U.S. colleges ranked by number of affiliated Congressmembers • Hacker News Board

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

#21

Post by pash » Wed, Jun 01, 2016, 3:41 PM UTC

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.…

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

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

#22

Post by tgokh » Wed, Jun 01, 2016, 3:41 PM UTC

arcanus wrote: post #14

showerst wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

Also, it's Johnssssssss =P

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

#23

Post by nhebb » Wed, Jun 01, 2016, 3:42 PM UTC

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

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

#24

Post by dumbfounder » Wed, Jun 01, 2016, 3:51 PM UTC

searine wrote: post #8

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

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.

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

#25

Post by projectramo » Wed, Jun 01, 2016, 3:52 PM UTC

theklub wrote: post #20

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

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/

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

#26

Post by ckinnan » Wed, Jun 01, 2016, 3:58 PM UTC

brorfred wrote: post #7

showerst wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

#27

Post by danso » Wed, Jun 01, 2016, 4:04 PM UTC

pash wrote: post #21

danso wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

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…

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

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

#28

Post by wildmusings » Wed, Jun 01, 2016, 4:05 PM UTC

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.

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

#29

Post by jtbigwoo » Wed, Jun 01, 2016, 4:15 PM UTC

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.

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

#30

Post by dsg42 » Wed, Jun 01, 2016, 4:16 PM UTC

searine wrote: post #8

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

Even that is flawed because it is not Congressioanl Representation Per Capita. Not having it be per-capita overvalues high population schools like Harvard.

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.