Fourth was Apple Inc., whose chief executive, Tim Cook, is arguably the most important executive in all of tech. He went to a university better known for football than academics: Auburn.

Are you sensing a pattern here? General Electric Co.’s Lawrence Culp went to Washington College in Chestertown, Maryland. Cardinal Health Inc.’s Michael Kaufmann went to Ohio Northern University in Ada, Ohio. AT&T Inc.’s Randall Stephenson went to the University of Central Oklahoma in Edmond, Oklahoma. General Motors Co.’s Mary Barra went to Kettering University in Flint, Michigan. (Kettering used to be the General Motors Institute before it was spun off from GM in the early 1980s.)

Of the CEOs of the top 20 companies in last year’s Fortune 500, exactly one — Amazon.com Inc.’s Jeff Bezos — went to an Ivy League school (Princeton). And that’s not all. We tend to think of the founders of technology companies as having all gone to Stanford University (or dropping out of Harvard University). And yes, many of them did. But Michael Dell went to the University of Texas. Steve Jobs dropped out of Reed College in Portland, Oregon. Marc Andreessen went to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. So did Larry Ellison, though he never graduated.

When I see something like the college admissions scandal that broke on Tuesday — with dozens of parents arrested for resorting to bribery to get their kids into a prestigious school like Yale or Georgetown — I shake my head in dismay. Not because of the criminality; I mean, bribing a women’s soccer coach to pretend your kid is an athlete is more comedy than tragedy. And not because of the sheer stupidity, either. Didn’t anybody tell these rich parents that with their wealth all they had to do was make a sizable donation to get their kid into a “good school,” no matter how poor their grades? (Exhibit A: Jared Kushner, who got into Harvard after his father pledged to make a $2.5 million donation.)

No, what dismays me is that these parents and their children — just like millions of elite parents and their children up and down the East and West coasts — seem to view getting in a top-ranked school, preferably an Ivy League university, as an absolute key to a successful life. Yes, there are powerful reasons, starting with status anxiety, that underlie the obsession with name-brand schools. And yes, as several high-brow commentators have noted, getting your kid into an elite school is a way for the so-called meritocracy to replicate itself into the next generation.

But the elites can’t say that out loud. So the way they justify their obsession is by saying that an education from a top school — not just the Ivies, but the Dukes, the Berkeleys, the Stanfords, the Amhersts — gives their graduates a leg up on life. And perhaps, in a status-obsessed profession like finance, it does. But for the vast majority of us, it won’t. And it doesn’t. If you don’t believe me, just look at that list of CEOs again.

Maybe a Harvard diploma will give a graduate an easier shot at landing a first job out of school. Maybe. But that’s really the only advantage, and it doesn’t last long. Once you’ve landed the job, you have to perform. If you don’t, your Harvard degree isn’t going to be worth the parchment it’s printed on. And if you do perform, nobody is going to much care that you went to the University of Central Oklahoma. As the Wall Street Journal’s Jason Zweig put it on Twitter: