UPDATE: In the post below we state that Ivanka Trump graduated magna cum laude from the Wharton school. It appears there’s some question as to whether Ivanka received summa cum laude or magna cum laude. Some reports quote Ivanka as insisting she graduated summa cum laude. One must assume that whether in fact she graduated summa or magna, her Wharton records have been adjusted to show summa by now so we correct our assertion. Ivanka Trump graduated summa cum laude.

According to Ivanka she Ivanka Trump is an intelligent woman. She has to be. She graduated magna cum laude from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania with a bachelor of science in economics, and she did it all on her own merits with no strings pulled anywhere by anyone. Magna cum laude “with great honor” is a step up from just cum laude “with honor”, but lower than summa cum laude, “with highest honor”. [If you care, there are other distinctions of honor bestowed upon college grads; but none of it is really relevant to anything]. The point is, Ivanka Trump wasn’t Einstein or his female equivalent, but she was an academically superior student nonetheless, and her superior mind and inherited ambition are what have propelled her to the top of the corporate ladder; not her name and other intangible assets. So she insists.

Ivanka Trump, as you may or may not know, is the daughter of self-professed financial genius Donald Trump. And as you can see from the photo, academia is not the only area in which the 25-year old former fashion model, entrepreneur and current vice president of Real Estate Development and Acquisitions at the Trump Organization stands apart from the average person; but how much of Ivanka’s success is truly the result of her hard work and how much of it can be attributed to her being “Ivanka Trump”?

There are many women with equal ambition and equal intelligence who never manage to get very far climbing the corporate ladder. Even Ivanka Trump knows that ambition and brains alone won’t often get a woman very far if her goal is to reach the top of the corporate ladder. Women have come far from the days when they couldn’t vote and were considered only useful for keeping house and bearing children; but they still haven’t overcome every hurdle of discrimination.

Ivanka Trump is 25 years old. Most women 25-years old don’t hold positions as vice-president of anything at multi-million-dollar corporations. Most women 25-years old who look like Ivanka Trump don’t have it very easy getting people to take them seriously, to respect them for their ambition and their brain. Presumably, Ivanka doesn’t wear thin strapped halter dresses with low necklines that bare excessive cleavage to the office; but no doubt the people she works with see the sexy photos of her in the magazines and, how ever conservatively she might dress at the office, it no doubt still becomes more difficult for her male colleagues not be thinking more about her physical assets than her mental when dealing with her.

So how did Ivanka Trump manage to rise so high in the ranks at such a young age where other women, possibly some of her own colleagues, move up the ladder at a significantly slower rate, most never managing to get past a certain rung? Ivanka doesn’t like when people say her father pays her way through life for her. She likes to point out that she pays her own way. She’s a working woman who earns her keep; and that may all be well and good. But without the Trump name Ivanka Trump is unlikely to have reached such a height of success so young, even with a Wharton degree and having graduated magna cum laude, and being very ambitious. And she clearly knows herself that her name is her most valuable asset. She’s said as much, insisting she won’t take her husband’s last name when she marries, and will give her children her father’s last name instead of their father’s as is the tradition.