The successful college dropout is rare. The majority of startup executives have advanced degrees

Research by Collin West and Gopinath Sundaramurthy

56% of executives hold advanced degrees or fellowships. 70% of U.S. startups have at least one C-level person with an advanced degree.

There’s an idea going around Silicon Valley that higher education doesn’t matter if you want to start or climb the ranks of a startup. People point to the likes of Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg as successful college dropouts. But looking at the executive teams of the companies they founded—Microsoft and Facebook—we still see that they are filled with graduate degree holders. Facebook’s number two, Sheryl Sandberg, is a Harvard MBA and Nathan Myhrvoid, Microsoft’s first CTO, went to Princeton on a fellowship where he completed a master’s and a PhD.

We at the Kauffman Fellows Research Center explored the link between education and startups using Crunchbase data to better understand these key drivers. Our analysis spanned 90,000 U.S. venture-backed startups, including 419,000 startup roles going as far back as 2001.

See the full article HERE.