Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, July 15, 1990 TAG: 9007150098
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: E4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: CHRISTINA A. SAMUELS STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Sort of.
Yale and Princeton easily were the top two schools - both in terms of total number of CEOs and under a "power factor" the magazine developed to factor in class sizes.
No. 3 on the power factor list, though, was a private liberal-arts college in Lexington.
Washington and Lee produced five present or past CEOs, far fewer than Yale's total of 43, but more than Georgetown, Brown or Lehigh. And W&L's power factor of 2.86 left it well ahead of such educational giants as Harvard (1.91), Columbia (1.55) and Cornell (1.05).
The power factor takes into consideration the average size of the graduation class for each school during the 1950s - the decade when Fortune figures most of today's CEOs would have earned their undergraduate degrees. W&L graduated an average of just 175 students a year in that decade.
Deans at W&L credited everything from the honor code to the class size as reasons for the school's success in turning out business leaders.
Larry C. Peppers, dean of the School of Commerce, Economics and Politics, said the focus for aspiring business leaders should not be "highly technical, specialized courses" but on liberal arts courses. He said the smaller classes at the 241-year-old school encourage analytical training and critical thinking, both attributes useful to business people.
W&L's 11-to-1 student-faculty ratio also encourages students to take leadership roles in the classroom, said John Elrod, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences.
J. Carter Fox, a W&L grad who is CEO of Chesapeake Corp. in Richmond, said he learned during his college days that "education is a continuing thing." Fox came to W&L from a small town, Aylitt, so he said being exposed to people from different backgrounds helped broaden his understanding of people.
Not all of the CEOs produced by W&L went to Lexington as Alex P. Keaton types:
John D. Gottwald, CEO of Tredegar Inc. in Richmond, didn't start taking business courses until he was a senior. Before that, his interest was geology.
by CNB