Nucor VP MaryEmily Slate Scraps Her Way to the Top of the Heap

MaryEmily Slate of Nucor.

Go to college: Your future depends on it.

That’s great advice, Blytheville steel plant manager MaryEmily Slate says, but it comes with an asterisk. “I’m absolutely the oddity. I never went.”

Slate preaches the value of a college degree, and can cite statistics showing that college graduates are paid far better than others on average. “I tell my kids that, and I do believe it,” she said.

But there are other paths to success, and with just a high school education, Slate has proved it.

At 51, she is a vice president and general manager for Nucor Steel Arkansas, overseeing more than 700 workers at two steel mills in Mississippi County. Counting two other operations nearby, her company employs almost 1,700 people in the county. (See Mississippi County’s Nucor: 3 Decades, 4 Facilities.)

“We have workers with education levels everywhere from high school to Ph.D.,” said Slate, an enthusiastic native of the St. Louis suburbs who speaks about her company with the fervor of an evangelist.

Her workers’ pay, averaging almost $90,000 a year, is more than double Arkansas’ median household income, according to U.S. Census figures. The household income numbers dovetail with the state’s education ranking: Arkansas is 48th among the 50 states in degree-holders with just more than 20 percent of its population having completed college.

So Slate is insistent: College is the smarter choice for most ambitious young people. But she also somewhat reluctantly tells her story — of how a single mother not long out of high school in Granite City, Illinois, took entry-level office work at a steel company and wound up running steel plants. She wouldn’t reveal her compensation, but she said it was “definitely far more than I ever thought I could make.”

“I started as a receptionist at 19,” she said in a telephone interview from Charlotte, North Carolina, where she regularly attends meetings at Nucor’s corporate headquarters. “I worked my way up through office clerk, inside sales, outside sales, sales manager, and then made the jump to operations manager.”

Eventually, a training program took Slate to five steel mills run by leading companies in the industry. The last was a Nucor plant in Crawfordsville, Indiana, and Slate was smitten.

“I remember saying someday I’m going to work for that company,” she said. “Everyone was so committed and so proud. To them, it didn’t seem like just a job; it was a calling. I found from the start that Nucor’s values were my values, and I love the company I work for. That’s why I’m hesitant to focus on me, because it’s really all about the team.”

Praises STEM Efforts

When Slate became manager of Nucor’s Hickman and Castrip plants in far northeast Arkansas last year, she was familiar with the area. She had worked in Mississippi County once before, in sales for Huntco Steel before joining Nucor.

She was elevated to Nucor vice president and general manager when she took over running the company’s plant in Auburn, New York, in 2010. There she started telling her story to high school students, working with the Central New York STEM Connection and speaking at career-day events, where she promoted jobs in manufacturing.

“STEM is an amazing project,” said Slate, who recently discovered the Arkansas STEM Coalition, a Little Rock-based public-private partnership committed to promoting training and careers involving science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

Slate applauds STEM efforts as a link between students and jobs they might not have considered. “It basically partners industries with schools, and students get to see that manufacturing work can be smart, fulfilling and well-paid.”

“Everybody at Nucor has earning opportunities that are hard to match in other fields,” she added. “Every child of a Nucor team member gets a scholarship, and the benefits are good.”

Slate, who took charge of the Arkansas steel plants in July 2015, doesn’t want her success story to discourage anyone from attending college. She said she fought that battle with her own children: Nathan, Christopher and Rebecca. Christopher and Nathan, a Nucor employee, live in Alabama, where Slate helped to run Nucor operations before moving to New York. Rebecca attends college in upstate New York, majoring in early elementary education. Slate and her husband live across the Mississippi River from Blytheville in Dyersburg, Tennessee.

Slate is familiar with studies like a 2014 survey by the Bureau of Labor Statistics that found that among full-time workers ages 25 to 50, those with a college degree earned about $1,100 a week compared with less than $700 a week for high school graduates with no college.

The pay gap between American college graduates and others reached a record high in 2013, according to data based on an analysis of Labor Department statistics by the Economic Policy Institute in Washington. Four-year degree holders earned on average 98 percent more per hour than people without a degree.

However, a recent study by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York suggests that a quarter of the lowest-earning college graduates earn no more than successful high school graduates, and University of Toronto researchers Philip Oreopoulos and Uros Petronijevic found that, at least among Americans 30 to 50, the median college degree holder has less annual income than the top 10 percent of earners with only high school diplomas.

Still, Slate points out that people are individuals, not averages, and says the benefits of college go far beyond dollar signs.

“College proves that you’re willing to work hard, and it definitely gives you a foot up in the job market,” Slate said, adding that she would like to see Arkansas’ college-completion numbers improve.

“My path was anything but typical,” she says. “I was a single mother before I started working. I talked a lot to the STEM students about not allowing a difficult challenge or what might be seen as a bad turn in their path keep them from reaching for the stars.” Slate said starting at the bottom required determination, and that she “was going to be the best receptionist that I could possibly be.”

She added, “It really comes down to the person. People with ambition, who are smart and willing to learn, they can succeed in school or in the workplace. I was interested in learning everything I could about other jobs in the industry that I might want to do.”

To succeed, Slate said, is to take risks.

“I never dreamed that my first job could lead me to such a successful career,” Slate said.

“I tell kids to be willing to step out of your comfort zone and accept the challenge of change when opportunities arise. That adaptability can make all the difference.”