The analysis found that elite colleges are slightly more likely to send alumni to a Fortune 50 company, but not by much. In terms of sheer numbers, very few Fortune 50 employees attended highly selective colleges, because those schools’ enrollment numbers are tiny compared with higher education as a whole. Your future coworkers in any company are roughly four times as likely to have graduated from a college with an acceptance rate above 40% than from a more selective school, according to the Lightcast research. And as those coworkers move through their careers, many will end up in the executive suite.
Last year, Nature published a study with the headline, “The most successful and influential Americans come from a surprisingly narrow range of ‘elite’ educational backgrounds.” The study focused on just 34 elite colleges attended by some Fortune 500 CEOs. But an appendix revealed that 378 other colleges also had alumni running Fortune 500 companies. Duke and Brown each had three graduates on the list, but so did Ball State, Louisiana State, San Diego State and many other schools.
The religion scholar James P. Carse wrote that life is made up of two kinds of games: finite and infinite. A finite game has a fixed endpoint, with winners and losers. That’s college admissions. An infinite game goes on and on and has no definite winners. That’s the career that comes after college. In trying to master the finite game of getting into an elite college, we too often lose sight of the infinite game of life.
Take Colleen McAllister, who turned down an offer of admission from Cornell University to attend Ithaca College, drawn by its communications school and a generous financial aid package. When I met her at an alumni event, she told me that she spent a semester at Ithaca’s Los Angeles program, where she interned for a production company. After graduation, she eventually found herself up for a job at Illumination, the animation studio. “I had, at that point, done so many different internships and entry-level jobs,” she told me. “I was happy to take out the trash, happy to do the coffee run. I was willing to read everything that crossed the desk.”