<p>there are a few Cornells, a Dartmouth, and several Whartons (Penn), but in addition, you'll notice:</p>
<p>There's Stanford, which isn't Ivy but might as well be.</p>
<p>There's University of Virginia, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Cal-Berkeley, arguably the best public universities in the country</p>
<p>And there are a few UChicago MBAs, which was ranked this year as the #1 business school.</p>
<p>So maybe you don't need an Ivy degree, but apparently it doesn't hurt to get a degree from a top tier school</p>
<p>There are more than 3000 colleges in the United States. There are 8 Ivy league schools. </p>
<p>(8/3000)x100 = .267%</p>
<p>According to fourth link, 12 of the CEOs from the top-100 companies graduated from the Ivy League</p>
<p>12 > .267</p>
<p>It seems like attending an Ivy-League institution helps greatly.</p>
<p>Jyankees and his math FTW.</p>
<p>Doesn't UW-Madison have the same number of grads who became a CEO as Harvard?</p>
<p>C'mon folks, you don't want to admit it, but there are plenty of CEO's from no-name schools!</p>
<p>As far as "connectedness" is concerned, it seems like one might be more "connected" by going to a non-Ivy, since the vast majority of those in very high positions are grads of non-Ivy colleges, because Ivies represent only a tiny portion of the colleges in the United States.</p>
<p>As I've mentioned a thousand times, it's not WHAT the Ivies teach that lead to the success of their grads, it's WHO they are teaching. Those Ivy grads would have been just as successful if they attended other colleges because it is the personal qualities they brought with them to the Ivies, not what they were taught at the Ivies.</p>
<p>One must remember too, that there are plenty of Ivy grads who are in "regular" jobs along with the thousands of other college grads from across the country. The Ivy grads we hear about are the "cream of the crop" Ivy grads. We don't hear about those who are in "regular" jobs.</p>
<p>Ivies being "the way to go" is the biggest myth that adults are getting college-bound high school students to believe.</p>
<p>Jyank: Regarding Post #3...Yes, some you mention did go to Ivies, but it was for their Master's degree. Let's look at undergrad institutions. Overwhelming majority come from non-Ivies!</p>
<p>Also, with your logic one might conclude that the Patriot League (Lehigh, Holy Cross, etc.) grads have as good or better a showing in CEO postiions as Ivies.</p>
<p>interesting trivia. but how many people end up becoming CEOs anyway?</p>
<p>About 500 in the Fortune 500.</p>
<p>seven out of the Patriot League</p>
<p>perhaps there are so few ivy leaguers because they realized in college that becoming a big business CEO wasnt the path they wanted to take in life? so they went on to less stressful, more rewarding things?</p>
<p>even if not, this is just a list of 100 random successful people. maybe CEO isnt the best way to measure graduation success...</p>
<p>and CEO differ.......</p>
<p>Jyankees hasn't taken college stats yet...
First, the size of schools varies greatly, so taking 12 out of 3000 to get a proportion doesn't work when you consider the size of a U Wisconsin or Penn State=100 tiny schools.
Second, you implied there was a causal relationship btwn. an Ivy degree and being a CEO. There are too many lurking variables, and we could only prove correlation at best given the data. (I.e., Ivy/top tier kids are smarter/harder working to begin with).
Third, we are dealing with a small sample size of 100. Thus the proportion could be due to randomness.</p>
<p>BTW, a princeton economist recently verified this.</p>
<p>I'm at McGill and hope to go to MIT for grad., so I'm not dissing elite institutions. I just think their financial value is marginal at best.</p>
<p>wutang, I understand where you're coming from. I agree that paying full-tuition for an ivy-league school isn't necessarily going to benefit you in the long run, and I also understand the fact that students who turn down ivy-league schools tend to do just as well in life as those who actually attend the schools. I haven't taken college stats either, lol. I was simply pointing out that when you say there are fewer people from 8 schools in any given position than from 3000 other schools combined, it's a slightly ridiculous statement. It's especially ridiculous when you consider all of the other ivy-caliber schools that you see on the list there, not included in the "ivy-league" technically, but still having the same prestige.</p>
<p>Well said!</p>
<p>Thank you for creating this thread. What with all of the Ivy focus and the Wall Street mania and hype found here on CC, you would think that nothing else mattered. If you are a high school student reading this, please trust me when I say that it is a very big world out there, there are many terrific careers outside of Wall Street and many terrific schools outside of the Ivy League. When you enter the business world, you will quickly learn the true value of those prestige-oriented schools. It's nice to have Princeton or Yale next to your name on your resume and it might help you on the cocktail circuit with members of the opposite sex, but it is definitely not an automatic qualifier that you are the smartest person in the room. There are plenty of brains and talent out there and around the country and that is why the vast majority of successful businesses in America are run by people from places like Lehigh or Ithaca or Davidson or Augustana or even the University of Montana!</p>
<p>
[quote]
C'mon folks, you don't want to admit it, but there are plenty of CEO's from no-name schools!
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Sure, it's true. But first off, frankly, being a CEO of a public company ain't the best thing you can achieve. Note, I'm not saying that it's not a major achievement, because it is. But frankly, if what you want is money and power, there are other things you can do. </p>
<p>Let me put it to you this way. What does the median CEO of a Fortune 500 company make? Maybe $2-3 million a year? Granted, some CEO's make much more than that. But plenty of others make less. Yet the truth of the matter is, $2-3 million really isn't that much money compared to your other career paths. For example, that kind of pay would, frankly, be considered mediocre for a managing director at an investment bank. And MD isn't even the highest level you can go if you're an investment banker - you can rise to become department head, partner, etc. And of course, by definition, there can be only 500 CEO's of Fortune 500 companies. There are clearly more than 500 investment bankers who are at the MD level and up. </p>
<p>And that's not even figuring in all of related fields in finance such as private equity, hedge funds, or venture capital, where you can REALLY make a boatload of money in a short length of time. Right now, a lot of the best investment bankers are looking to jump to private equity - in fact, it's gotten to the point that the zeitgest at Harvard Business School is that those students who take Ibanking jobs do so because they just weren't good enough to get a private equity offer. People are leaving Ibanking for PE beause it pays even more and offers more power. Why become a CEO of just one public company and be constantly at the mercy of impatient shareholders who demand steady quarterly growth when you can run several companies as part of a PE fund, and do so privately (hence the 'P' in PE) and hence not feel pressured to meet quarterly earnings targets, and where you don't even have to reveal the your inner workings to the public (again, the P stands for private) - instead having to reveal information to only your private investors.</p>
<p>Yet the truth of the matter is, if you want to get a job in IB or (especially) in PE, it really helps a lot to have an Ivy-caliber degree. Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, for example, presents at only Harvard, Columbia, and one other school (I think Wharton). You might still be able to get in if you don't go to one of these schools, but the odds are long.</p>
<p>
[quote]
As I've mentioned a thousand times, it's not WHAT the Ivies teach that lead to the success of their grads, it's WHO they are teaching. Those Ivy grads would have been just as successful if they attended other colleges because it is the personal qualities they brought with them to the Ivies, not what they were taught at the Ivies.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>This assertion, I am afraid, is highly unlikely. What you're basically saying is that marketing has no value. Yet I think there is little dispute that, whether we like it or not, marketing does help and help greatly. That is why companies pay billions of dollars a year to market themselves and build brand names, because they all realize that good marketing generates business. There is no point in developing a great product if customers don't know about it. Business history is littered with countless examples of good products that failed because of bad marketing, and conversely, relatively mediocre products that succeeded anyway because of great marketing. </p>
<p>As a case in point, car aficionados generally realize that Mercedes are really not that reliable or well-engineered/designed. The ratings say so quite clearly. But it doesn't really matter. Customers buy them anyway, because of the power of the exotic Mercedes brand name. It's a triumph of marketing over quality.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.whatcar.co.uk/news-article.aspx?NA=218083%5B/url%5D">http://www.whatcar.co.uk/news-article.aspx?NA=218083</a>
<a href="http://www.businessweek.com/autos/autobeat/archives/2007/03/mercedes-benz_s.html?CFID=3184158&CFTOKEN=38466059%5B/url%5D">http://www.businessweek.com/autos/autobeat/archives/2007/03/mercedes-benz_s.html?CFID=3184158&CFTOKEN=38466059</a></p>
<p><a href="http://www.autospies.com/news/Mercedes-Benz-USA-Records-Best-January-Sales-Ever-12221/%5B/url%5D">http://www.autospies.com/news/Mercedes-Benz-USA-Records-Best-January-Sales-Ever-12221/</a>
<a href="http://news.taume.com/World-Business/Business-Finance/Mercedes-Benz-sales-increased-with-8-percent-620%5B/url%5D">http://news.taume.com/World-Business/Business-Finance/Mercedes-Benz-sales-increased-with-8-percent-620</a></p>
<p>But the point is, to say that the Ivies have no value is far too strong of a statement. One might say that their value is overrated. Maybe. But to assert that they have no value at all? That completely discounts the value of marketing. Yet the fact is, we live in a world of constrained information, and nobody can realistically have all of the information at their fingertips to evaluate every possible option, and people therefore tend to rely on brand names and marketing. That's just the reality of the world we live in.</p>
<p>
[quote]
Yet the truth of the matter is, $2-3 million really isn't that much money compared to your other career paths. For example, that kind of pay would, frankly, be considered mediocre for a managing director at an investment bank.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Or you could learn to hit a curve ball and make even more</p>
<p>PE, etc. will become another DotBomb bust when the economy takes that little turn south and they cannot pay all that money they borrowed back. It always looks easy in an up market but let's see how they do when sales go down 10% and there is no extra cashflow to pay back the debt. Bloodbath to come. Just like in 1989-90 and 2000-2001 there will be lots of formerly rich folks looking for work.</p>