Since 1999, David Kang has pursued a peculiar hobby. That year, after Fortune released its annual Fortune 500 issue, Kang began to wonder about where chief executives of companies on the list had attended college. To keep track, the college professor did some research and manually entered their alma maters into a spreadsheet. After completing the task, Kang, then a professor at Dartmouth College’s Tuck School of Business, was shocked by what the data revealed.
“The results were stunning,” he told Fortune. “Like everyone else, I thought Ivy Leagues would dominate. But the largest place they had gone to was no college at all.”
