Where did Minnesota’s top CEOs go to college? Hint: not the Ivy League.

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Next month, some students who were wait-listed by Ivy League schools this year will start classes instead at one of Minnesota’s colleges. In effect, they earned their place at the top, but didn’t earn quite enough luck to get in. Unless the phone rings — and it almost never does — it’s off to their “safety school.” This kind of thing is hard to swallow for a generation raised to chase rare honors.

But does it matter? The brilliant student is still brilliant if she goes to the University of St. Thomas, the College of St. Benedict or the University of Minnesota. Does it matter if she was wait-listed by Dartmouth?

Some people certainly appear to think so. For them, the college quest starts young and involves tutors, sports, community service and more. It’s an all-of-life game show where each contestant does all the same things in an effort to look different. Generally, it doesn’t work: over 95% of applicants to Harvard, many with perfect GPAs, are rejected. By contrast, top state research universities usually accept around 75% of undergraduate applicants, as the University of Minnesota does. These are excellent schools, but they don’t care if you were captain of the competitive knitting team. They admit students based on their high school transcripts.

Whether Dartmouth matters depends on where your treasure is. But some of the angst over college admissions starts with the idea that getting into a “good school” is the first step to a successful career. Conventional wisdom of this sort is sometimes so obvious that nobody bothers to see if it’s actually true. We decided to have a look.

We started with the CEOs of Minnesota’s Top 50 public companies, then added 100 Minnesota leaders in other fields: hospital presidents, mayors, school superintendents, the heads of big philanthropies and so on. (Here’s the full list: tinyurl.com/minnCEO.) Whether they’re running Medtronic or Feed My Starving Children, these people are successful. So, did their success begin in the Ivy League?

Let’s start with the 50 corporate CEOs. None went to Ivy League colleges. Twelve went to highly selective schools like Northwestern or Georgia Tech. Thirty went to state universities or private colleges that accept most of their applicants, and six went to college in another country. (In case you’re wondering, six of the CEOs went to college in Minnesota: three are Tommies, two are Gophers and one is a Bennie.) One has a degree from the U.S. Naval Academy, and the CEO of The Tile Shop went straight into the Marines after high school. Getting into the Marines might be easier than getting into Yale, but getting through the Marines is another matter.

What about the wider range of leaders — those who run philanthropies, government agencies and such? Half of our 100 noncorporate leaders went to state universities, and 13 went to one of Minnesota’s many private colleges. None went to Carleton, our only highly selective school. While none of the corporate CEOs went to college in the Ivy League, 11 noncorporate leaders did, and another 11 went to very selective colleges like Williams, Wellesley or Tufts. Altogether, three-quarters of them went to colleges that accept 60% to 90% of all applicants.

So success at the age of 50 doesn’t require gunning for Harvard when you’re 12. But it would be wrong to conclude that college doesn’t matter at all, since 148 of the 150 leaders on our list have a four-year degree. And there is good evidence they did well in school, because three-quarters of them earned graduate degrees after college, which is generally only possible if you do well in college. Their graduate degrees include 19 from Ivy or Ivy-plus schools (most often Harvard or the University of Chicago), 20 from highly selective schools like Northwestern or Berkeley, and 24 from the University of Minnesota. The college admissions drill may not be worth it, but it looks like the graduate admissions drill is.

Is it a different story outside of Minnesota? It doesn’t seem so. Massachusetts is home to many elite universities, but just three of its Top 10 corporate CEOs went to college at an elite school. This is consistent with the broader Fortune 500, where most CEOs did not go to highly selective colleges. As in Minnesota, most of the Massachusetts CEOs went to graduate school, and several went to Harvard.

So what’s the benefit of an elite undergraduate degree? It would be delusional not to recognize that there are some advantages, and they certainly change the social context of a person’s life. This is probably what the frenzy to get in is mostly about. But a degree from Princeton or MIT doesn’t typically change someone’s long-term earnings, as some well-designed studies have concluded. This may be because, while some of their graduates go straight to Wall Street, others are drawn to careers where almost nobody gets rich. Here are three examples of fields where we find a lot of Ivy League graduates.

First, it should be no surprise that people who like to learn also like to teach. Elite college graduates often become academics. The Carleton English faculty alone can produce college sweatshirts from Amherst, Berkeley, Bowdoin, Harvard, Penn, Princeton, Wellesley, Wesleyan, Williams and Yale — plus Cambridge in the U.K. and, of course, Carleton.

Perhaps for similar reasons, Ivy Leaguers are heavily represented in elite journalism roles. All but three editors on the New York Times masthead went to Ivy League or highly selective schools. (But the other three went to the University of Iowa, the University of Minnesota-Duluth, and the University of St. Thomas … see, our kids really don’t need to go to Brown.)

Finally, elite college grads often take an interest in public policy, which leads to careers in the social sector, philanthropies and government. Eighteen of President Biden’s 26 Cabinet members went to elite colleges, though Biden is the first president since Reagan who didn’t go to an elite school. The Supreme Court is also decidedly Ivy League, and Minnesota’s two U.S. senators have four Ivy-plus degrees between them.

That said, our congressional delegation mostly went to schools like St. Kate’s, St. Cloud State and the University of Minnesota. And Congress is not, overall, dominated by elite college graduates, as these House and Senate lists show.

So should our kids even register for the elite college application rat race? Our answer is … maybe. Some schools require intense preparation, so getting in is very hard. These are generally engineering schools like Caltech, Harvey Mudd, or Webb Institute, where the (much) younger co-author of this piece will start this fall.

But much of what ambitious high schoolers do these days isn’t really preparation for college — it’s “crafting an applicant persona.” Following conventional wisdom, high schoolers play sports they don’t like, invent new clubs just so they can be president, and collect hours of community service with the enthusiasm of someone who’s doing it under a court order.

Life is too short. You’re young and healthy. Go buy a kayak. Spend time with your friends. Better yet, take them all to volunteer at the food shelf — and leave it off your college application. Hungry families don’t care who goes to Yale.

We have become so transfixed by the long lines outside of elite colleges that our best young people just get in the queue. Before doing that, they should ask some important questions: What can I do here that I can’t do anywhere else? How much is this about posting my acceptance on Instagram? What exactly will my monthly loan payments be? Will a degree from this place help me live a life of leadership and service?

People who make their lives count treat college as the start line, not the finish line. What they do in their formative years matters more than where they do it — whether they are at Harvard, Bemidji State, or in the Marines.

Dan Currell, a lawyer and consultant, was a deputy undersecretary and senior adviser at the U.S. Department of Education from 2018 to 2021. He is a trustee of Gustavus Adolphus College and lives in St. Paul. Curtis Craig, a 2024 graduate of Minnehaha Academy, is a member of the Webb Institute’s class of 2028. He lives in Minneapolis.