Future Leaders or Fortunate Elites? Rethinking Leader Development in Higher Education

Aaron Pomerantz, PhD (Postdoctoral Research Fellow, The Doerr Institute for New Leaders, Rice University)

Ryan Brown, PhD (Managing Director for Measurement, The Doerr Institute for New Leaders, Rice University)

Late last year Time Magazine, in partnership with Statista, released their ranking of “the best colleges for future leaders.” From that title, one might assume these institutions were doing something that develops students into future leaders, but that isn’t what the ranking represents. To create their ranking, Time sampled the resumes of over 2000 high-status Americans and identified where they went to school. Time then determined which institutions showed up most frequently among these resumes to create their ranking system. Rather than indicating which schools are best at developing students into effective leaders, we suggest this ranking actually represents the extent to which schools select already-privileged students and provide them the social capital only accessible in such environments. However, developing future leaders requires more than diplomas from elite schools, and we must expect more of our educational institutions and the roles they play in leader development.

When explaining their ranking, Time admits that what distinguishes the schools on its list isn’t “teach[ing] students to be better leaders, but that alums receive more opportunities,” in part because graduation from an elite school is a handy mental shortcut for labelling someone as “smart.” In other words, Time’s ranking reveals that elite schools are, shockingly, elite! The ranking reveals nothing about these institutions’ capacity for shaping tomorrow’s leaders. Thus, we weren’t surprised to find that Time’s ranking is significantly correlated with the salaries given to the presidents of the schools in its list (r = –.29, p < .05); the better (i.e., lower) the ranking, the higher the president’s salary.

Time’s ranking methodology made this inevitable because it was based on a sample of “politicians, CEOs, union leaders, Nobel winners, and more.” As any good social scientist will tell you, this a terrible way to draw causal conclusions. Let’s imagine it’s 1950, when women were largely excluded from the halls of Higher Ed and the corner offices of corporate America. If we examined politicians, business leaders, and intellectuals, we might readily surmise that effective leadership required one to be male—missing out on the fact that women are systemically denied both elite educations and leadership opportunities.

Leadership is about more than possessing power or wielding authority, and effective leader development is about more than attending an elite school. It requires the intentional cultivation of students’ opportunities and experiences, which not only changes what they know or can do, but who they are. Leader development is a deliberate and intentional process, not something that occurs passively or by osmosis. Indeed, recent data from one elite American school demonstrates this clearly, showing that students who only took great academic courses over four years left the school with the same leadership capacity they had when they arrived as freshmen.

Most colleges and universities in America make some type of claim to develop leaders. Unfortunately, it’s easy to claim to develop leaders. Providing evidence that you actually do so is another matter. Compounding this issue, essentially no one in higher education has defined what they mean by “developing leaders.” At best, they seem to mean enhancing specific skills usable in specific industries (what we would consider professional development), not the identity-formation processes necessary for developing truly competent people ready to step into leadership roles and continue to grow their capacity to lead well. The book Leadership Reckoning: Can Higher Education Develop the Leaders We Need? highlighted how so few schools actually measure fundamental leader development factors such as leader identity, core leadership competencies, or consequent leader effectiveness.

Without such measurement, attempts to rank schools for leader development will be forced to rely on anemic practices like seeing which schools’ graduates attain positions of power and influence. However, given these schools’ rigorous academic standards, targeted recruitment, and legacy admissions, students at elite universities are likely to possess the social capital and individual traits that enable personal success before they even set foot on campus. Thus, no one can reasonably claim that the schools on Time’s list are truly developing leaders, because it is likely their graduates would have succeeded no matter where they went to school.