What Ever Happened to the Top MBAs of 1991?

A look at where five high-achieving B-school grads from two decades ago ended up

By Tori Stilwell

They were the most coveted team members for group projects, the protégés of esteemed professors, the presidents of the finance club, the targets of every corporate recruiter who visited campus. Everyone remembers the smartest students in their MBA class. And everyone wonders what ever happened to them … until now.

Bloomberg Businessweek has tracked down five of the top students from the MBA Class of 1991 to find out where they ended up, and if success in B-school led to success in the working world. They each credit what they learned at B-school as extremely important to the discovery of their future careers, which doesn’t come as a surprise to Dave Wilson, president and chief executive officer of the Graduate Management Admission Council and a 1965 MBA grad from University of California, Berkeley’s Haas School of Business. "An MBA opens the door," Wilson says. "When you get in there, it gives you a sense of perspective, a balance, a world view that is often different from what you would have had before you took the degree."

This holds true for these high-achieving members of the MBA Class of 1991. Here are their stories:

Tom Anderson

Then: MIT Sloan School of Management Class of 1991, Seley Scholar, the most distinguished of Sloan’s achievement awards honoring outstanding leadership, professional promise, high academic achievement, and contributions to the school

Now: CEO, Education Dynamics

Tom Anderson graduated from Dartmouth in 1984 with a math degree and a plan to go into medicine. But after speaking to some doctors who expressed regret with their career choices due to the HMO mess that characterized the 1980s, Anderson changed his mind. He took a job teaching high school math for a few years and then joined Paine Webber as a stockbroker. He spent three years at the firm, and in that time he found himself drawn to asset management. But to make the job switch, he was going to need an MBA.

Anderson went out on a limb and applied to only one school: Sloan. "Fortunately I got in," he says. "I went there expecting to go into asset management, but one of the great things about the top business schools is that you get incredible exposure to a bunch of different companies and different fields in different professions."

After earning his MBA, Anderson signed on at McKinsey & Co. He worked there for the next decade, moving up the corporate ladder and eventually becoming a partner. He left McKinsey and joined Capital One, where he successfully ran, then sold, one of its medical lending businesses. Then, after taking on a similar role at three other businesses, Anderson gained a reputation as a star CEO in the private equity world.

Anderson now fuels a passion for education as the CEO of Education Dynamics, which aims to help adult learners find the right schools and the right degree. "Sloan was a life-changing experience for me on many dimensions," he says. "If I could have figured out how to get paid and do that my whole life, I would have been a permanent student."

Martha Blue

Then: University of North Carolina’s Kenan-Flagler Business School Class of 1991, Valedictorian

Now: Co-founder, Real Change Strategies

Martha Blue’s career began in fixed income sales and trading at Goldman Sachs after she graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in December 1986 with an accounting degree from the Wharton School. She stayed at Goldman for two years before deciding it wasn’t for her.

Blue took a six-month break in Florence, Italy, then returned stateside with a plan to earn her MBA. After spending a weekend in Chapel Hill, N.C., she knew that UNC’s Kenan-Flagler School of Business was her MBA destination. "The school had so much energy and so many people dedicated to making it a world-class program," Blue says. "It was the most realistic preparation for a work environment you could get at a business school."