DECEMBER 2006 :: CAREERS

'Any College Will Do'
Most CEOs Start Out at State Schools and Small Colleges, Not Ivy Leagues

By Carol Hymowitz
Staff Reporter of The Wall Street Journal

The college degrees of the nation's top executives tell an intriguing story: Getting to the top has more to do with leadership talent and drive for success than with having a bachelor's degree from a prestigious university.

Most CEOs of the biggest corporations didn't attend Ivy League or other highly selective colleges. They went to state universities, big and small, or to less-known private colleges.

Wal-Mart Stores CEO H. Lee Scott, for example, went to Pittsburg State University in Kansas, Intel CEO Paul Otellini went to the University of San Francisco and Costco Wholesale CEO James Sinegal to San Diego City College.

This information should help allay the anxieties of many students and their parents who believe admission to a top-ranked school with a powerful alumni network is a prerequisite to success in the upper tier of business management. Today's crop of CEOs are, of course, at least a generation older than current college students, but they are in the position to hire people, and they say they don't favor job candidates with certain degrees.

"I don't care where someone went to school, and that never caused me to hire anyone or buy a business," says Warren Buffett, CEO of Berkshire Hathaway and a graduate of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

On, Wisconsin!

W hat counts most, CEOs say, is a person's capacity to seize opportunities. As students, they recall immersing themselves in their interests, becoming campus leaders and forging strong relationships with teachers. And at state and lesser-known schools, they sought challenges and mixed with students from diverse backgrounds-an experience that helped them later in their corporate climbs.

Bill Green, CEO of Accenture, never planned to go to college. He took a construction job when he graduated from high school because he didn't think he had the ability to pursue more education. He changed his mind when he visited friends at Dean College, a two-year community school near Boston.

"Walking around campus, listening to my friends talk, I realized they were being exposed to a big world-and I had a chance to take another shot at learning," he says.

At Dean, he got help from faculty members who devoted themselves to their students, not "doing research and writing books like professors at four-year schools," he says. "They were available to any student who needed help," says Mr. Green.

Inspired by an economics professor who made the subject "fun and relevant," Mr. Green went on to Babson College to earn his bachelor's and M.B.A. degrees. But he credits Dean with teaching him to think analytically, to gain confidence in his abilities and to learn to work with people.

Now a trustee at Dean, Mr. Green says he feels angry when he encounters "parents who are afraid or ashamed to say their son or daughter is attending a community college," he says.

Some 10% of CEOs currently heading the top 500 companies received undergraduate degrees from Ivy League colleges, according to a survey by executive recruiter Spencer Stuart. But more received their undergraduate degrees from the University of Wisconsin than from Harvard, the most-represented Ivy school.

Some non-Ivy League schools have long been training grounds for particular industries. But some of today's most successful CEOs got their start on small, isolated campuses.

A.G. Lafley, Procter & Gamble's CEO, chose Hamilton College in Clinton, N.Y., because he wanted a solid liberal-arts education and to be assured a spot on the basketball team. A history major, he was elected president of his sophomore class, became a fraternity officer and spent his junior year studying in France.

"I learned to think, to communicate, to lead, to get things done," he says, adding that those qualities are what he seeks in job candidates. "Any college will do."

Berkshire Hathaway's Mr. Buffett didn't even want to go to college. He enrolled at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School as an undergraduate at his father's urging. He stayed just two years, then returned to Omaha and graduated from Nebraska within a year.

At his father's urging again, Mr. Buffett applied to Harvard Business School, which rejected him as too young, he says. By then, he was devouring the books of investors David Dodd and Benjamin Graham, who advocated investing in companies that had "intrinsic business value"-a view that became Mr. Buffett's guiding investment principle. When he learned the two men were teaching at Columbia University's business school, he wrote to them to ask if he could attend their lectures. He earned a master's degree in economics at Columbia in 1951. "But I didn't go there for a degree, I went for those two teachers, who were already my heroes," he says.

'Trust Your Gut'

O ne reason more Ivy League alumni aren't CEOs may be that many have traditionally chosen careers in investment banks and at big law firms, where they could earn big sums quickly and wouldn't have to start in entry-level management jobs.

The exceptions are some founders of high-tech companies who never completed college, like Microsoft's Bill Gates and Apple Computer's Steve Jobs. They found their classroom studies less compelling than their own ideas.

What do they think about this decision today-and would they advise young people to copy them? In a graduation speech at Stanford last year, Mr. Jobs said college, like any life decision, is up to each individual. "You have to trust your gut," he said.

His decision to quit Reed College after one semester was "pretty scary" but ultimately "one of the best decisions I ever made," because instead of taking required courses that didn't interest him he spent the next 18 months auditing classes that did. A calligraphy course he audited strongly influenced his design of the Macintosh computer 10 years later. "If I'd never dropped in on that single course, the Mac would never have had multiple typefaces," he said.