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New CEO Study: The Undergraduate Degrees Of Fortune 100 CEOs

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What area of study seems to best prepare employees to ascend to a F100 CEO position? Does it matter?

To find out, I looked into the backgrounds of the F100 company CEOs and identified several factors associated with their career paths: undergraduate schools, undergraduate degrees, graduate schools, graduate degrees, educational majors, functional emphasis, the number of years at their current company (at which they are CEO), and the companies that produce more CEOs (methodology below). In previous articles, I have explored the undergraduate schools and graduate schools most attended by F100 CEOs, the number of firms F100 CEOs have worked for, and the early career choices of F100 leaders.

In this article, I explore the undergraduate degrees of study chosen by the F100 CEOs.

The Bachelor of Arts (BA) and Bachelor of Business Administration (BBA) were the most popular among F100 CEOs, with 53% of those identified having obtained one of these two degrees. A Bachelor of Science (BS) degree is held by 47% of the CEOs who received an undergraduate degree. Of note, we excluded from the analysis CEOs who either did not hold a bachelor’s degree or whose undergraduate degree could not be identified from publicly available records (i.e., Bloomberg, company website, proxy statement, etc.). See methodology below.

Not all F100 CEOs obtaining a BS necessarily graduated with a science, engineering, or math degree, with 45% getting their BS in a business field (e.g., accounting, finance, television and radio, etc.). For example, Doug McMillon, CEO of Walmart, obtained a BS in Business Administration from the University of Arkansas, Robert Iger, CEO of The Walt Disney Company, received a BS in Television and Radio from Ithaca College, and Stephen Squeri, CEO of American Express, earned a BS with a concentration in accounting and computer science from Manhattan College.

Interestingly, nearly all F100 CEOs in tech-related fields have undergraduate degrees directly related to engineering. For example, Apple’s Tim Cook has a degree in industrial engineering, Alphabet’s Larry Page has a degree in computer engineering, IBM’s Virginia Rometty’s focus was on computer science/electrical engineering, and Amazon’s Bezos focused on electrical engineering/computer science. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Dell’s Michael Dell did not graduate.

In contrast, some F100 CEOs don’t hold degrees in areas directly applicable to their company’s industry. For example, Goldman Sachs’ CEO, Lloyd Blankfein, has a degree in history. So does Bank of America’s Brian Moynihan. Anthem’s CEO, Gail Boudreaux, studied psychology/sociology and Lowe’s Marvin Ellison got a degree in marketing. Both Nike’s Mark Parker and Target’s Brian Cornell received degrees in political science.

In sum, while some industries appear to require a specific undergraduate education path to the CEO position (e.g., tech), other fields don’t (e.g., financial services) with CEOs holding varied degrees or ones that aren’t an obvious link to the industry (e.g., history to banking). In terms of whether to pursue or a BA, a BS, or a BBA, it isn’t clear (other than industry-based norms such as in tech) whether it truly matters.

For additional insight on Fortune 100 CEO career paths, see the following: the undergraduate institutions they attended, the graduate schools they attended, the number of companies they have worked for, the early-career firms at which they worked, the undergraduate degrees they earned, and the early-career functions in which they chose to work.

Join the Discussion: @KimWhitler

Disclosure: I am an Assistant Professor at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business.

Methodology: To identify CEO information, a number of information sources were used: 1) Bloomberg, 2) Company websites, 3) Company proxy statements, 4) press releases, 5) Wikipedia, among others. While most of the information was accessible, there were 10 occasions where the data was unavailable or conflicted across resources. In such cases, the CEO was excluded from the total CEO count in the statistic calculated if unavailable/inconsistent. Additionally, some firms were acquired and the CEO transitioned to the acquiring firm. In such cases, the CEO’s tenure at the current firm was calculated starting at the time of the merger/acquisition. The CEOs were identified in September 2018 and the research was conducted in winter 2018/2019. A special thanks to Wilkerson Anthony, an outstanding research assistant with whom I worked from 2014-2019, who helped source and code the information. Also, thanks to Tyla Gallegos who created the data images.