Biography | Mary Barra — The Stanford Quad Where a GM Fellowship Bought Two Years

People treat a Detroit engineering degree as enough to run an automaker.

General Motors decided it was not.

In 1988 the company sent Mary Barra west on a fellowship to the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

She finished the MBA in 1990.

The House biography prepared for her 2014 congressional appearance and later company profiles both date the fellowship to 1988 and the degree to 1990.

She had already taken the electrical-engineering bachelor from the General Motors Institute in Flint.

The Stanford years sat between Pontiac plant work and a return into manufacturing planning.

The pin is the Graduate School of Business cluster on the Stanford campus, now addressed at 655 Knight Way.

The Knight Management Center that a visitor sees opened in 2011, two decades after she left.

Do not look for her seminar rooms in that later stone and glass.

They were the older GSB buildings on this same campus.

The fellowship was a company bet, not a private sabbatical.

GM paid for the two years and took her back.

She is a living executive.

This memory marks a published degree and a public campus.

It does not mark a present office or a private house.

Photo: Stanford Graduate School of Business, Effeietsanders, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Portrait: Mary Barra, 13 August 2014, U.S. Department of State, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.