An Interesting Article from the Wall Street Journal:

 

'Any College Will Do'

Nation's Top Chief Executives
Find Path to the Corner Office
Usually Starts at State University
September 18, 2006; Page B1

The college diplomas of the nation's top executives tell an intriguing
story: Getting to the corner office has more to do with leadership
talent and a drive for success than it does with having an
undergraduate 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 to University of San
Francisco and Costco Wholesale CEO James Sinegal to San Diego City
College.

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

QUESTION OF THE DAY

Is an undergraduate degree2 from an elite private college worth the
cost?"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, who graduated from the University of Nebraska-
Lincoln.

What 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, where many were
the first in their families to attend college, 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. The son
of a plumber, he took a construction job when he graduated from high
school in western Massachusetts 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. Rather than post student-meeting times
on their office doors, they posted their class schedules. "All the
other time, they were available to any student who needed help," says
Mr. Green, who worked part-time to pay for part of his tuition.

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.

"You can go to a top-end school and end up dramatically
underperforming, or you can go to a place that cares and blow away
what everyone thinks," says Mr. Green, who still stays in touch with
his economics professor, Charlie Kramer. A trustee at Dean, 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.

Harvard's nine current CEOs include United Technologies' George David
and Microsoft's Steve Ballmer. Among Wisconsin's 10 current CEOs are
Pitney Bowes's Michael Critelli, Kimberly-Clark's Thomas Falk and
Halliburton's David Lesar. Carol Bartz, chairman and former CEO of
Autodesk, majored in computer science at Wisconsin and used a
scholarship she'd won for women gifted in math to help pay her tuition.

Some non-Ivy League schools have long been training grounds for
particular industries. The University of Texas-Austin, the alma mater
of Exxon Mobil CEO Rex Tillerson, has churned out numerous oil
executives. Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, is known for its
computer-science graduates. 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 intercollegiate basketball team. A history
major who graduated in 1969, 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
at his company. "Any college will do."

Berkshire Hathaway's Mr. Buffett didn't even want to go to college. He
enrolled at University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School as an
undergraduate at his father's behest. He stayed just two years, then
returned home 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 principal.

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.

One 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.

"A lot of people who earn degrees from tier-one universities and
business schools aren't willing to start at the bottom of a huge
company" and spend years scaling layers of management and hoping to
reach the top, says Richard Tedlow, a business historian at Harvard
Business School.

The exception are some founders of high-tech companies who never
completed college. They found their classroom studies less compelling
than their own ideas. Bill Gates quit Harvard to start Microsoft,
Michael Dell quit the University of Texas-Austin to start Dell
Computer and Steve Jobs quit Reed College in Portland, Ore., to work
at Atari and then found Apple Computer. None ever returned to college
to complete a formal degree.

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 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 ten years later. "If I'd never dropped in on that
single course, the Mac would never have had multiple typefaces or
proportionally spaced fonts," he said.

Quitting college also eased his guilt about spending his adoptive
working-class parents' savings "when I still had no idea what I wanted
to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure
that out," he said. But dropping out "wasn't romantic," he warned. "I
didn't have a dorm room so I slept on the floor of friends' rooms and
returned Coke bottles...to buy food."

Thomas Neff, chairman of recruitment firm Spencer Stuart U.S.,
warns: "It's the exceptionally inventive person who can do this. If
you have a big, big new idea, you can get venture financing -and if
you wait to graduate someone else may capitalize on your idea first,"
he says.

But for everyone else who wants a professional or management job at a
big company, a college degree is a necessity -- including for jobs at
Apple, Microsoft and Dell. And increasingly, employers also expect
graduate degrees for management-track candidates. Close to two-thirds
of top CEOs have either an M.B.A., law, or other advanced degree,
according to Spencer Stuart's survey -- and some executives who didn't
go to Ivy League colleges got Ivy credentials as graduate students.
P&G's Mr. Lafley has a Harvard M.B.A.

Robert Iger, CEO at Walt Disney Co., decided in high school that he
wanted to work in television and attended Ithaca College in upstate
New York because he felt its strong communications program would
nurture his career dreams. "I was in a place that supported creativity
and individuality with a focus on what I was most interested in," says
Mr. Iger, who took liberal-arts and hands-on broadcast courses. After
college, he got a job working for ABC-TV, now a unit of Disney.

Anyway, by the time someone has been working for a few years, or held
one or two jobs, their employment record counts more than their
educational background, recruiters say. And companies seeking to fill
CEO and other senior jobs rarely consider candidates' degrees. "It's
what you've accomplished that matters," says Mr. Neff, "not what you
were doing at 21."

Write to Carol Hymowitz at carol.hymowitz@wsj.com3

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