Ryan Hertel, a student tour guide at the University of Wisconsin's Madison campus, pauses before the Old Red Gym, a former armoury firebombed by Viet Nam War protesters in 1970. That same year, homemade explosives killed a graduate student in physics working late into the night.

"The bombings are the sad point, the low point in our history," says Hertel, a 20-year-old junior, as he leads prospective students and their parents around the 933-acre campus.

The University of Wisconsin, the eighth-largest public university system in the US, has left those days of political unrest behind while maintaining its tradition of social consciousness, Provost Peter Spear says.

Less obvious to visitors, who can watch cows get milked at the school's working dairy farm every afternoon, is the university's other claim to fame: Wisconsin is a top breeding ground for US corporate leaders.

Wisconsin, with 29,000 undergraduates, tied with Harvard University's Harvard College for first place in educating the most chief executive officers of companies included in the Standard & Poor's 500 Index, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Each has 15 CEOs.

Honour roll

Wisconsin's CEO honour roll, from all of its campuses, includes Carol Bartz, CEO of Autodesk Inc, which makes software for architects and engineers; Thomas Falk, who runs Kimberly-Clark Corp, the largest US maker of disposable diapers; and Lee Raymond, head of ExxonMobil Corp, the world's largest publicly traded oil company.

Harvard alumni include Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft Corp, the world's largest software maker; Franklin Raines, who heads Fannie Mae, the largest source of US mortgage money; and Sumner Redstone, CEO of Viacom Inc, the third-largest US media company.

Harvard and Wisconsin outrank both Princeton University and Stanford University, two private institutions that tied for third place in educating the most CEOs.

State universities

Wisconsin's leadership in educating US chief executives comes at a time when gaining admission to highly selective colleges and universities has never been tougher, says Matthew Greene, a private college consultant based in Westport, Connecticut.

Big state universities like Wisconsin outpace their private counterparts in educating CEOs. Chief executives are four times more likely to have earned their undergraduate degrees from a publicly funded university than from an Ivy League school.

The top 10 educators of CEOs also include public universities such as the University of Texas, City University of New York, University of North Carolina, University of California, University of Missouri and University of Washington.

"There should be more respect for the kind of education you can get from a large public institution," says Sim Sitkin, founding director of the Centre of Leadership and Ethics at the Fuqua School of Business, at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina.

"Senior executives in large companies need not only come from an isolated elite but need to be able to relate to a wide spectrum of people," he says.

Wisconsin and other state schools may turn out more CEOs because their graduates have to try harder, says Maury Hanigan, founder of Hanigan Consulting Group. a New York-based consultant on human resources strategy.

CEOs who graduated from public universities say working their way through school helped instil a strong work ethic.

The pedigree

Such glowing testimonials about Wisconsin may make parents wonder just how important that Ivy League degree really is. James Wright, president of Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, defends its worth.

"What I'd like to think a Dartmouth or an Ivy League school does well is less the pedigree and more the education, encouraging independent initiative and risk taking that will serve them well when they move up in higher levels of management," Wright says.

Both Goldman Sachs's Paulson and General Electric's Immelt earned their undergraduate degrees at Dartmouth.

For the record, Wright was born in Madison and got his own bachelor's degree in 1964 from Wisconsin State University, which is now the University of Wisconsin at Platteville. He received both a master's and a doctorate in history from the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

For shareholders of S&P 500 companies, there may be an even better argument for a Wisconsin education.

In the 12 months ended on June 30, stocks of companies led by Wisconsin grads returned 27.4 per cent - a little more than 2 percentage points better than companies led by Harvard graduates.

(China Daily 08/02/2004 page12)