During Lloyd Blankfein’s tenure as CEO of Goldman Sachs, thousands of recent graduates from leading universities joined the ranks of the investment banking giant.
Yet even though he is a Harvard alum himself, Blankfein didn’t hold elitist views about a person’s educational background and recognized that exceptional talent can come from outside the Ivy League.
In an interview two weeks ago, Blankfein pointed out that his colleague Gary Cohn—Goldman’s former president and chief operating officer—attended American University, while current CEO David Solomon went to Hamilton College.
Blankfein conceded that, overall, graduates from elite schools tend to outperform their peers from other institutions.
“These top schools are extremely hard to get into and have very high standards, so their average student performance will be higher,” he said. “The average graduate might be more accomplished, and the bottom quartile is definitely going to be far stronger.”
But when evaluating the cream of the crop, that advantage fades, Blankfein added—largely because large public universities have much bigger student populations.
Surviving such a rigorous environment to emerge at the top of the class means more than being the best in a significantly smaller pool.
“If you compare the absolute top of Harvard (where you’re the best of 1,600) to the absolute top of the University of Minnesota (the best of 50,000) and consider what they’ve gone through,” he said, “I’d argue those Minnesota top graduates are at least as good, maybe even better.”
In fact, building that edge starts even before college. Students who enrolled in non-elite universities have been “swimming upstream against a much stronger current,” Blankfein noted.
But for students from top prep schools like Choate or Andover— which send many graduates to the Ivy League—“the current is working in your favor,” he said.
Blankfein’s comments come as Americans reevaluate the value of a college degree: AI is reducing demand for entry-level professional workers, while interest in skilled trades is booming (these jobs are less affected by AI and don’t require taking on tens of thousands of dollars in student loans).
Additionally, college students are increasingly using AI to complete coursework, which professors often grade with AI tools. The academic rigor of higher education is also in doubt: Harvard has admitted that [missing context] now leads to about 60% of grades being A’s—up from 40% a decade ago and less than a quarter 20 years ago.
Meanwhile, author Malcolm Gladwell recently advised prospective college students to choose their second or third-choice school, where they have a shot at being top of their class.
“If you want to succeed in college, you never want to be in the bottom half of your class—it’s too hard,” he said during an appearance on the Hasan Minhaj Doesn’t Know podcast. “So go to Harvard only if you think you can be in the top quarter of your class there. That’s fine. But don’t go if you’ll be at the bottom—especially if you’re doing STEM; you’ll just drop out.”
However, the proliferation of AI-generated resumes has made many applications look identical, making it harder to distinguish candidates.
A 2025 survey of over 150 companies found that 26% recruit from a narrow range of schools—up from 17% in 2022—according to recruiting intelligence firm Veris Insights.
This means job applicants from top schools or those near company headquarters get priority, per Chelsea Schein, Veris’s vice president of research strategy.
“Not everyone starts from the same place if some people have access to on-campus engagement and others don’t,” she said.