While it’s true that 13 of this year’s power women ranging from Sonia Gandhi to Anna Wintour may not have graduated from college, the evidence here is that education is a help -- and that attending a prestigious university certainly doesn’t hurt either.
Impressively, 30 of the 100 women on the list attended an Ivy League institution. To put that in context, there are only 8 such schools with the Ivy moniker out of the tens of thousands around the world. These numbers are all the more remarkable in light of the fact that the majority of these schools only started accepting women in the late 1960’s, early 70’s (with Columbia University in New York being the final hold-out, not admitting women until 1982).
The prestigious alums on our list earned a collective 39 Ivy degrees, with 6 listees having an Ivy undergraduate diploma under their belt and 18 with advanced degrees. A notable 6 power women graduated with both, 5 of whom made the list’s top 25, including Michelle Obama, Sheryl Sandberg, Meg Whitman, Irene Rosenfeld and Safra Catz.
The value of advanced education is noteworthy here as well, as the majority of the power Ivy Leaguers also earned focused degrees, including 9 MBAs, 3 MDs and 2 juris doctorates. What's more, 75% of all the Forbes power women who graduated college went on to earn some sort of advanced degree. Call it higher education you can use.
These power women also leverage their power degrees in diverse fields that stretch far beyond a corporate boardroom. They’re heading up some of the world’s most influential non-profits, such as Helene Gayle of CARE (UPenn). Others are turning entrepreneurial ventures into billion-dollar businesses like Tory Burch (UPenn), while some are flexing their political muscle, serving as heads of state, such as Liberia’s Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf (Harvard), or pursuing aspirations to do so, like Hillary Clinton (Yale).
So with all this star power emanating from the Ivies, how do the Ivies themselves score in terms of producing today’s most powerful change-agents? Harvard continues to pump out the majority of Forbes Power Women with 13 alum on this year’s list; University of Pennsylvania trails behind with 6 graduates followed by Cornell, Columbia, Princeton and Yale. No listees graduated from either Brown or Dartmouth.
This raises the inevitable question: What makes an Ivy education so much more (seemingly) beneficial than degrees from other fine institutions?
One explanation may simply be that ambitious people naturally strive to attend the very best educational institutions should circumstances allow, displaying the discipline and work ethic that's critical to achieving such levels of future success. Another may involve the powerful social networks that Ivies typically offer -- giving potential graduates an extra edge in helping to open doors in the global workplace.
Whatever the confluence of factors driving this “chicken or the egg” debate, the numbers speak for themselves: the striking correlation between Ivy League alums and the leaders spotlighted on this Power Women’s list is undeniable. In the broader sense, there’s also no doubt that the potential return on that enormous investment can be very real for recent Ivy grads, particularly given that the cost of an Ivy education is currently outpacing inflation by a factor of four or more. A recent list released by Payscale evaluated the potential 30-year financial return on a bachelor’s degree from over 1,000 institutions around the country. As it turns out, 4 of the 8 Ivies were among the top 25 schools with the best ROI. Newly-minted grads of Princeton, Harvard, Dartmouth and UPenn bank an average starting salary of over $50,000, even in a sluggish economy, thanks in large part to lucrative opportunities in fields like finance and management consulting. And the 30-year return-on-investment for those Ivy degrees? Upwards of $1.2 million, two times higher than that of the median ROI for schools on Payscale’s list -- further justifying the expenditure.
In the end, regardless of the number of degrees earned or from which institutions, there will only be a certain number of star performers that emerge in any given generation. During my years as an undergrad at Princeton, I can safely say that those destined for success would have excelled at any institution they attended and that a college acceptance letter in no way guaranteed future greatness.
But the fact that nearly a third of this year’s power women earned degrees from just 6 Ivy institutions is too compelling to ignore. As we continue to focus on innovative and disruptive pathways to power, perhaps examining the more traditional routes through a new lens deserves our consideration.
