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Serial entrepreneur Jorge Fernandes jokes with colleagues that Silicon Valley start-ups tend to follow a common blueprint for success. A Stanford University grad comes up with an idea, a Harvard MBA runs the show and a Santa Clara University grad keeps the books.</p>
<p>The take-away? You need a pedigree from an elite private university to lead a Silicon Valley company.</p>
<p>Not so fast. </p>
<p>Two-thirds of the CEOs of the valley's 150 largest public companies who earned their undergraduate degrees in the United States attended taxpayer-funded public universities, state colleges and regional schools, according to a Mercury News survey. About one out of six studied overseas. And two college dropouts - Larry Ellison and Steve Jobs - reinvented the Horatio Alger story for the computer age.</p>
<p>"Silicon Valley is really about as close to a pure talent meritocracy as you can find anywhere in the world," said Thomas J. Friel, who retired this year as chairman of Heidrick & Struggles, a leading executive search firm with offices in Menlo Park. "It's a brutal meritocracy."</p>
<p>Such findings might relieve stressed-out high school seniors in the midst of college-application season. Angst is running especially high as they race to beat the University of California's application deadline at midnight Friday.
<p>I think the honors programs at the major state flagship universities are great and I believe that a motivated student can get just as good an education there as anywhere. However, the problem with observations like this one is similar to the problem with the observation that tax cuts tend to favor the rich. The vast majority of students go public. Only a relative handful go to prestigious privates but these folks are present in far greater numbers than one might expect in prestige jobs like law, universities, medicine, management consulting, investment banking, and venture capital firms.</p>
<p>Steve Ballmer has both BA and MBA from Harvard, though.</p>
<p>Let's not forget that (1) state schools are not chopped liver, certainly not Berkeley or UCLA, to name two relevant ones, and (2) Berkeley and UCLA each graduate 4-5 times the number of students that Stanford or Harvard does. I can guarantee that they don't hold that relative advantage in power positions in Silicon Valley (yes, including the VCs and other playas). Finally, the article doesn't exactly contradict the notion that a lot of the CEOs have Harvard MBAs, since it only talks about undergrad degrees, and, yes, HBS does accept non-Ivy students.</p>
<p>^I agree that the graduate degree is more important than the undergraduate degree. I've had one person working for me(or our group) as an admin who graduate with a undergraduate degree in history from UCLA.</p>
<p>Not really a fair comparison as there are only eight Ivy colleges and many more publics with many, many more students, but this does reinforce a point I've made elsewhere. Many of the top colleges teach their students to manage risk and not nearly as much or as well about how to be an entrepreneur and take risks. The professional preoccupation of many Ivy students is how to get to "prestige jobs like law, universities, medicine, management consulting, investment banking, and venture capital firms" and that is certainly not a risky, entrepreneurial path. It may be smart and it may be lucrative in terms of W-2 income, but the path to the greatest riches lie in starting your own business and/or getting equity in a growing business that can later be monetized. Wall Street and its Ivy grads may be able to advise on the sale of the business (and take an outsized, hefty fee in the process), but the biggest prize by far goes to the entrepreneur, who usually comes from a much humbler educational background.</p>
<p>Correction, Steve Ballmer, graduate from Stanford Business School. Not Harvard.</p>
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[edit] Pre-Microsoft
He grew up near Detroit.</p>
<p>In 1973, he graduated from Detroit Country Day School, a high school, and now sits on its board of directors.[2]</p>
<p>In 1977, he graduated from Harvard University [3]with a bachelors degree in mathematics and economics. While in college, Ballmer managed the football team, worked on the Harvard Crimson newspaper as well as the Harvard Advocate, and lived down the hall from fellow sophomore Bill Gates.</p>
<p>He then[citation needed] worked for two years as an assistant product manager at Procter & Gamble, where he shared an office with Jeffrey R. Immelt, the future CEO of General Electric.</p>
<p>In 1980 [citation needed]he dropped out from the Stanford University Graduate School of Business
<p>For the average Joe, it is highly unlikely to earn a good income unless they can attend top schools. I've always seen the Ivy League as equal to top state program educationally, but the opportunity to network yourself into a high paying position is far more evident. Keep in mind that along with money and success comes prestige and most extremely wealthy people are more likely to send their children to top ranked schools. Since these students already have the golden path paved for them, it provides less fortunate folks the opportunity to befriend rich kids, who can provide many opportunities which would be non-existent at a state school.</p>
<p>If you are a rising star you are a rising star, but for the vast majority of students, this is absolutely irrelevant. The average kid from a state school would most yield lower lifetime earnings than a HYP grad. The salary surveys for these schools speak for themselves. It does on average pay off big time to attend an Ivy. </p>
<p>Not that state schools don't provide a good education and can open many doors. They do indeed. It is just that Ivy's and other top tier schools provide even more opportunity than those schools do.</p>
<p>If you are purely talented, you will be snatched up and compensated for your skill regardless of what school you attend, regardless of if you even go to school at all. The majority however are run of the mill average folk.</p>
<p>The school I attend has a very selective pre-med program. They are just as bright and talented as Ivy students. However, they will typically earn far less over their lifetime than a student from a top medical program. Sad, but true.</p>
<p>I don't have the time to look it up now, but from what I remember the one big, good study that was done of long-term earnings, based on undergraduate degree but adjusted to account for SAT differences, showed very little difference between graduates of Ivy League-level schools and graduates of top-ranked state universities. There was a more meaningful difference between the Ivy-type schools (which I think included some elite LACs) and lower-ranked state universities.</p>
<p>Certainly the conclusion I drew from it was that, for any given SAT level, it was impossible to make an argument for Harvard over UVa or Michigan based on long-term earning potential.</p>
<p>Has anyone calculated the success rates between Ivy League grads and public grads? It's not surprise that more CEOs are from public in absolute numbers.</p>
<p>I believe the study you are talking about found that those who were admitted to elite privates, but did not attend, had the same earnings as those who attended these schools. So they looked at the disposition of the application in toto, not just the SAT score.</p>
<p>Of course, planning to go to college to found a start up and become a billionaire is about as reasonable as planning to go to college and becoming an NBA all star. Some people do it, but the odds are so much against you that it is a foolish plan for anyone with options.</p>
<p>That is why the expected value of entering the finance field, or law or medicine, is far higher, even accounting for the rare individual who becomes vastly wealthy. These elite college students are smart enough to have figured out a better plan than buying lottery tickets.</p>
<p>Silicon Valley person here. You gotta differentiate between founders and CEOs. The founders might be Stanford scientists but in many many cases - Jobs and Ellison aside - the investors kick the founders out and look for seasoned businessmen when required to take the helm.</p>
<p>And when you are looking for seasoned businessmen you really don't give a rat's a** where they went to school.</p>
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The school I attend has a very selective pre-med program. They are just as bright and talented as Ivy students. However, they will typically earn far less over their lifetime than a student from a top medical program. Sad, but true.
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<p>Not for medical school. I have first hand knowledge of someone graduate form top state school and earned a lot of money. UCSF Medical school is top state medical school.</p>
<p>You forget that, at one point, the investors DID kick Jobs out. He only came back when the company was on the ropes, and he had re-proven himself with Pixar.</p>
<p>I did a little sweep through the founders of the following Silicon Valley institutions, which are (along with Apple and Oracle) pillars of the scene there: Sun Microsystems, Hewlett Packard, Cisco Systems, Google, Kleiner Perkins & Caulfield. With two exceptions (out of 14 people total), all of the founders either had graduate degrees from Stanford or MBAs from Harvard. Many (not most) had Ivy League, MIT, or Stanford undergraduate degrees. The exceptions were Bill Joy (Michigan/Berkeley) and Gene Kleiner (RPI).</p>
<p>It would be useful to see which state universities the founders and CEOs attended. One reason why so many people from the NE attend IVY League and peer schools is the underfunded and rather mediocre state of their flagship universities. This does not apply to the flagship universities of a number of states, such as CA, WI, MI, IL. Nor are they competing for the best and brightest in their states with a plethora of excellent if expensive private colleges.</p>