<p>They need to adjust for size–University of CA, tens of thousands of Students, Dartmouth/Princeton, tiny undergrad populations.</p>
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<p>Gee, it seems to me without the “generosity” of US tax payers, GM would no longer exist.</p>
<p>Trends in ceo educational background. Ivy decline</p>
<p>[Do</a> You Need an Ivy League Degree to Become CEO? : Worldwide Success](<a href=“http://ww-success.com/blog/index.php/2010/04/19/do-you-need-an-ivy-league-degree-to-become-ceo/]Do”>http://ww-success.com/blog/index.php/2010/04/19/do-you-need-an-ivy-league-degree-to-become-ceo/)</p>
<p>This is a good trend. Your life is not limited by decisions you make in high school.</p>
<p>Only time will tell if the new ivy initiatives–aid for middle class, free tuition for poor, need blind to intnls, reaching out to new communities, etc. will produce more CEOs.</p>
<p>My guess is that it will. And I would attribute it to the fact that the kids getting into ivies today–not all wealthy prep school kids–have mastered the extreme drive and political savvy that climbing the corporate ladder takes.</p>
<p>It is far too easy at the early stage of a career for an elite grad to go make 200k to 500k in consulting, investment banking, or the learned professions( law or a medical specialty) than it would be to enter a large corporation and work his way up through a large bureaucracy. Ironically, the great opportunities and choices the elite have early on in their careers, keep many from reaching the CEO position since a large portion of the elite are routed away from the corporate ladder early on. You don’t see many Ivy Leaguers in corporate training programs but you do see them en masse in investment banks, consulting firms, law and medical schools.</p>
<p>The elite college guy would not fit into a corporation seeking to train its future district sales managers and controllers (and Later CEOs) and the elite guy would actually have a hard time of it, since his peers would perceive him as having options everyone else doesn’t have, leading boses to question commitment and peers to question loyalty to the career path and the firm.</p>
<p>In the military and large corporations its follow the big football conferences with scores of engineers and accountants and marketeers from the Texases, Michigans, Wisconsins, Georgia Techs, Notre Dames, Virigina Techs etc. of the world with nary an Ivy Leaguer in site.</p>
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Opinion until supported with fact.</p>
<p>Well, have fun dedicating your life to shining someone else’s shoes for a paycheck. '</p>
<p>Unless you’re working towards a good cause (and working in corporate America usually isn’t, sorry to say) most individuals will get more satisfaction from reaping what they sow.</p>
<p>Your username suits you well.</p>
<p>It takes a very strong stomach and lots of luck to build a successful business–and it’s still a business and as likely to be doing similar things as the rest of corporate America. </p>
<p>Also consulting and banking were often seen as good shortcuts to CEO level jobs.</p>
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And you know this because…?</p>
<p>I chuckled while reading through all the posts lacking sagacity.</p>
<p>dartmouth dominates</p>
<p>This thread, the other thread about tech leaders and the Payscale salary surveying, all show Dartmouth is a potent force in the business world. I think they are doing pretty well too in the political world. However, I am not sure about academia. They didn’t produce many Noble Prize winners or top scholars.</p>
<p>It is just amazing, given it’s tiny size, the power Dartmouth has. The best kept secret in the ivy league–skip Wharton, skip HYP, if you want money and successs in business, head for NH.</p>
<p>“Back then, only trust fund babies and prep school brats went to the elite colleges–everyone else went to the most affordable school close to home.”</p>
<p>Nonsense. Most of today’s CEOs went to college in the 70s and 80s. There was a lot of financial aid in those days, and a lot of public school graduates at top schools. The elite colleges were much more affordable then. Tuition has risen faster than inflation for decades.</p>
<p>So why do there seem to be so few graduates of elite colleges heading major corporations? 1. There aren’t that many graduates of elite schools as a percentage of the educated population. 2. Their graduates are disproportionately likely to enter the professions. I’d estimate that half of my college classmates are physicians or lawyers.</p>
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<p>Have you actually even worked in a real corporation? Do you think that people sit around saying, “Oh, Bob doesn’t fit in here, he went to Princeton and he has options we don’t”?
Do you not get that all the name on the diploma gets you is the interview / foot in the door, and from there, it’s what you do that makes the difference?</p>
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Point #2 means many of those graduating from elite undergrad schools were bright enough to anticipate Nassim Taleb’s advice about choosing a non-scalable career. Some careers, such as a dentist, are not scaleable since there is a limit on how many patients you can see in a day. In scaleable careers you can multiply your pay by 10x or 100x without doing much additional work. Some minor character may not work any less hard on a movie than Eddie Murphy does, but Eddie gets paid 1000x more. It takes no more time to write a book that sells 10 million copies than one that sells 10 thousand. In scaleable careers this characteristic has been termed “winner-takes-all”, meaning those at the top get a huge share compared to others in the same line of work. </p>
<p>So if you want to be absolutely filthy rich the way to get there is to be in a scaleable career, but Taleb’s advice surprises many. Rather than try to become the rare person at the top making a fortune but facing a high chance of being a much lower paid also-ran, Taleb advises choosing a career in which the rewards are pretty good and the odds of success are high. Like dentistry, medicine, and (for those who have elite backgrounds and can get jobs at top firms) law. The careers of those CEOs and others at the pinnacle are examples of Taleb’s Black Swans – unpredictable events paved the way for them to rise above the tens of thousands that started off along that same path. Whether it was impressing a mentor who had a bright future, being chosen to lead a division that ended up having a blockbuster product, or even landing a roommate in college that could later lend a hand (like “heckuva job, Brownie”), luck and chance played a huge role.</p>
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Whoever the original poster was (too lazy to look), education only gets you so far. Once you’re in the work field, experience bears the strongest weight to a resume. An employee with an advisory position in a corporation most likely did not start there, even if he came from an elite school. He most likely had previous work experience. Education generally only gets you as far as a respectable entry-level position, beyond entry-level positions are based more on experience.</p>
<p>“Point #2 means many of those graduating from elite undergrad schools were bright enough to anticipate Nassim Taleb’s advice about choosing a non-scalable career. Some careers, such as a dentist, are not scaleable since there is a limit on how many patients you can see in a day.”</p>
<p>True. Another construct that goes into these choices is the declining marginal utility of money. The material comforts of available at a salary of $1 million per year don’t differ that much from those available at $200K per year. You can afford the same schools, drive a comfortable car, take vacations, and pay for a big house. (Not as big, but big, and in a neighborhood with good schools.) Maybe you’re drinking wine that costs $15 a bottle at instead of $50 a bottle. But the difference between a $15 wine and a $50 wine is negligible; few people can tell the difference. (The difference between a $5 wine and a $15 wine is more obvious.)</p>