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U.S. colleges ranked by number of affiliated Congressmembers

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Re: U.S. colleges ranked by number of affiliated Congressmembers

#11

Post by arcanus »

danso wrote: post #5
arcanus wrote: post #2

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'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.…

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.

Re: U.S. colleges ranked by number of affiliated Congressmembers

#12

Post by ChazDazzle »

ohitsdom wrote: post #9
rustyfe wrote: post #4

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

Re: U.S. colleges ranked by number of affiliated Congressmembers

#13

Post by showerst »

danso wrote: post #5
arcanus wrote: post #2

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'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.…

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

Re: U.S. colleges ranked by number of affiliated Congressmembers

#14

Post by arcanus »

showerst wrote: post #6
s_q_b wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

Re: U.S. colleges ranked by number of affiliated Congressmembers

#15

Post by Nicholas_C »

projectramo wrote: post #10

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.

Re: U.S. colleges ranked by number of affiliated Congressmembers

#16

Post by DSMan195276 »

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.

Re: U.S. colleges ranked by number of affiliated Congressmembers

#18

Post by maxerickson »

rustyfe wrote: post #4

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.

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...

Re: U.S. colleges ranked by number of affiliated Congressmembers

#20

Post by theklub »

projectramo wrote: post #10

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?

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

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