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A comment on Set your heart on an MBA? Don't bother. Parent comment

Re:Set your heart on an MBA? Don't bother by mindcrime on Wednesday February 02, 2011 @03:51PM (#2172061)
If you are going to a World Top 5 - then it might be worth it to network with the people who are going to be hiring CEOs.

Maybe not even then. I don't have the reference in front of me, but I seem to recall something about a study of the Fortune 500 CEOs, and there were as many from some state school (University of Wisconsin, maybe?) as there were from Harvard.

Edit: some links about this point.

http://content.spencerstuart.com/sswebsite/pdf/lib/2005_CEO_... (Warning:PDF)

http://bernardmoon.blogspot.com/2009/05/go-wisconsin-most-fo...

http://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/articles/2011/...

Here's another fun observation from that 2005 study (said as a North Carolinian who resides in Chapel Hill):

Of the Fortune 100 CEOs, the top schools for their undergraduate degrees were:

Harvard, Stanford, Yale, U. of North Carolina - 3% each

Which one of these is not like the others? :-) (To be fair though, even though it's a state school, UNC is generally pretty highly regarded and their business school is usually pretty high in the national rankings.)

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Re:Set your heart on an MBA? Don't bother by iuygtfrgth on Wednesday February 02, 2011 @04:37PM (#2172267)
That's not the statistic you are interested in though. The question isn't - if you go to Harvard will you become head of facebook/apple. The question is if you go to Harvard will you do OK as a senior VP of a firm where the person hiring you went to Harvard.

MBA isn't for leaders - it's for followers, just very well paid followers.

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