“I went to a little place called F.U.”
McMillon also started his career working in a Walmart warehouse as a teen.
Went to school and worked his way up the ladder
The question that needs to be asked is why such a high percentage in the top levels of the FedGov bureaucracy come from a handful of Ivy League schools, with maybe a few others thrown in?
The dirty little secret is that the Ivy’s have mostly developed into a place for making connections into government, or into the grifter structure that lobbies government, or uses any of a 1000 ways to tap into government largesse.
Their educational product is becoming obviously inferior with a few specific programs. (Harvard Law not being one of them)
Mark
Ambition, determination and perseverance are most important
Gary C. Kelly is CEO of Southwest Airlines. He was born in San Antonio on March 12, 1955. Kelly received a Bachelor of Business Administration in Accounting from the University of Texas at Austin. He is a Certified Public Accountant.
Doug Parker is CEO of American Airlines. He grew up in Michigan and received a BA in Economics from Albion College (1984). He then received an MBA from the Owen Graduate School of Management at Vanderbilt University (1986), where American Airlines offered him a job after a campus interview.
This article is such shallow nonsense.
In the first place, most of these CEOs attained CEO status in a pre-internet era and a pre-fourth-grade-playground-dirtbomb-throw and a pre-facebook-picture beer-chugging and joint-smoking era. And they probably didn’t start out as CEOs, they probably graduated from a wide range of schools and entered their corporate careers as mid-level bureaucrats where it didn’t much matter if you graduated from the U of KS or the U of MS or Yale or some state school. That they are CEOs today is more a matter of having worked in their industries for 25 years than having graduated from Wharton.
That said, my nephew graduated from Wharton and was early recruited by Bain Capital (yes, Bain) and is making astrofrickinominal money.
Now it’s 25-30-35 years later and with the deep and nuanced insight and understanding only attainable by writers with the attention span of flying insects, all of a sudden we can pick a CEO and look at where they graduated college and come to this stunning conclusion that ignores the intervening 25 years and apparently it doesn’t matter where you graduated from or if they had a good football team.
Not excusing them one bit; The parents who paid these huge bribes were conditioned to believe that they were advancing the prospects of their kids and to do so, they believed they had to get their screw-off kids into name brand schools. Some of them might have quite legitimately paid $2K to SAT consultants, others might have paid $50K and $100K to a “casting agency” where it was plainly obvious that a stand-in test taker was going to sit for an important test. Others might have paid six figure amounts to get their kids to ghost on sports teams. Those latter items are frauds and knowing frauds.
What these sad episodes have to do with what hiring prospects may have been 25 and 30 years ago is.....nothing.
Attending an Ivy league school is more about the networking than the education. I’m not saying they don’t do a great job with education, but where the real benefits lie are the relationships students form with other students who will be the future CEOs and government leaders. It certainly doesn’t hurt your own prospects when you’re on a first name basis with classmates who are CEOs of fortune 500 companies and Supreme Court Justices.
Yes, you can absolutely go to very good state schools or regional private schools and with smarts and hard work, do very well for yourself.
BUT THAT’S NOT THE POINT. Haven’t we all learned that in the USA, government runs, plans and organizes the country? We all agree there is such a thing as a ‘deep state’ in Washington DC, do we not? Well - these people predominantly come out of these Ivy and Top 20 universities. These people caught in this scandal come from law, finance, media and entertainment. They aren’t stupid - they know to join America’s RULING class, it really helps to have a diploma from these universities.
Ah, but where did all the top politicians go to school?
>>The No. 1 company in last year’s Fortune 500 was Walmart Inc., with $500 billion in revenue. That would make its chief executive, Douglas McMillon, a pretty important and powerful executive, don’t you think? Can you guess where he went to college? The University of Arkansas.
That’s nothing, Hillary Clinton sat on the board of directors at Wal-Mart and got the job because she was married to the governor at the time.
And in Arkansas, University of Arkansas carries a bit more weight.
Like encountering University of Texas or A&M alumni in the corporate ladder in Texas. Sometimes it may help you. Others it could be a drawback. Depends where your corporate peers went and if they give a damn about “traditions”.
I agree with your basic premise.
However, Texas A&M is one the best “oil schools” in the world, for engineers and for executive managers, so it’s not surprising that Exxon’s CEO went there.
Lin Wood, the lawyer representing Nicholas Sandmann, got his undergraduate and law degree from Mercer University in Macon, GA. Wood somehow succeeded without a law degree from Yale, Harvard or Princeton.
I am an attorney who has worked in law firms and in real estate development firms. I have worked with people from all the Ivies and other “elite” schools. Of the three most talented people I have worked with in a 35-year career, two were from the University of Maryland and one didn’t finish high school. The “elite” schools are mainly social breeding grounds where one makes connections with the rich and famous. Unfortunately, “it’s not what you know, it’s who you know” is axiomatic.
A lawyer told me that it matters where you went to law school in the first 5 years after graduation...after that it’s strictly PERFORMANCE.
While the top positions are not necessarily held by Ivy League graduates, throngs of the top tiers in all businesses graduated from those schools.
These degrees open doors that would otherwise be closed to them. Many certainly fail, specially if they didn’t authentically get into those schools. The people that deserved to be in those schools end up in well paying positions and retire early with a lifetime of wealth to spend. They also end up in the senior executive service in the federal government and end up influencing the rest of us, often with leftist nonsense.
I personally know many examples proving the negative.
One particular CEO here in town who is known to be an arrogant idiot, widely derided as his name rhymes with “Garbage”. Earned a degree from Carnegie-Mellon which is about all one ever needs in the Pittsburgh job market.