I count 15 of 23 that have either an undergraduate degree or an MBA from an Ivy-league school or Stanford. Mostly HBS/GSB. That's 65% representation, relative to the less than 1% of undergraduates who graduate from the Ivy league.
Now, you can theorize that maybe it's because people who get into these schools are smart to begin with, and would have been equally successful elsewhere. But there is a lot of overlap in predictors between these schools and the ones right behind them. E.g. SAT Math interquartile ranges for Duke are 690/780 and the ones for Princeton are 710/800, and within that narrow range also fall Northwestern, Stanford, U Chicago, Penn, Columbia, Harvard, and Yale. The student bodies at these schools overlap more than they differ. If the key differentiator was the quality of the people coming in and not pedigree by itself, you would see a more graduated drop-off in representation.
I think it's obvious that the pipelines that Harvard/Yale/Princeton/Wharton/Stanford have to elite organizations in finance are a huge boost for people who have the option to acquire that credential, distinct from the qualifications those people come in with.
True. It should be pretty simple to model this out in Bayesian fashion. Doing so would probably bear your theory out, i.e., these schools seem overrepresented in top-tier finance relative to their numbers of graduates in any given region (VC in this case, perhaps IB/PE/etc. in other cases).
It goes beyond the credential, though. The credential is a side effect. Many (most?) lucrative careers in finance don't happen when a person with a Harvard/Yale/Princeton/Stanford diploma applies blindly to a job at Goldman Sachs. They begin when that person is an undergraduate at H/Y/P/S, where the Goldman recruiters show up in greater numbers (and with bigger quotas) at those schools than they do elsewhere. That's where the pipeline begins, and that's precisely why it's very hard for any credential to rival the pipeline these schools have built. From there, advantages begin to accrue and compound over the years (the "Cumulative Advantage" Theory).
Arguably, in many cases you could trace the origins of the pipelines even further back, to the elite private and prep schools with well-paved inroads into H/Y/P/S/etc.
There's no question you need to be smart to flourish at these schools, and to succeed in high finance. Probably in the top decile of IQ and effort, at least. But smart is just table stakes.
E.g. Accel Partners, just the SV office: http://www.accel.com/#people.
I count 15 of 23 that have either an undergraduate degree or an MBA from an Ivy-league school or Stanford. Mostly HBS/GSB. That's 65% representation, relative to the less than 1% of undergraduates who graduate from the Ivy league.
Now, you can theorize that maybe it's because people who get into these schools are smart to begin with, and would have been equally successful elsewhere. But there is a lot of overlap in predictors between these schools and the ones right behind them. E.g. SAT Math interquartile ranges for Duke are 690/780 and the ones for Princeton are 710/800, and within that narrow range also fall Northwestern, Stanford, U Chicago, Penn, Columbia, Harvard, and Yale. The student bodies at these schools overlap more than they differ. If the key differentiator was the quality of the people coming in and not pedigree by itself, you would see a more graduated drop-off in representation.
I think it's obvious that the pipelines that Harvard/Yale/Princeton/Wharton/Stanford have to elite organizations in finance are a huge boost for people who have the option to acquire that credential, distinct from the qualifications those people come in with.