U.S. News & World Report, Where the Fortune 500 CEOs Went to School:
The 500 executives collectively earned about 465 college degrees, which means about 35 executives didn't graduate from college. Both Ralph Lauren and Sheldon Adelson (Las Vegas Sands Corp.) are among the CEOs who dropped out of college. But the Fortune 500 executives who completed both college and graduate school collectively earned about 200 MBAs and about 140 other graduate degrees.
Harvard topped the list of Fortune 500 CEO degree granters with 65 total degrees. The next closest school was Stanford, which doled out 27 undergraduate and graduate degrees. Pennsylvania awarded a total of 24 degrees to Fortune 500 CEOs, while the executives on the Fortune list earned 18 degrees from Columbia.
Harvard, Penn, and Stanford also count the most Fortune 500 MBAs among their ranks (40, 13, and 10, respectively), with the business schools at Chicago (7), Northwestern (6), and Indiana (6) trailing behind. MIT didn't award any MBAs to Fortune 500 CEOs, but it was third on the list of institutions that awarded the most other graduate degrees to the executives, after Harvard and Columbia.
Institution Total degrees Undergraduate degrees MBAs Other graduate degrees US News undergraduate rank US News business school rank Harvard 65 11 40 14 1 1 Stanford 27 11 10 6 5 1 Pennsylvania 24 7 13 4 5 3 Columbia 18 3 4 11 4 8 Michigan 14 6 5 3 28 13 Notre Dame 14 10 1 3 19 25 Virginia 14 4 4 6 25 13 Cornell 13 8 3 2 15 16 Dartmouth 12 9 3 0 11 9 Indiana 11 5 6 0 75 23 Northwestern 11 2 6 3 12 4 Rutgers 11 5 3 3 68 63 MIT 10 3 0 7 5 4
