Bell Curve

58 The Emergence of a Cognitive Elite Cognitive Partitioning by Occupation 59right poverty) but because a college degree was not considered importantfor running a business.20 A Wall Street tycoon (himself a Harvardalumnus) writing in 1908 advised parents that "practical business is thebest school and college" for their sons who sought a business career andthat, indeed, a college education "is in many instances not only a hindrance,but absolutely fatal to success."21The lack of a college education does not mean that senior executivesof 1900 were necessarily less bright than their counterparts in 1990. Butother evidence points to a revolution in the recruitment of senior executivesthat was not much different from the revolution in educationalstratification that began in the 1950s. In 1900, the CEO of a large companywas likely to be the archetype of the privileged capitalist elite thatC. Wright Mills described in The Power Elite: born into affluence, theson of a business executive or a professional person, not only a WASPbut an Episcopalian WASP.22 In 1950, it was much the same. The fathers'occupations were about the same as they had been in 1900, withover 70 percent having been business executives or professionals, and,while Protestantism was less overwhelmingly dominant than it had beenin 1900, it remained the right religion, with Episcopalianism still beingthe rightest of all. Fewer CEOs in 1950 had been born into wealthy families(down from almost half in 1900 to about a third), but they werecontinuing to be drawn primarily from the economically comfortablepart of the population. The proportion coming from poor families hadnot changed. Many CEOs in the first half of the century had their jobsbecause their family's name was on the sign above the factory door; manyhad reached their eminent positions only because they did not have tocompete against more able people who were excluded from the competitionfor lack of the right religion, skin color, national origin, or fam.ily connections.In the next twenty-five years, the picture changed. The proportionof CEOs who came from wealthy families had dropped from almost halfin 1900 and a third in 1950 to 5.5 percent by 1976.23 The CEO of 1976was still disproportionately likely to be Episcopalian but much less sothan in 1900-and by 1976 he was also disproportionately likely to beJewish, unheard of in 1920 or earlier. In short, social and economic backgroundwas no longer nearly as important in 1976 as in the first half ofthe century. Educational level was becoming the high road to the executivesuite at the same time that education was becoming more de-In fifty years, the education of the typical CEOincreases from high school to graduate schoolPercentage of CEOs with ...70% - ... no more than ahigh school diploma... bachelqr' s degree /. . .graduatk training0% I I I I1900 1925 1950 1976Source: Burck 1976, p. 172; Newcomer 1955, Table 24.pendent on cognitive ability, as Chapter 1 showed. The figure abovetraces the change in highest educational attainment from 1900 to 1976for CEOs of the largest U.S. companies.The timing of the changes is instructive. The decline of the highschool-educated chief executive was fairly steady rhroughout the period.College-educated CEOs surged into the executive suite in the1925-1950 period. But as in the case of educational stratification, themost dramatic shift occurred after 1950, represented by the skyrocketingproportion of chief executives who had attended graduate scho01.'~"By 1976,40 percent of the Fortune 500 companies were headed by individualswhose background was in finance or law, fields of study thatare highly screened for intelligence. So we are left with this conservativeinterpretation: Nobody knows what the IQ mean or distributionwas for executives at the turn of the century, but it is clear that, as ofthe 1990s, the cognitive screens were up. How far up? The broad envelopeof possibilities suggests that senior business executives soak up alarge proportion of the top IQ decile who are not engaged in the dozen