<p>"Where did the senior Fortune 100 executives attend college? The proportion with an Ivy League bachelor’s degree dropped from 14% in 1980 to 10% in 2001 but then held steady. In 2011 Merck had the highest percentage of Ivy baccalaureates, at 50%, with Freddie Mac, Microsoft, and Amazon tied for second place at 44%.</p>
<p>As the charts below show, those holding bachelor’s degrees from private non-Ivies (and, to a lesser extent, from Ivies) lost considerable ground to graduates of public universities in filling the top jobs over the past three decades."</p>
<p><a href="http://hbr.org/2014/03/whos-got-those-top-jobs">http://hbr.org/2014/03/whos-got-those-top-jobs</a></p>
<p>Keep in mind that there are only 8 Ivy League colleges, with an average undergraduate enrollment of less than 6000 students. Arizona State University alone enrolls more undergraduates than all the Ivies put together. The total undergraduate enrollment of US public and private not-for-profit institutions is nearly 19,000,000 (<a href=“Carnegie Foundation Classifications”>Carnegie Foundation Classifications). So, Ivy League undergraduate enrollments comprise only a small fraction of one percent of the total enrollments (something like 48,000 / 19,000,000 = .25%). </p>
<p>The fact that even 10% of all F100 executives have Ivy League bachelor’s degrees, or that as many as 50% have them at some companies, represents an outsized influence of these schools relative to their populations.</p>