Exploring the diverse academic backgrounds of water’s top leaders

School’s out for summer, so I finally have a bit more time to blog about… school.🙃

This post continues an occasional series on water utility chief executive officers (CEOs). With the generous support of Spring Point Partners, Natalie Smith and I collected data on top leaders from a randomized, stratified sample of more than a thousand water systems. Past posts using these data have looked at women in top executive posts, gendered career paths, and racial diversity.

Along with demographics, we also gathered data on executives professional backgrounds. Here we’ll look at an underappreciated dimension of leadership diversity and development in the water sector: utility executives’ education.

Academic achievement

Higher education is effectively required to lead a water utility today: over 96% of utility CEOs have college degrees, and nearly half earned postgraduate degrees. Here’s educational attainment for executives who hold at least one college degree:

Disciplinary diversity

At 18%, business/public administration is the second most common area of study for future water CEOs—perhaps unsurprisingly, since utilities are complex organizations that demand administrative acumen as much or more than engineering expertise. Another 15% of CEOs hold degrees in scientific fields like chemistry, physics, and biology; 9% earned degrees in social science disciplines, such as economics and political science. A smattering of other fields make up the remaining 10%.

Although engineering remains the modal field of study for future water utility CEOs, water’s top jobs are apparently open to leaders with nearly any disciplinary background. In fact, 52 of the executives in our sample had no prior water sector experience before taking their current positions.  

Graduate education as calling card & accelerator

Labor market research shows that postgraduate degrees sharpen professionals’ skills and send signals to employers about candidates’ competence and aspirations. These findings suggest that graduate training has these effects in the water leadership labor market, too.

Relatedly, the data show that CEOs with postgraduate degrees accelerate the journey to executive posts. On average, executives who hold graduate degrees reached the corner office 1.25 years earlier than those without graduate degrees:

Naturally, this result makes me happy as a professor who teaches principally in a MPA program. Alas, with these data we can’t conclude definitively that graduate education causes faster career advancement; postgraduate training isn’t randomly assigned in a laboratory, and we only observe the people who ultimately took executive posts, not the universe of people who earned graduate degrees. But the data certainly suggest that graduate education can help speed a professional’s path to a top executive post—especially when advancement involves moving from one organization to another.

Education & minority mobility

Advanced education appears to have particular significance for career advancement among nonwhite CEOs. Here’s the likelihood of an executive holding a graduate degree by race/ethnicity and gender:

Racial/ethnic minority executives are on average 11% more likely than their white counterparts to hold a postgraduate degree. This difference in educational attainment aligns with another pattern that emerges in the data: racial/ethnic minority CEOs have a roughly 50% probability of having been hired from outside—a 12% higher probability than their white peers, who are more likely to have been promoted from within.

Notably, there is virtually no gender difference in average educational attainment among our CEOs, and women executives are most likely to advance via internal promotion. ^†  

Lessons for leadership development

• Utility leadership requires college education but is open to many academic disciplines. That openness is an important strategic opportunity for the water sector, as it can draw talent from every direction to help meet its diverse challenges; leadership development efforts in the water sector should cast a wide net. That academic openness also makes the water sector a promising path for talented, ambitious professionals.
• Postgraduate education facilitates job mobility. Advanced graduate degrees create a more dynamic, competitive labor market for top executives—which can be better for utilities and professionals alike.
• Postgraduate degrees and job mobility facilitate racial/ethnic minority advancement. Efforts to enhance racial/ethnic diversity in utility leadership should go beyond mentorship, sponsorship, and skill-building to emphasize advanced formal education.

* Maybe for good reason?

**Many CEOs hold multiple degrees from different disciplines, so the degree proportions reported here reflect some double-counting.

† All of us simultaneously hold racial, ethnic, and gender identities, of course. So what about intersectionality? Unfortunately, we can’t say much about career paths and educational backgrounds of the nonwhite women who lead water utilities, since there are only 17 of them in our sample. In this case, underrepresentation is itself a barrier to the study of underrepresentation.