Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business (GSB) exhorts its students to dream big. When one of its alumni in the class of 2006, Mr Rishi Sunak, became Britain’s prime minister in 2022, the dean welcomed the news as if it had always been inevitable. “Rishi’s experience at Stanford raised his aspirations,” he proclaimed in a school-wide e-mail.

The GSB prides itself on offering the world’s most selective MBA programme. Its class of 420 students is less than half the size of that of its arch-rival, Harvard Business School – and represents just 6 per cent of applicants, compared with 10 per cent or so for HBS. Although not all of them can be heads of government, many will follow alumni such as Asia’s richest man, Mr Mukesh Ambani, or Detroit’s mightiest woman, Ms Mary Barra of General Motors, into corporate stardom.