There are alternative routes to achieving your objective of becoming a leader, even though attending a top institution may increase your odds of doing so.
- A new college rating based on the leaders that each school produces was published by Time magazine.
- Out of the 100 listed institutions, the top 10 are dominated by private colleges.
- Different links between leadership and elite education have been discovered by other research of this kind.
All colleges claim to be preparing the next wave of American leaders, but which ones can support these assertions? We now know, according to a recent rating by Statista and Time magazine.
For its first-ever “Best Colleges for Future Leaders” list, the magazine examined the educational backgrounds of 2,000 American politicians, CEOs, Nobel Prize winners, and others by looking at their portfolios, personal websites, business profiles, and media coverage. The findings are then weighted in some way according to the size of the school.
On the magazine’s website, only the top 100 schools and institutions are highlighted.
Contrary to what the title would suggest, undergraduate alma maters are taken into account in addition to graduate and professional degrees. Time identifies “notable subsidiaries” for several of the institutions, including public health, business, law, and medical schools.
What Time deemed to be the top 10 are as follows:
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Harvard University
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Stanford University
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University of Pennsylvania
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Columbia University
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Massachusetts Institute of Technology
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Yale University
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Princeton University
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Northwestern University
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University of Michigan
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University of Chicago
Only one of them, Michigan, is open to the public; the other two, the University of Texas at Austin and the University of California, Berkeley, are ranked 11 and 14, respectively.
The magazine notes in its examination that these institutions’ curricula do not inherently foster the development of leaders. Rather, their significance is found in the signals they transmit. Since “elite degrees offer a shortcut for finding talent,” many corporations have a “vested interest” in employing graduates of particular colleges, according to the magazine.
Graduates from these institutions frequently choose to work in consulting, technology, or finance, which are popular fields for those who want to hold leadership roles in the future. Time notes that there are, however, many unorthodox career paths, such as the University of Michigan’s connections to the automotive industry and Texas colleges that send their graduates into the oil and gas sector.
Not All Leaders Possess Elite Degrees
Of course, Time isn’t the only organization to try and figure out which universities turn out the most leaders. Steven Brint et al. contrasted the educational backgrounds of corporate executives and politicians with those of American “cultural elites” in a journal paper published in 2020.
“Cultural elites” were identified by them as think tanks, philanthropic leaders, and representatives of the arts, media, and academia.
What did they find out? Leaders in business and politics were less likely than cultural elites to have an undergraduate degree from a prestigious university. About one-third of these “elites” in their sample were enrolled in one of the top 39 undergraduate institutions as identified by U.S. News & World Report’s rankings.
Elite colleges were more likely to produce business executives and political figures with graduate degrees than undergraduate ones.
According to another research, around 10% of the current CEOs of Fortune 500 businesses hold an Ivy League MBA, and about 12% of them received their undergraduate degrees from Ivy League institutions.
The others have degrees from various colleges and institutions throughout the country. Furthermore, just five of the top 20 CEOs hold a college degree.
Although Time’s rating provides a useful insight into the relationship between colleges and the leaders they graduate, it is essentially a moment in time. Depending on who holds those jobs currently, a comparable analysis conducted in three years may provide different findings.
We’ll find out if the magazine keeps up its yearly rating.
The key takeaway, though, is that while attending one of these “top” universities may increase your chances of landing a leadership role in the future, you don’t need to include their names on your CV to succeed in that endeavor.