Colleges & Success

During my brother’s junior and senior years, I heard many discussions about college choices in my household and our entire community. There seems to be a lot of societal pressure on high school kids that are in the application process to go to certain ivy league and highly ranked schools and avoid certain schools. I wondered if these metrics really change a student’s chances of succeeding professionally in the future. 

How do you define professional success? The peak looks different depending on what career path you take. To an athlete, success could be winning Olympic gold, but to a politician, success may be becoming the President or a Senator. Some metrics for success are easy to identify, such as those for wealth and entrepreneurship. Others are more difficult such as arts and sciences. For the purpose of this post, I will focus on “corporate success”. 

To analyze corporate success, we need to find the most successful companies and the highest position in each company. We would all agree that CEOs are at the top of the corporate ladder. And for this research, I used the S&P 500 index as our list of the most successful companies based on size. 

Methodology

Last summer, I looked up CEOs for each company in the S&P 500, and then searched the internet to find names of their undergraduate colleges. As a result, I built a list of all S&P 500 companies, their CEOs, and their undergraduate schools.

In total, there were 508 CEOs, since some companies had Co-CEOs. For 14 CEOs I was unable to find the undergraduate schools. Additionally, 68 CEOs went to an international school for their undergraduate degree. I chose to exclude the international schools because of the complexity of comparing international school rankings to US schools. Therefore, I was left with 426 CEOs that went to a US school for their undergraduate degrees, and this is the set that I used for analysis. 

People often judge schools based on their status as Ivy Leagues or as highly ranked U.S. News Best Colleges – therefore, I categorized schools on my list using the same two metrics. Since 1983, U.S. News has been publishing college rankings that are widely recognized and easily accessible. When looking into schools, many families look to see if the school is in the top 10, 50, or 100 for National Universities. And to state the obvious, Ivy league schools are eight of the most prestigious schools out there with acceptance rates of 5-10%.

To measure which schools drive professional success, I will use two metrics: the number of CEOs from the school and the number of CEOs relative to class size. While the first one is simpler, it is incomplete since it does not take into account that a school with more people coming through it naturally has a higher chance of producing a CEO. So I created a second metric that adjusts for class size. This is a CEO-to-Class-Size (“CCS”) metric trying to describe the number of current CEOs per 10,000 students that went through the school in the last 30 years. Rough but directionally correct.

Findings

Tied for first place we have the University of Pennsylvania and Princeton, both with 11 CEOs. In third place, we have Harvard with 10 CEOs. After these Ivy Leagues is a school that is a bit more surprising: Texas A&M, with nine CEOs. Tied together in fifth are the University of Michigan and Miami University with eight CEOs each.

Schools with most S&P 500 CEOs

Place	School	#CEOs	U.S. News Rank
1	University of Pennsylvania	11	8
2	Princeton University	11	1
3	Harvard University	10	3
4	Texas A&M University	9	68
5	Miami University	8	103
6	University of Michigan	8	23
7	Georgetown University	7	23
8	University of Virginia	7	25
9	Michigan State	6	83
10	Boston College	6	36
11	Iowa State University	6	>100
12	Cornell University	6	17
13	United States Military Academy	5	N/A
14	University of California, Berkeley	5	22
15	Georgia Institute of Technology	5	38

Out of the top 15 schools that have five or more CEOs, two-thirds were ranked in the top 50. However, there were five outliers – three of them were ranked from 50 to 100 and two of them were not in the top 100, or were not ranked as National Universities. 

In thirteenth place, we have the United States Military Academy, with five CEOs. It is very likely that leadership skills developed in the military are responsible for such a high number. Tied in ninth place, we have two state schools – Michigan (ranked 83rd) and Iowa (ranked outside the top 100), both with six CEOs. Both are larger schools but seem to be driving greater success than other large state schools. For companies with CEOs from Michigan State, you see an emphasis on industrial manufacturing, which is one of Michigan’s largest sectors. 

The top two outliers were Texas A&M and Miami University, with nine and eight CEOs respectively. Looking at Texas A&M’s companies, five of them are in the energy industry. This makes sense, as Texas is both the largest consumer and producer of energy due to its abundance of natural resources. Unlike Texas A&M, there were no clear patterns for CEOs from Miami University. 

As previously stated, we also analyzed the number of CEOs adjusted for class size. Interestingly,  three schools with the highest CCS scores are Kettering University, Princeton University, and Claremont McKenna College, with the scores 3.2, 3.1, and 3.0 respectively.

Schools (≥3 CEOs) with the highest CCS scores

Schools (*Ivy)	Top 100 Rank	#CEOs	Undergrads	CCS
Kettering University		4	1,659	3.2
Princeton University*	1	11	4,773	3.1
Claremont McKenna College		3	1,351	3.0
Harvard University*	3	10	5,222	2.6
Union College (New York)		3	2,046	2.0
University of Pennsylvania*	8	11	9,872	1.5
United States Military Academy		5	4,536	1.5
Dartmouth College*	13	4	4,170	1.3
Georgetown University	23	7	7,357	1.3
Massachusetts Institute of Technology	2	4	4,361	1.2
Bucknell University		3	3,695	1.1
Lehigh University	49	4	5,203	1.0
Yale University*	5	3	4,703	0.9
Boston College	36	6	9,445	0.8
Johns Hopkins University	9	3	5,427	0.7

Of the top 10 schools based on the CCS score, four are Ivy League, but only six are in the top 100 U.S. News schools. 

The biggest standout is Kettering University, beating out every Ivy League and every other school. Even though it had four CEOs (which is seven less than second place, Princeton), because of its small class size it came in with a CCS score of 3.2. Going by the metric, you are more than three times as likely to become an S&P 500 CEO if you go to Kettering versus Yale, which is an Ivy League school ranked in the top five for US rankings. 

The other three outliers are Claremont Mckenna College, Union College New York, and United States Military Academy. 

Caveats

(1) It is worth repeating that becoming a CEO is just one of the many ways you can achieve professional success, and there are many other fields with their own different definition of success, which we can analyze in further research. 

(2) It is difficult to draw conclusions about individual schools with this data since there is a very large number of US schools, and we only have ~500 CEOs. One way to expand this work would be to compile a list of all CEOs for a larger number of companies and including historical time periods. 

(3) For class sizes and school rankings, we should really be looking at the school’s data for the specific year that the CEO graduated, not the current year. This would be hard to do. 

(4) “Smarter” kids may simply choose to go to schools because they have higher rankings, but those schools may not be what made them successful. 

(5) A more privileged kid is more likely to go to a more prestigious school because of the resources they have access to. They can use this same privilege and resources to do better in the corporate world. In other words, correlation is not causation.

Conclusion

So, do school rankings and Ivy League status matter? The answer is both Yes and No. You do indeed have a better chance of reaching the highest levels of corporate success if you are selected into a highly ranked school or an Ivy League. Of the 426 CEOs with known US Schools, 233 or 55% were from the top 102 schools. In fact, 50 of them came from just eight Ivy League schools (12%), which equates to an average of 6.3 CEOs per school. By ranking, 53 CEOs came from the Top 12 schools, which equates to an average of 4.4 CEOs per school. The average number of CEOs per school drops to 2.6 for the next ~40 schools, and 1.4 for the next ~50 schools.

Schools		#CEOs	#CEOs/School
Ivy	8	50	6.3
Top 12	12	53	4.4
Rank 13-54	42	111	2.6
Rank 55-102	48	69	1.4

That being said, 45% of the 426 CEOs still came from schools outside the top 102 (or not ranked as National Universities). In fact, if you include international schools, the percentage of CEOs from outside the top 102 US schools is more than 50%. In addition, there are lesser-known schools like Kettering University that do incredibly well, beating the most sought-after colleges in the world in terms of the number of CEOs relative to class sizes. Also, keep in mind that lower-ranked schools such as the University of Alabama, University of Arkansas, Bucknell University, and the University of Colorado have as many CEOs in S&P 500 companies today as do Brown, Duke, Stanford, and Yale. 

So, breathe easy. You will be just fine 🙂