U.S. colleges ranked by number of affiliated Congressmembers | Hacker News Reader

U.S. colleges ranked by number of affiliated Congressmembers

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61 pointsdanso51 comments

The title is incorrect. This is a ranking of the US news top-25 universities, with an additional tag noting the number of congressmembers associated with the school.

If actually ordered by congressional representation the top-3 would be:

1) Harvard

2) Yale

3) Georgetown

That sounds about exactly what one would expect. The best and the brightest of Stanford run into tech (mostly based in the Bay Area), and the best and the brightest from Princeton stream into finance and consulting firms (mostly based in New York.)

Princeton has the Wilson school for MPPs, so it's actually pretty big in Government and policy circles. I'm surprised the number isn't higher.

Princeton doesn't have any professional schools so no law degrees, medical degrees, or MBA's to fill the ranks with...

Correct. Princeton also has a small student body, it probably outperforms on a graduate per capita basis.

How did you calculate that?

Indeed. Also observable in the fact that while Harvard is the wealthiest school on an absolute basis, Princeton has the largest endowment per enrolled student. Harvard is more than twice the size of Princeton.

Similarly, I was surprised at how few had gone to John Hopkins, which also had a prestigious foreign service/ international relations program.

I have a feeling more SAIS alums end up in policy or foreign service jobs rather than pursuing politics.

Also, it's Johnssssssss =P

That's true, the priority of U.S. News and World Report reflects not just the popularity of that particular list, but that most of those schools have fairly canonical names that are easy to text-mine against ("text-mine" in the most crudest form, string matching and some regexing)...this project started out as an attempt to find out how many Congressmembers had reached various levels of higher education (e.g. B.A.,B.S.,MBA, etc) but the descriptions of educational events is too inconsistent in the Congress bioguide (that's even before considering how school names changed over the centuries).

So I decided to make the text-mining easier by just searching for well-known schools. It's possible that a few of the big public prestigious schools, such as University of Michigan, would be near the top. The raw text from each Congressmember's biography can be found in the repo:

https://github.com/dannguyen/congress-colleges/tree/master/d...

It's probably possible to (easily) automate the classification of how many Congressmembers served in the military or passed the bar...but I can save that for another day.

It is an interesting and cool effort!

I would however at least provide the option to sort by congressmembers, and likely would make that the default. That would be more informative: anyone can look up the USNEWS Top-25.

Very cool! Would NNDB maybe have more normalized data? http://www.nndb.com/people/106/000122737/

Instead of mining the bio guide, I would mine Wikipedia. There is a page listing all members of the current U.S. Congress [0], and that page links to each member's own Wikipedia page. Almost without exception, each current member's personal page names the universities the member graduated from in the info box.

So mine the membership list for the members' names and the URLs of their personal Wikipedia pages, then mine the info box on each personal page for university affiliations. The links will allow you to disambiguate universities with similar names.

Pages also exist listing the membership of almost all former U.S. Congresses, so you could repeat the process going back in time; it would be interesting to see how affiliations have changed and diversified (or not) over the years. A similar process would work for finding the academic affiliations of members of the U.S. Supreme Court and the president's cabinet, as well as of state governors; it might even work to find comparable information for some sets of foreign poliicians (e.g., British MPs or members of European Parliament).

(And I agree with arcanus; you should change your page to sort by the count of affiliated members of Congress, not U.S. News rank, as it's the former that is the information being presented, not the latter.)

0. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/114th_United_States_Congress

I haven't looked at extreme edge cases, but you're right, Wikipedia tends to have the right alma mater, included situations in which someone has only attended classes but isn't reported as actually matriculating.

It wouldn't require a big traversal of Wikipedia (though I imagine that would be easy enough)...the unitedstates Github repo, which is a semi-automated crowdsourced repo of Congress data, has all the historical Congressmembers as structured YAML, including their Wikipedia page (though I haven't counted to see how many have that attribute filled):

https://github.com/unitedstates/congress-legislators

I was going to suggest looking at http://everypolitician.org but it seems like the US is ahead of the game in releasing this info. People from other countries that want to do similar might find it useful though.

Even that is flawed because it is not Congressioanl Representation Per Capita.

Not having it be per-capita overvalues high population schools like Harvard.

I agree, needs to be ranked per capita, but I still think that Harvard would be #1.

Yale would be #1

You'd have to account for type and breadth of schools within each, in that case. Many schools don't have medical or architecture schools, so why include per capita counts?

What gives you the idea that Harvard is high population? It only has ~21000 at a time, including undergrad, grad, and professional students. Cal has 38000.

Princeton has 7,946 total undergrad and grad students. Dartmouth has just 6,298.

so we can blame these schools for our awful congress?

you jest but this is actually a valid point.

I think it's interesting (and somewhat saddening) how the engineering schools on the list tend to be outliers in their rank to legislator ratio.

I would assume it's due to the general breakdown of majors at those schools, but it's still unfortunate that STEM majors don't seem to have a good pathway into political activism.

> it's still unfortunate that STEM majors don't seem to have a good pathway into political activism.

How many STEM majors want to be involved in politics? That's a complete field/industry change (not the case for law majors).

This is true only in the United States. Not so in China

The association doesn't have to be a degree.

I imagine many of the Ivy degrees are MBAs and JDs and the like. That's a path for STEM to follow into politics...

There are indeed many advanced degree holders in congress:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Members_of_the_111th_United_St...

The path isn't that hard, especially during a Presidential election year: https://www.hillaryclinton.com/jobs-and-internships/ (or whoever your candidate of choice is).

I worked the Obama campaign in '12. It was a blast, and I met a bunch of awesome people.

I think this has some issues. For example I live in Ohio, so I noticed "Oberlin College" in the liberal arts section. But one of them is from Oberlin College in N.Y., where as the other two are from Ohio (Two different cities named Oberlin). I feel like they shouldn't be listed together - as far as I know, there is no association, and with such low numbers of people this seems like a bit of an issue.

> attended Oberlin College, Oberlin, N.Y., 1982-1986

http://bioguide.congress.gov/scripts/biodisplay.pl?index=C00...

I think that's a typo. There's no such city as "Oberlin, New York"

Wikipedia says Yvette Clarke went to Oberlin College in Oberlin, Ohio.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yvette_Clarke

Yeah, just one of many examples of where the BioGuide text is inconsistent. It's only luck that Oberlin is a unique enough name that we can be relatively sure that the naive string matching refers to the one and only Oberlin College...

I can think of reasons for a lot of the colleges that produce many more congress members than their rank might lead one to guess (Georgetown is in DC, the military academies seem to make sense).

But why is Wesleyan such an outlier? It is a fine school, of course, but so are many of the others. Do they have some powerhouse poli sci program I am unaware of?

Perhaps it's the type of people that choose to go there and/or the families that send them.

Looks like there are many different Wesleyan Universities lumped into one?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indiana_Wesleyan_University

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Wesleyan_University

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ohio_Wesleyan_University

Oh you think it is an error in that the algorithm was not able to tell them apart from "the" Wesleyan?

http://www.wesleyan.edu/

As a Wesleyan alumn I was very surprised to see it so high, but I think it's likely a scraping error—searching for "Wesleyan University" shows many hits for Ohio Wesleyan, Kentucky Wesleyan, Texas Wesleyan, and so forth.

Needs some error checking. John Hine didn't go to Rice, he went to Luther Rice which is a seminary in Georgia.

So many fascinating possibilities to this data.

It would be interesting to see the next hundred schools. Places like Michigan State or Minnesota have so many students that it'd be interesting to see how many congress members they've produced.

It would also be interesting to see trends over time as well. Congress is more heavily tilted toward lawyers than it used to be 100 years ago. I wonder if that's part of the reason why the ivy league schools seem over-represented.

Interesting to see how well Georgetown does. Figure it's lots of children of legislators following in their parent's footsteps.

I think it is far more than just legacies. The proximity to capital hill and other government internships opens up many opportunities. Being regarded as the best school in D.C. means it is a natural talent feeder for government agencies.

It also has an extremely well regarded foreign service program.

Georgetown alum here and I can definitely vouch for this. While most students across the country would have to take an entire summer for an unpaid internship on The Hill while living in a very expensive city, our students can do this as an extra curricular during the academic year while living out of their dorm.

Plus if you're already doing political stuff in the city as a professional, the law school is not only the best in the area but one of the best in the country, which makes it a common choice for those in that line of work.

And let's not forget that this is just people affiliated with the university, which could include members of congress who teach classes at the school, not sure what the congressional roster is like right now but for example Madeline Albright teaches a very popular foreign service course.

Hoya Saxa ;)

Always great to not see your school listed :/

Would be good to normalize by student population.

No real surprises there. Except, personally, I didn't know the military academies were considered liberal arts schools.

Sigh. USN&WR rankings are commonly gamed by the institutions.

It would be interesting to see fraternity / secret society affiliations. For example, in 2004 both major party candidates for POTUS were members of the same secret society (Skull and Bones of Yale). Now there's a choice for ya.

It's also odd to see the armed forces service academies listed as "liberal arts" colleges.

Congressmen. Congressmen! Members of Congress, if you must. "Congressmembers" is an abomination. I suspect that most female members of Congress would agree.

Edit: I agree with Michael. If we're going to use a neologism, let's use "congresscritter", because it correctly implies that they are slimy and disgusting creatures.

Why do you care so much? Why not err on the side of making non-males feel welcome? Isn't that more important than nice-sounding words?

"Why not err on the side of making non-males feel welcome? Isn't that more important than nice-sounding words?"

That's a false dichotomy. "Members of congress" is also gender neutral and doesn't require making a ridiculous new word.

I think the standard gender-neutral term is "congresscritters".

Those female members of Congress have mastered politics.

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