Top Univ. of Minn. grads are ‘as good, maybe better’ than Harvard’s best: former Goldman Sachs CEO

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

In an interview on Big shot Blankfein noted two weeks ago that his colleague Gary Cohn, former president and chief operating officer of Goldman, went to American University, and current CEO David Solomon went to Hamilton College.

Certainly, the total number of graduates from elite schools must exceed their peers elsewhere, Blankfein acknowledged.

“The rate will be higher at these great schools, which are very difficult to get into and have very high thresholds,” he said. “The average person may be higher, and the bottom quartile will certainly be much higher.”

Blankfein added that when you evaluate the quality of the crop, this advantage disappears. This is because a larger public university has a larger student population.

So surviving such a challenge to emerge at the top of the class means more than being the best in a much smaller group.

“If you were to look at the top of Harvard, or the top of the University of Minnesota — where you’re in the top 50,000 students versus the top 1,600 — and I went through that, I would say that having been through that, they’re at least as good, maybe better,” he said.

In fact, developing this quality actually begins before you even start college. Students who attend non-elite universities are “swimming upstream against a much larger current,” Blankfein said.

But for students who go to top boarding prep schools like Choate or Andover, which send many graduates to the Ivy League, “the flow goes with you.”

These comments come as Americans reconsider the value of a college degree, as artificial intelligence reduces demand for entry-level workers in professional professions. By contrast, interest in skilled trades is booming, as those jobs are less affected by AI and do not require taking out tens of thousands of dollars, or more, in student loans.

In addition, college students are increasingly using AI to perform coursework, which is often evaluated by professors using AI. The academic rigor of higher education has also come into question, with Harvard University admitting that rampant grade inflation has resulted in about 60% of grades being distributed as A’s, up from 40% ten years ago and less than a quarter twenty years ago.

Meanwhile, author Malcolm Gladwell recently urged prospective college students to choose their second or third school, where they have a chance to be at the top of their class.

“If you are interested in succeeding in an educational institution, you would never want to be in the bottom half of your class,” he said in an episode of the program. “It is very difficult.” Hasan Minhaj doesn’t know Podcast. “So you should go to Harvard if you think you can be in the top quarter of your class at Harvard. That’s fine. But don’t go there if you’re going to be at the bottom of the class. Do you study STEM? You’ll just drop out.”

But the proliferation of AI-generated resumes has made many applications look identical, leading some recruiters to rely on a university’s prestige to differentiate candidates.

A 2025 survey of more than 150 companies found that 26% were hiring from a narrow range of schools, compared with 17% that were doing the same in 2022, according to recruitment intelligence firm Veris Insights.

This means that job applicants from top schools or those located near the company’s headquarters have priority, Chelsea Shen, vice president of search strategy at Ferris, told The New York Times. Wall Street Journal.

“Not everyone is going to start in the same place if some people can participate on campus and others can’t,” she said.