Is it worth getting a degree from a top-tier university in today's job market?

[Pengwuino]

A MA or PhD from a top-tier university is certainly one of the stepping stones to becoming the head of a big corporation. I can't name any CEO's or top-executives who don't have at least a MA from a big-name university.

This is stupid. Did you even bother to take a quick google to look at even the top 10 Fortune 500 CEOs? It sounds like you may not even able able to name a CEO period. It took me literally 10 minutes to find every single CEO of the top 10 in the Fortune 500 list.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rex_Tillerson , BS in Civil Engineering UT Austin
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Duke , BS in Industrial Tech, Georgia Tech

10 minutes and you find 2 without advanced degrees.

Although I'm guessing your next sentence will be "Certainly you need a Bachelors from at least a good school". At some point you'll say "well, you of course need at least an Associates degree from a good community college to be a CEO". Sheesh.

 

[czelaya]

i recall having this discussion with a young man at my church who was getting a degree from our flagship state university business school. he was very shocked when i suggested his business school degree did not guarantee him a job. later that year i went into wendy's for a burger and the familiar looking guy behind the counter gave me a very nasty look. when i got outside i remembered him as the young man from the church conversation.

Wow(have a similar story-on the other end of that story)! This recently happened to me just a few weeks ago.

I was an undergraduate in biology and already had my foot in medical school. I was an Army Ranger and got activated for deployment to Bosnia. When I came back, I was basically told to be readmitted to medical school, I would have to continue to take additional course work. I choose a second undergraduate major. Upon taking physical chemistry, I decided I wanted to study physics and its application to chemical systems(it was the first thing that I was truly passionate about).

Six years later, I'm in last my last year of my Ph.D program-working one day out of the week at a restaurant, and I see some old church friends. They just starred at me with this look of dismay on what I was doing there. I explained to them what had happened the last 12 years of my life and they didn't understand the new course in my education endeavors(even thou I was happy).

I have daughter, so my ability to move for a post doc are not possible. I'm now re-considering going back to medical school.

 

[daveyrocket]

A MA or PhD from a top-tier university is certainly one of the stepping stones to becoming the head of a big corporation. I can't name any CEO's or top-executives who don't have at least a MA from a big-name university.

Here's a fun page:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_college_dropout_billionaires

But this is pretty obvious trolling...

 

[thegreenlaser]

A MA or PhD from a top-tier university is certainly one of the stepping stones to becoming the head of a big corporation. I can't name any CEO's or top-executives who don't have at least a MA from a big-name university.

Sources please? Have you never heard of Microsoft, Apple or Facebook? I'm pretty much oblivious to the business world, and even I know that Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Mark Zuckerburg don't have college degrees (except for maybe honorary ones). Please, if you're going to start a topic (or should I say, a bunch of topics) and argue a point, do everyone the courtesy of at least doing a trivial amount of research on the topic. It's really not that difficult, and I'm most certainly not the first one to tell you this.

 

[wukunlin]

Here's a fun page:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_college_dropout_billionaires

But this is pretty obvious trolling...

i knew it, being a drug lord has got to be the way to go

 

[Vanadium 50]

It's clear that the OP is not putting as much effort into making his claims as others are putting into rebutting them, which is a good time to close the thread.