(FORTUNE Magazine) – Conventional wisdom says you must attend an Ivy League or similarly elitist institution to have a shot at the executive suite. A look through the alumni directory of the decidedly egalitarian University of Illinois, however, suggests otherwise. Graduates from this heartland of higher learning seem to be way overrepresented in corporate America's upper echelons.

Eastman Kodak CEO George Fisher believes he first met General Electric CEO Jack Welch on the U of I campus in Urbana-Champaign almost 40 years ago. Welch was then a graduate student pursuing a Ph.D. in chemical engineering and teaching freshman chemistry on the side. Fisher, a first-year engineering student in Welch's class, apparently didn't make much of an impression. "Students had short hair in those days and they all looked alike, " recalls Welch.

True, there isn't much ivy at U of I; the school, which has an enrollment of 35,000, sprawls amid rich fields of corn and soybeans. Still, flora aside, the U of I is a veritable executive incubator. Besides Fisher and Welch, its renowned engineering and computer departments and the Midwest's hard-work ethic have combined to produce CEOs Jon Corzine of Goldman Sachs, John Georges of International Paper, Jerry Sanders of Advanced Micro Devices, James Benson of Equitable Life, Edward McMillan of Purina Mills, and Donald Staheli of Continental Grain, as well as retired CEOs Thomas Murphy of General Motors, Richard Voell of the Rockefeller Group, and Arnold Beckman of Beckman Instruments. Phoenix Suns president Jerry Colangelo was a captain of Illinois's basketball team the same year ABC Sports president Dennis Swanson was the team's manager.

These corporate Fighting Illini haven't forgotten alma mater, either. Fisher and his wife, Ann, for example, recently donated $1 million to the school of engineering to endow two professorships in their names. Then, during a campus reception to celebrate, an epiphany. The couple regretted not putting the gift in Fisher's parents' names. Their solution: toss in another $1 million gift. "It just goes to show mistakes can cost you," quipped the Kodak CEO. Fisher, who earned a Ph.D. in applied mathematics at Brown University after leaving Illinois, is co-chair of Illinois's $1 billion fundraising effort.

Younger alums are also buffing the Big Ten school's reputation. It was as a U of I undergraduate that Netscape's Marc Andreessen, today a multimillionaire at age 24, helped write the program for Mosaic, the Internet browser the university licensed to Spyglass in 1994. In fact, Illinois's supercomputer center is a powerful link to big business, since it offers unusually close partnerships to corporations. Today 15 companies, including AT&T, American Airlines, Caterpillar Tractor, Dow Chemical, Kodak, J.P. Morgan, Schlumberger, and Sears Roebuck, use the facility to sift complex data. Fisher found the program so useful that two years ago he sent two full-time staffers down to Urbana-Champaign to work on the supercomputer.

That's a new, old school tie.

- Linda Grant