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April 29, 2005
Dear old Harvard, say it's not veritas!
Writer Michael Steinberger comments in today's WSJ on Harvard's influence in American politics, business, and life, arguing that it has never been lower (except among journalists). Here is the section on Harvard's influence in business:
Harvard also matters less in the business world. It is true that a few Harvard graduates (and one dropout, Bill Gates) have figured prominently in the digital revolution -- unquestionably the biggest business story in the past decade -- but Stanford is a much more prolific supplier of its brainpower. Google, Yahoo!, Cisco, Sun Microsystems and a raft of other marquee tech firms were partly or wholly incubated on the Stanford campus.Meanwhile, there are fewer Harvard diplomas hanging in corporate boardrooms. According to the executive search firm Stuart Spencer, the percentage of large-company CEOs holding Harvard MBAs declined to 23% last year from 28% in 1998. Of the Fortune 1000 CEOs appointed so far this year, just one, Corning's Wendell Weeks, earned a Harvard MBA. Asked about Harvard's declining presence in the executive suites, Mr. Weeks jokingly told USA Today: "I've yet to see a study that Harvard creates value."
Quite the opposite, actually. Two years ago, famed hedge-fund manager Victor Niederhoffer (himself a Harvard alumnus) and Laurel Kenner did a study measuring the performance of Nasdaq 100 companies run by Harvard graduates, of which there happened to be an unusually large number at the time. The results were not pretty. Mr. Niederhoffer and Ms. Kenner looked at the nine Nasdaq 100 firms headed by Harvard grads and found that they had, over a five-year period, dramatically underperformed Nasdaq firms run by graduates of other Ivy League schools, Ivy League equivalents (Stanford, MIT, Berkeley) and state schools.
Will Harvard become just another run-of-the-mill Ivy League school? Perhaps it will among Americans, but I would argue that Harvard is still the American university best known outside the US, and that won't change soon.
Posted by adrianjo at April 29, 2005 03:27 PM
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