Top CEOs have this degree

michaelshoe.com

2 points·michaelshoe··3 comments

I've found that the most important sections "What Did They Study in College?" conclusions are misleading. Engineering majors dominated the list (28), followed by business (16), economics (12), accounting (11) and finance (5). Personally I think it's a bit disingenuous and misleading to separate the engineering degrees while keeping the the other majors intact. Then when it comes to compare the engineering Vs business, all the business includes business, economics, accounting and finance. My conclusion from the article is that if you want to become a successful CEO where the main title is "executive" (as opposed to CFO, CIO, CTO, etc), because with engineering education and background you probably can "execute" better.

There are definitely assumptions involved in writing this piece:

My definition of "business degrees" were: Business(incl. biz mgmt/biz admin, etc.) + Accounting (11) + finance (5) = 32

"Engineering degrees" were: Everything with engineering in the name of the degree = 23

So for the time being, there are more CEOs with college business degrees than those with engineering degrees. If you separate accounting and finance from business, then the story is reversed.

However, I also did notice that the average age of the CEOs is 60 and the mean is 61; things may have changed now.

It will be interesting to see the backgrounds of some more recent founders of successful startup, etc.

interactive chart.

check it out.

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