Top University of Minnesota grads are ‘at least as good, maybe better’ than the best and brightest from Harvard, former Goldman Sachs CEO says

When Lloyd Blankfein was CEO of Goldman Sachs, thousands of newly minted graduates from top universities joined the ranks of the investment banking giant.

But despite being a Harvard alum himself, he wasn’t a snob about where someone went to school and recognized that superior talent can come from outside the Ivy League.

In an interview on the Big Shot podcast two weeks ago, Blankfein pointed out that his colleague Gary Cohn, Goldman’s former president and chief operating officer, attended American University, and current CEO David Solomon went to Hamilton College.

To be sure, the overall population of grads from elite schools should exceed their peers elsewhere, Blankfein conceded.

“The average is going to be higher at these great schools, which are very, very hard to get into and have very high thresholds,” he said. “And the average person may be higher, and certainly the bottom quartile is going to be a lot higher.”

But when assessing the cream of the crop, that advantage disappears, Blankfein added. That’s because a large public university has a much bigger student population.

So surviving such a gauntlet to emerge at the head of the class means more than being the best in a significantly smaller pool.

“If you’re going to look at the tippy, tippy top of Harvard o...