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40-year decision - TrumpCard - 12-28-2014

We regularly hear that Stanford's recruiting pitch includes an emphasis on the 40-year decision.  The implication is that high school recruits will have more accomplished careers if they attend Stanford rather than another university.  I buy into the sales pitch because I know Stanford is a great university.  My question is whether Stanford has put together evidence to back it up.  This question occurred to me because the Cory Booker video seemed to place too much emphasis on one alumnus.  Is there a list of highly accomplished professionals who were scholarship athletes at Stanford?  I'm not necessarily talking about people who are famous.  I'm just talking about people who have solid professional careers.  I would be especially interested in reading about former athletes who now work in technical fields like medicine or computer software. 

PS:  I am interested in evidence of the value of the Stanford academic program, so I am not asking about athletes who have become successful in Olympic or professional sports.

PPS:  I am aware of John Arrillaga.  Also, I seem to recall someone posting a list of accomplished WBB athletes, which includes a CEO of a major company.

Re: 40-year decision - oman - 12-28-2014

Why technical fields like medicine and computer science?

I would think you would would want to get stats on the percentage of athletes who get all post graduate and professional degrees, no matter the area.  I would think Stanford has to be careful about fighting the perception that it has little room for students who want a simple liberal arts degree. 



Re: 40-year decision - yvonne - 12-28-2014

Here's a letter Stanford Football sent last year to recruits. It doesn't capture the question you asked, but does demonstrate that Stanford students in general do better than students in general at other top 25 football schools. Its biggest flaws are that a) it doesn't look at just football players, but all students, and b) it looks at the mean, rather than the median, which could skew based on a few millionaires. I wonder whether Stanford's treating football players as student athletes might bring up the median over schools that treat football players as jocks for hire, though.

If you're looking for case studies, I suggest a good place to start would be LinkedIn. Just search on the names of some former athletes. I see quite a few in finance. I found a LinkedIn group called Stanford Football Alumni. Here are some names:

Mike Mitchell
Sr. Area Sales Manager at Xeralux

DeRonnie Pitts
Financial Advisor at Morgan Stanley

Michael Dotterer 1st
401Network Founder

Mike Biselli
Community Builder | Business Developer | Digital Health Entrepreneur | Social Engineer | Public Speaker

Che' Holloway
Front End Web Developer at Intuit, Inc.

Jon Haskins
Founder at IEO Recruiting

JJ Lasley
Real Estate, Commodities and Finance

Andy Sinclair
Sinclair Insurance, Broker/Agent

Frank R. Atkinson
Member, Board of Directors at MACH Energy

Harold F. "Butch" Sanders
Product Management / Operations - Architect and Warrior (Hardware, Software, Biotech)

Craig Albrecht
Vice President at Thompson Street Capital Partners

Drew Caylor
Private Equity Investor & Entrepreneur
Bodley - Mirage, LLC, FanSparker, LLC

Babatunde Oshinowo Jr.
UI/UX Engineer at NCSA & Founder of Chiefmoney

There's a similar LinkedIn group called Stanford Athletes.



Re: 40-year decision - BobK - 12-28-2014

Many Drs and Lawyers among the Women Basketball grads and several CEOs

Re: 40-year decision - Bruce Wang - 12-28-2014

During a bachelor party, I met a bunch of former Stanford football players at a club in NYC.  They all worked at bulge bracket investment banks.  They seemed to be doing pretty well for themselves as their table was much better than ours.

Re: 40-year decision - TrumpCard - 12-28-2014

A couple of additions and responses:

(1) I saw the letter relating to average income of alumni.  If I recall correctly, the data includes all alumni, not just athletes.  I'm interested in the professional accomplishments of Stanford athletes.

(2) I am interested in technical fields because I have heard rumors that other schools use a negative recruiting pitch that athletes at Stanford can't hack it in the ultra competitive technical fields.  Pratt and Rhyne have outstanding GPAs in engineering, but they need more time to establish careers.  We can cite Marecic and Wusu as guys apparently headed into careers in medicine.  My memory fades as I go further back in time though, and it takes time to establish a profession. 

(3) I found the website with info on WBB alumni:  http://www.stanfordfbc.org/FBCFiles/alumni_alphabetical.htm

Re: 40-year decision - Bruce Wang - 12-28-2014

(12-28-2014, 05:02 PM)TrumpCard link Wrote:(2) I am interested in technical fields because I have heard rumors that other schools use a negative recruiting pitch that athletes at Stanford can't hack it in the ultra competitive technical fields. 

This kind of negative recruiting backfires on the kind of athletes we want and get.

Re: 40-year decision - Stymie - 12-28-2014

I personally think that the "40-year decision" meme is highly overrated.  I'm a few years past that 40-year milestone and I can honestly say that after the 1st 5-10 years of my career, my Stanford degree (as well as my "Stanford of the East" degree) meant increasingly nada the more I aged and the more influence I achieved.  What counted for me and still counts is the quality of character, rather than the quality of the sheepskin.  Of the hundreds of people I worked closely with over my working career (even if in some cases only for very short periods), none shone out to me just because they happened to have a Stanford or Harvard or whatever degree.  What shone out (if and when it did-genius is rare and ephemeral) was random relative to where they got (if any) a degree.

When we pontificate to our potential recruits that "our" degree is significantly more valuable than that of our quasi-competitors (or even the Florida States of the world) we are potentially sticking our heads in the sand.

Re: 40-year decision - yvonne - 12-28-2014

James McGillicudy, offensive lineman from the Orange Bowl team, is a team lead at a company that was acquired by Salesforce this year. You can even see his picture on the Company page. https://www.relateiq.com/company.

Toby Norwood is Distribution Network Optimization Engineer at Intel. Granted, Industrial Engineering isn't as techie as other types of engineering, but it does require and understanding of design, materials, and data.

Eddie Gayles from the 2001 Rose Bowl team is senior software engineer at Amazon's Lab 126, which is the group that develops the Fire tablet and other hardware.

Do a few LinkedIn searches and you'll uncover some interesting stories.



Re: 40-year decision - Hank 91 - 12-28-2014

Damon Dunn made a fortune in commercial real estate.
Jon Volpe is CEO of Nova Home Loans.
Tommy Vardell is managing director of Northgate Capital.

Re: 40-year decision - BostonCard - 12-29-2014

How about David Shaw: Bradford M. Freeman Director of Football at Stanford University

BC

Re: 40-year decision - 81alum - 12-29-2014

This thread contains my general response to this recurring topic:
http://thecardboard.org/board/index.php/topic,10895.msg102420.html

Suffice it to say that the kinds of students that come to Stanford--whether they are athletes or not--have a variety of goals.  A significant number of our students--varying from year to year--are not "careerists" at all.  These students value Stanford because they believe the quality of the liberal arts education they will receive will be first rate.  For these students, crass appeals to income earning potential could be a detriment.  They would rather hear about Condi Rice mentoring Chiney, or the quality of the Talisman singers, or the number of students interning in Washington, or our superb creative writing program.

The 40 year decision is absolutely the right way to think about it--but we need to think about how the undergraduate experience enriches an appreciation of civilization, of citizenship, and of humane values over decades of life too.


Re: 40-year decision - Hulk01 - 12-29-2014

Phil Satre became president, and still may be, of Harrah's.  Randy Vataha did very well in sports management. 

My study and work on brands, and my experience, convinces me that the Stanford brand tilts the table toward its grads for their entire lives. 

It's of limited value, to be sure, in the arts, just as a 3.95 at any school won't help you land a screenwriting job.  Even at that, my Stanford brand has lots of my books and helped close a lot of speaking inquiries. 

Re: 40-year decision - SUBuddha - 12-30-2014

Vince Otupal is now an AD in Utah, formerly in the cal state system.