<p>Daily</a> Chronicle | Former McDonald's exec gives $40M to Loyola</p>
<p>Cute, but McDonald’s is a perfectly fine employer at the corporate level and if CC students weren’t so obsessed with the almighty banking, they’d know that there are quite a few good jobs at McDonald’s corporate, Target corporate, etc. Indeed, I know a young man from Notre Dame who works “at Target” (Target corporate headquarters in Minneapolis) who has a fantastic job. Such jobs, at consumer product companies, are often really great foundational jobs.</p>
<p>^agree 100%. A friend told me her friend’s son wanted to work at McDonald’s because he wants to own franchises someday, so he wants to learn the business from the ground up. All work has value.</p>
<p>annasdad, as Pizzagirl infers, your thread title is deceiving. He’s not asking “do you want fries with that?”</p>
<p>My h is with an oil company but nobody wonders whether he actually pumps gas for a living.</p>
<p>“The donation was announced Saturday during an annual dinner at the university.”</p>
<p>I doubt they served McDonalds ;)</p>
<p>I suppose annasdad’s point is that this kid made a success of himself “despite” attending Loyola. Since he started working in the McDonald’s mailroom when he was 18, maybe his college education didn’t really help him at all.</p>
<p>However - at least in the era in which Quinlan rose at Mickey D’s (and it may still be the case, I wouldn’t know), having any executive-level job required a successful career in the stores - which meant starting at the bottom, working one’s way up through assistant manager to manager, then regional manager, etc. It was an integral part of the culture - if you don’t know how to clean the deep fryer, you can’t learn to manage the people who do. So although he started in the mailroom at corporate, I guarantee you he spent a considerable amount of time asking customers “do you want fries with that?”</p>
<p>In the early 80s, I worked for a small Chicago-area consulting firm that landed a big contract with McDonald’s to help them revamp their management training curriculum at Hamburger U. The lead consultant on the project, who happened to have an English PhD, was required to spend a couple of weeks working in a McDonald’s, going through the training that all newly hired employees do. A year or so later, shortly before the project was finished, he left our company and I was assigned to oversee the mop-up work on the project. They (McD) considered having me go into a store but decided that given the limited nature of the work that still remained, it wasn’t necessary. So I lost my chance to become a frymaster. As I enter my dotage, there are some regrets - might be a useful addition to my resume if I need some additional income to cover the kids’ college costs. ;)</p>
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<p>Apparently, he disagrees - to the tune of $40 million.</p>
<p>I live near McD corporate headquarters and know a lot of people who have worked there in corporate positions. No one in the real world is “surprised” that people can be highly successful financially without elite-school degrees.</p>
<p>Here’s another article with more info about him–and it also explains why fraternities are great:</p>
<p>[Former</a> McDonald’s CEO gives $40 million to his alma mater - Wire - NewsObserver.com](<a href=“http://www.newsobserver.com/2012/06/03/2110753/former-mcdonalds-ceo-gives-40.html]Former”>http://www.newsobserver.com/2012/06/03/2110753/former-mcdonalds-ceo-gives-40.html)</p>
<p>I have 2 cousins with advanced degrees, they quit their corporate jobs to own few Poppey franchise. I think they are doing very well.</p>
<p>Another interesting bit of McD culture (again from 30 years ago, I don’t know whether this still obtains): When a manager reached a certain level in the organization and the powers-that-be decided that he (and in those days, it was invariably a he) wasn’t going any further, they would arrange for him to take over a franchise - generally a corporate store that was being converted to a franchised one. Very nice golden parachute for middle managers, and I’m sure a contributor to the fanatical loyalty that managers at all levels in Oak Brook and elsewhere had for the company.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, it seems much harder to reach the top of fortune 500 companies going to non-elite schools. There might be a lot of executives who went to other schools but not CEOs. </p>
<p>There are couple of state schools that seem to be prominent in this list - Indiana University and Rutgers. Michigan and Virginia are not a surprise.</p>
<p>Yale not being on this list is a big surprise.</p>
<p>[Where</a> the Fortune 500 CEOs Went to School - US News and World Report](<a href=“http://www.usnews.com/education/best-graduate-schools/top-business-schools/articles/2012/05/14/where-the-fortune-500-ceos-went-to-school]Where”>http://www.usnews.com/education/best-graduate-schools/top-business-schools/articles/2012/05/14/where-the-fortune-500-ceos-went-to-school)</p>
<p>Is the point here that there are people who attend non top 20 schools and do well, and then give generously to their alma mater? If so, its a big… duh.</p>
<p>texaspg:
That table lists “the 13 schools that awarded at least 10 degrees to Fortune 500 CEOs. The ranks of their undergraduate program and graduate business school are also included. The table is sorted by total number of degrees awarded per institution:”</p>
<p>Yes, exactly, jym. Perhaps a straw man was being set up to be knocked down.
Of the two richest people I personally know, one went to Tulane and the other doesn’t have a college degree at all but has sales acumen out the wazoo. This isn’t anything notable, either.</p>
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<p>But once you get inside a fortune 500 company and are doing whatever it takes to climb the ladder, no one cares what school you went to.</p>
<p>jym - Sure that is the case. </p>
<p>It is also showing some level of correlation for CEOs and where they went to college if about 250 of 465 declared degrees came from a total of 13 colleges.</p>
<p>Yes, exactly.</p>
<p>The preponderance of graduates from so-called “top” schools can be explained largely by the fact that the best and the brightest tend to go to those schools - not by anything that they get from those schools that they wouldn’t get almost anywhere else.</p>
<p>Totally agree, texaspg. </p>
<p>As for the purpose of this thread. Seems to be another not-so-thinly veiled attempt to say that kids can succeed with degrees from many institutions. Again, … duh. As they say, the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.</p>
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<p>Except a high density of being surrounded by other “best and the brightest,” which some parents and / or students value highly, myself included. For some people, it’s important for them to be in a population of the best and the brightest and to be intellectually challenged by everyone they meet. For other people, they can make their own stimulation no matter who is around them. Neither way is better or worse, just different. I agree that at a certain point, French 101 is French 101 no matter what you are. I think a lot of the college experience, however, comes outside the classroom and all else being equal, I prefer my kids be with a densely-populated carpet of best-and-brightest.</p>