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Ivy League Degrees Aren't Necessarily A Formula For Success In Hollywood
The campus of Harvard University is seen in Cambridge, Mass.
(
Lisa Poole
/
AP
)
Topline:
As high school seniors across the Los Angeles area receive their college acceptance and rejection letters — producing anxiety among both them and their parents — a look at where 162 top executives, producers and showrunners across the entertainment industry reveals that an elite educational pedigree is by no means necessary for success.
Why it matters: Parents, especially those who work in the entertainment business, spend an inordinate amount of time and money from their children’s youngest days working to do everything they can to optimize their academic record and extracurriculars to position them for admission into an Ivy League or similarly elite college or university. Yet this obsession with the badge of a top-rated school in an effort to secure a great future does not jibe with the backgrounds of Hollywood’s leaders.
Where Hollywood CEOs went to college: Disney CEO Bob Iger is a graduate of Ithaca College. Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav went to SUNY Binghamton. Of the companies that operate the major studios, only Comcast CEO Brian Roberts attended an Ivy League school: Penn. (Comcast is based in Philadelphia, as is Penn, and it was not directly in the entertainment business when he attended.) The people directly running the studios are also overwhelmingly from non-Ivy schools.
USC and the Cal State System: Hollywood leaders reflect very well on California’s network of higher education institutions. Bela Bajaria, the chief creative officer of Netflix, went to Cal State Long Beach, as did Mike Hopkins, the head of Amazon Prime Video and Amazon & MGM Studios. Jamie Erlicht, one of the heads of worldwide video at Apple, attended UC San Diego. And of course, USC, which is a private school, has produced such executives as Dana Walden and Kevin Feige at Disney.
The big takeaway: The entertainment industry remains a place characterized by people who make their way through the industry with determination and creativity and not perfectly manicured resumes.
For more . . . read the full story on The Ankler.
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This story is published in partnership with The Ankler, a paid subscription publication about the entertainment industry.
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