LSU Alumni Are About Eight Times as Likely as Yale Alumni to Have Worked in Oil and Gas
Did you know that 3.01% of Louisiana State University alumni have worked at a major oil and gas company, compared with 0.37% of Yale University alumni?
Media buyers who build energy and industrial audiences often start with Ivy League letterhead. The name feels like a shortcut to the right people. In the AllSource identity graph, the shortcut points the wrong way for at least one high-value pipeline: major oil and gas employers.
In AllSource IDGraph (EducationHistory_V5 joined to EmploymentHistory_V5, counted as unique people), 3.01% of Louisiana State University alumni have worked at a major oil and gas company (ExxonMobil, Shell, Chevron, BP, Schlumberger or Halliburton), compared with 0.37% of Yale University alumni.
- Louisiana State University: 3.01% of alumni (2,154 of 71,625 people)
- Yale University: 0.37% of alumni (205 of 55,894 people)
That is about eight times the share. Louisiana State University sits in Baton Rouge, right in Gulf Coast energy country.
How the numbers were built
Each school's denominator is every person in IDGraph with an education record matching that school. For LSU, that includes Louisiana State University and excludes regional campuses such as Alexandria, Shreveport and Eunice, plus health-system labels. For Yale, it includes Yale University and its named schools, such as Yale Law School and Yale College.
The numerator is people from that school with a past employer record, not a current one, that matches major oil and gas or oilfield services employers, including ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell, BP, Schlumberger, Halliburton and close corporate variants. Shellpoint records are excluded so that a similar name does not inflate the count.
Coverage, and why the direction holds
Not every person in the graph has employment history on file. Past-employer data is populated for 81.95% of Louisiana State University alumni and 82.73% of Yale alumni, so coverage is nearly identical for the two schools. Among only the people with populated past-employer data, the rates are 3.67% for LSU and 0.44% for Yale. That is the same direction as the headline, so the gap is not an artifact of one school simply having more records.
The headline uses the share of each school's total alumni in the graph. That keeps the comparison fair between schools of different sizes, and it is the number a planner should start with before looking at raw headcount.
Why it matters for activation
School is a hiring pipeline, and pipelines are very different from one school to the next. An energy audience built only from Ivy League alumni can miss a large share of people who already carried a major oil and gas employer label earlier in their careers. If your plan targets people with energy experience, the employer label is the signal to buy, and the school label is only a proxy for it.
Prestige and pipeline are different things. Both can be useful in a plan. Treating one as the other wastes budget.
What to do with the finding
- Size alumni segments by employer path, not by school prestige alone.
- Ask your data vendor for the join method: school match, then employer set, then unique people, not record rows.
- Lead with the share of each school's alumni, then check headcount, so a large school does not win on size alone.
- Keep coverage notes next to any school comparison, and check that the rate among populated records points the same direction.
- Test past-employer audiences, such as former oil and gas people, alongside alumni audiences rather than assuming one replaces the other.
This is owned AllSource identity analysis for media buyers evaluating education and past-company audiences. It is not a claim about admissions, campus culture or hiring merit. It is a measurement of people who carry both a school label and a major oil and gas employer label in the graph.