
U.S. colleges ranked by number of affiliated Congressmembers - danso
http://beta-congress-colleges-fun.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com/
======
arcanus
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

~~~
danso
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...](https://github.com/dannguyen/congress-
colleges/tree/master/data/raw/bioguide/text)

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.

~~~
pash
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](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/114th_United_States_Congress)

~~~
danso
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](https://github.com/unitedstates/congress-legislators)

~~~
ZeroGravitas
I was going to suggest looking at
[http://everypolitician.org](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.

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rustyfe
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.

~~~
ohitsdom
> 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).

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

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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.

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

[http://bioguide.congress.gov/scripts/biodisplay.pl?index=C00...](http://bioguide.congress.gov/scripts/biodisplay.pl?index=C001067)

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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yvette_Clarke)

~~~
danso
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...

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projectramo
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?

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

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indiana_Wesleyan_University](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indiana_Wesleyan_University)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Wesleyan_University](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Wesleyan_University)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ohio_Wesleyan_University](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ohio_Wesleyan_University)

~~~
projectramo
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/](http://www.wesleyan.edu/)

~~~
tobobo
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.

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

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jtbigwoo
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.

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

~~~
arcanus
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.

~~~
wadetandy
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.

~~~
arcanus
Hoya Saxa ;)

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akhilcacharya
Always great to not see your school listed :/

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soyiuz
Would be good to normalize by student population.

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

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OliverJones
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.

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marcoperaza
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.

~~~
blt
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?

~~~
jlarocco
"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.

