The Educational Backgrounds of American Business and Government Leaders: Inter-Industry Variation in Recruitment from Elite Colleges and Graduate Programs

The paper provides new empirical evidence on the educational backgrounds of US business and government leaders. Analyzing a sample of 3,990 senior executives drawn from 15 sectors, including government, we find significant industry variation. Industries whose products depend primarily on the manipulation of symbolic media were the most likely to recruit from elite colleges. By contrast, industries involved in the transformation of the material world recruited less often from elite colleges, and this was particularly true for industries that employed comparatively few workers with advanced degrees. We find a relatively low level of association between elite undergraduate origins and executive positions in economy and state but greater proportional concentration by graduate business or law school attended. We discuss the different selection criteria used by elite colleges looking for outstanding students and corporations looking for outstanding executives, as well as additional layers of affinity that may lie behind industry differences in recruitment to executive positions.