Alumni: Ivy in the Board Room

To reach the top ranks of American business, it helps to have a college degree — and it helps even more to have one from a good Ivy League school. A survey of the boards of directors of 52 of the nation's largest corporations shows that 83% of the directors are college grads — and that 36% attended Harvard, Yale or Princeton.

As it happens, it was not an enterprising Ivy League publicity man who unearthed these flattering statistics but Business Professor Stanley Vance of the University of Oregon, who published his results in the University of California's California Management Review. Possibly displaying a touch of West Coast chauvinism, Professor Vance found "ominous overtones" in the "mounting suspicion that our maturing industrial society is slowly but surely evolving its own distinctive elite" based in part on "the prevalence of specific school ties."