No one asks the top CEOs where they went to college

Crain's Chicago Business reports:

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. He has an MBA, too. From the University of Tulsa.

Second on the list was Exxon Mobil Corp. Its CEO, Darren Woods, went to Texas A&M. Third was Berkshire Hathaway Inc., run by the man many consider the greatest investor who ever lived: Warren Buffett. He spent three years at the Wharton School before transferring to the University of Nebraska, from which he graduated. He was then rejected by Harvard Business School. (He got his MBA from Columbia Business School, where he famously learned from the great value investor Ben Graham.)


Fourth was Apple Inc., whose chief executive, Tim Cook, is arguably the most important executive in all of tech. He went to a university better known for football than academics: Auburn.

Are you sensing a pattern here? General Electric Co.’s Lawrence Culp went to Washington College in Chestertown, Maryland. Cardinal Health Inc.’s Michael Kaufmann went to Ohio Northern University in Ada, Ohio. AT&T Inc.’s Randall Stephenson went to the University of Central Oklahoma in Edmond, Oklahoma. General Motors Co.’s Mary Barra went to Kettering University in Flint, Michigan. (Kettering used to be the General Motors Institute before it was spun off from GM in the early 1980s.)


Of the CEOs of the top 20 companies in last year’s Fortune 500, exactly one — Amazon.com Inc.’s Jeff Bezos — went to an Ivy League school (Princeton). And that’s not all. We tend to think of the founders of technology companies as having all gone to Stanford University (or dropping out of Harvard University). And yes, many of them did. But Michael Dell went to the University of Texas. Steve Jobs dropped out of Reed College in Portland, Oregon. Marc Andreessen went to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. So did Larry Ellison, though he never graduated.

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