Humans have been using glass for more than 4,000 years, with some of the earliest uses being for decorative glass beads and arrowheads. Archaeologists have also discovered evidence of 2,000-year-old glass workshops. One such ancient workshop was uncovered near Haifa in modern Israel and dates back to around 350 C.E. There, archaeologists discovered pieces of raw glass, glass-melting furnaces, utilitarian glass vessels and debris from glass-blowing.

Modern glass manufacturing began in the early 20th century with the development of mass production techniques for glass bottles and flat glass sheets. Glass became an essential part of the electronics and telecommunications industry in the latter part of the 20th century and now forms the backbone for the internet.

Glass enabling technologies of tomorrow

Today, scientists are far beyond simply using glass as the material for a cup or a mirror. At the cutting edge of research into glass is the ability to manipulate its complex atomic structure and relaxation process to achieve certain properties.

Because glass is atomically disordered and always changing, any two points on a piece of glass are likely to have slightly different properties whether it is strength, color, conductivity or something else. Because of these differences, two similar pieces of glass that were made in the same way using the same materials can behave very differently.

To better predict how a piece of glass behaves, our team has been researching how to quantify and manipulate the chaotic and ever-changing atomic structure of glass. Recent advances in this field have had direct benefits to existing technologies.

For example, phone screens do not crack as easily as they did in 2014 in part because new processing techniques decrease the differences in atomic bond strengths to make it harder for cracks to propagate. Similarly, internet speeds have vastly improved over the last 20 years because researchers have figured out ways to make the density of glass used for optical fibers more uniform and, therefore, more efficient at transmitting data.

A deeper understanding of how to manipulate the changing, chaotic structure of glass could lead to big advancements in technology in the coming years. Researchers are currently working on a range of projects, including glass batteries that could enable faster charging speeds and improved reliability, fiberglass wind turbines that require less maintenance than existing turbines, and improved memory storage devices.

John Mauro is Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, Penn State and Katelyn Kirchner is a PhD Candidate in Materials Science, Penn State.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Vineyards and apple orchards across the Northeast are still gauging damage from a late-season frost in May that wiped out a third to most of the crop for some growers who say its the worst frost damage they have ever seen.

Some states are seeking federal disaster declarations, which would make low-interest loans and other programs available to affected growers, while agriculture officials across the region are contemplating together asking the U.S. Department of Agriculture for direct aid to farmers.

In southern Vermont, Scott Farm Orchard lost up to 90% of its apple crop when the temperature dipped to 25 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 3 degrees Celsius) for five hours on May 18. At the northern end of the state, Shelburne Vineyards in Shelburne, Vermont, lost about 50% of its grape crop, which is potentially a half-million dollar revenue loss, according to head wine grower and vineyard manager Ethan Joseph.

To make up for lost production, Shelburne Vineyards plans to buy additional grapes at a time when its overall costs this year will be higher due to the frost, Joseph told The Associated Press. The vineyard has wine in stock to sell and its not off the table that it could raise prices, he said.

Weve never seen this kind of freeze event, certainly in the history of the vineyard, Joseph said. Ive been here for 16 years. Weve never seen anything like it.

The widespread frost hit the large wine-producing region of the Finger Lakes in upstate New York where its estimated about half of the grape crop was lost regionwide, according to Kyle Anne Pallischeck, executive director of the Finger Lakes Wine Alliance. Depending on their location, some vineyards were hit hard and others had little to no damage. Vineyard owners say its still too early to tell what the final financial impact will be.

Ive been in this almost 40 years, doing it full-time and this is by far and away the worst, said David Stamp, vineyard manager of Lakewood Vineyards, in Watkins Glen, New York, of the frost damage. He estimated their total crop loss at about 30% to 40% though its tough to tell since the damage is scattered throughout the vineyards. I mean, if you put all the years together that weve had any damage its not even a quarter of what this is, he said.

The losses will mean shorter supplies of certain wines next year and higher prices for apples this year. Some vineyards and orchards are having to reduce staff.

Keuka Lake Vineyards, in Hammondsport, New York, estimates it lost between 50% and 65% of its crop, said Mel Goldman, owner and vineyard manager. We lost a lot, Goldman said, adding it will take a few weeks before a final verdict as the vines produce secondary buds and shoots that could bear fruit.

Some vineyards are now starting to see growth from secondary buds, Pallischeck said. This is where hope lies in salvaging a 2023 vintage for many, she told the AP by email. In Vermont, Joseph said the new growth at Shelburne Vineyards is too late to produce fruit that would ripen this season.

U.S. Sens. Charles Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand, both of New York, have asked the USDA for disaster relief for orchards and vineyards but did not specify how much was needed as damage is still being assessed. New York is the countrys second top apple-producing state after Washington.

Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont has requested a federal agriculture disaster declaration for the state, which, if approved, would make federal disaster assistance programs, such as emergency loans, available to farmers to cover losses. Vermonts agriculture secretary is asking agriculture officials in other New England states, as well as New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania, to join Vermont in seeking more USDA aid, saying that without it, businesses could downsize or close, delivering devastating blows to local economies.

To try to prevent frost damage in the Finger Lakes, some wineries ran tractors through the vineyards and a few used wind turbines to increase airflow. Others burned hay for heat or mowed the grass short in the vineyard to help keep the cold air away from the fruiting wire, according to a statement released by Schumer and Gillibrand.

In Vermont, at least one small orchard sprayed their apple trees with water to encase them in ice to protect them from the plunging temperature, but they still lost their crop, according to Terence Bradshaw, associate professor in the plant and soil science department at the University of Vermont. Bradshaw, who also is a tree fruit and viticulture specialist, estimates Vermont lost 50% to 70% of its commercial apple crop.

The length of time that the temperature dipped below freezing was unusual but it was a confluence of circumstances the bud stage, susceptible plant tissues that were out, and a lack of wind that caused such damage, he said.

The late frost was rare enough that Bradshaw doesnt think area orchards and vineyards will invest in frost irrigation or other frost protections.

Some apple growers may have a little bit more fruit than they expected, Bradshaw said. The question is how much is enough to justify not throwing in the towel for the year and just say lets step away, you know, cut our costs, he said.

It is inevitable that companies of all shapes and sizes will have disputes to litigate, and that they will need to make settlement payouts or fines over the course of doing business. Disagreements between various parties with differing interests will always arise, and civil litigation has become the way in which we adjudicate conflicts, find compromise, or compensate those affected. Current law requires that public companies report significant lawsuits and ongoing liabilities related to harassment, discrimination, class-action suits, fraud, and ESG (environmental and social governance) violations. 

The money spent on these lawsuits and settlements may seem like chump change to mega-corporations. But as companies conduct mass layoffs and remain stingy on paying out maternity and medical leave, that same cost-savings attitude could apply to resolving human disputes amicably.

Financial compensation for wrongdoing and bringing matters to court is a critical part of the justice system, and external, third-party adjudication will always need to coexist with internal controls. The potential for corruption, discrimination, and power abuse is part of human nature and therefore inevitably going to be part of workplaces. Workers and companies at opposite ends of a negotiating table have interests that are often totally at odds, meaning litigation will be necessary.

But right now, upon realizing a mistake or seeing a flaw or defect within a corporation, the kneejerk response of many companies is to go into crisis mode, immediately lawyering up and going for the nuclear option, even when this is not necessarily the only available option. On the opposing side, the employee who is bringing the issue forward has good reason to ensure they protect themselvespowerful corporations frequently play dirty when it comes to workplace disputes,  silencing them, blackballing, defaming, or bankrupting the employee who has far less power in the situation. This outsized power pushes many employees to the court system, as a result, looking to attain a financial reward for the financial loss and/or pain that has been inflicted on them. And such an adversarial approach leaves little room for alternate outcomes, inhibits cultural change within an organization, and burns through hundreds of thousands (or millions) of dollars in legal fees.  

Our overreliance on lawsuits has also created a system that lines the pockets of lawyers and crisis PR firms while giving a select few who hit the lawsuit jackpot massive payouts. For instance, last month, the Securities and Exchange Commission announced that an anonymous whistleblower would receive a $279 million reward for disclosures that led to more than a billion-dollar corporate fine. A few days later, Goldman Sachs announced that they settled a decades-long gender discrimination lawsuit for $215 million. Last year, it was revealed that the individual whistleblower Peiter Zatcko (Mudge) received a $7 million payout to settle his employment case with Twitter, which was filed in tandem with his whistleblower disclosures made to the government.

Perhaps none of those matters could have been avoided without litigation. But looking ahead, what if the incentives were reconfigured to require that companies revert to compromise, resolution, and problem-solving versus brass knuckles tactics?

Consider an engineer at a car manufacturer who recognizes a significant defect in the production line, one that could put driver safety at great risk. The manufacturer could run a risk analysis of the problem and decide that it makes the most financial sense to usher the employee out the door with generous hush money and continue business as usual. But their problems will not stop at that one employees severance pay. Product recalls, further lawsuits, and other litigation related to that initial red flag could plague the corporation for years to come, requiring a spend of hundreds of millions of dollars to handle the fallout. Imagine if the manufacturer had altered its production line upon the warning of that engineer. It can be hard to forecast precise savings on litigation fees, but certainly, some analysts could try as part of the disclosures to the SEC. You can apply this same logic to many other corporations, from vaccine developers to energy companies.

Or, take the case of one of the authors of this oped. Chelsey Glasson was a user researcher at Google who was iced out of her role and denied responsibilities while she was pregnant. When she spoke up, instead of moving her to a different team or taking her concerns seriously to align the reality of their workplace culture with the headlines about diversity fed by PR teams, Google offered her an insulting exit packagethree months payshe didnt even want to be jobless while pregnant, and three months salary wouldnt help a new parent, now unemployed, much. She pursued a costly lawsuit that resulted in a significant settlement after two years of litigation, which involved millions of dollars spent on the entire process and the involvement of seven lawyers and many more expert witnesses.

Was this a good use of company funds? The price of building and innovating any private enterprise is that you take the risk of hiring a bad executive who wreaks havoc among personnel, or you allow negligent or outright nefarious systems to create dangerous outcomes for consumers or for the public. It may not always be malicious or intentional that corporate wrongdoing happens. But it is just realistic to admit that at a certain scale, egregious or inadvertent mistakes will be made, and there will be differences of opinion. 

Today, though, the incentives are reversed. Companies may see any problem raised internally as a potential liability, causing a crackdown that staves off future financial fallout. And then workers, seeing that they may not be treated fairly within the system, will see a greater upside in going outside the system to fight for the money that would liberate themlikely getting paid many times more than the employer ever intended to pay them as a salary if they are successful. Corporations end up spending millions on legal fees in some sort of us-vs.-them fight, rather than devoting energy to fixing the more endemic issues. 

Shareholders, boards, and executives could start to require that their companies go beyond merely disclosing lawsuits and their financial ramifications, and answer for the way they handle employee complaintsincluding successfully mediated personnel issues, or anonymized resolutions from a whistleblower hotline. They could report more metrics outside of internal HR meetings, including how many internal sexual harassment and discrimination complaints occur annually, the outcomes of such complaints, the retention rates of those who file internal complaints, the number of discrimination and harassment lawsuits filed annually against the company, and how much money is spent on such litigation matters. This would put checks and balances on whether the company could have taken other routes to resolve issues in less adversarial ways, case by case, in a way that acknowledges a mistake, makes changes to rectify the problem and keep it from recurring, and takes ownership when wrongs occur.  

It may seem counterintuitive to air the dirty issues that were subsequently resolvedbut sunlight is a great sanitizer. Workplace problems that arise in a legal case quite often hide a mountain of issues within a company culture underneath them. By looking closer at how these issues are dealt with, shareholders could gain the cost savings of avoiding future legal battles and remedy internal problems that will become a drag on the bottom line. And it builds some goodwill with the public, too.

Chelsey Glasson is a former Google employee and workers rights advocate. Amber Scorah and Ariella Steinhorn are the co-owners of story publishing platform Lioness.

The opinions expressed in Fortune.com commentary pieces are solely the views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of Fortune.

More must-read commentary published by Fortune:

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.

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