The political ‘diploma divide’ now applies to members of Congress

There’s a new divide on Capitol Hill over education.

In a dramatic shift from 50 years ago, Republicans in Congress overwhelmingly attended nonelite universities for undergraduate and postgraduate studies. At the same time, almost half of all Democrats graduated from an Ivy League institution or some other elite university for undergraduate or postgraduate work, a slight increase from the early 1970s.

That’s the key finding from a new research paper published by three leading political observers from the University of Arkansas, Vanderbilt University and the University of Virginia.

The trio put together a 50-year study of members of Congress and their educational backgrounds. They traced the arc from a time when both parties were dominated by figures who attended universities like Harvard, Yale, Georgetown or Stanford to today, when many Democrats still have elite credentials while very few GOP lawmakers attended such institutions.

Their study, published Wednesday by Cambridge University Press, suggested that lawmakers’ more common educational backgrounds in the 1980s helped “cultivate common networks or philosophical outlooks” that led to a less polarized Congress. Today’s different educational standards “suggests that overcoming current partisan divides may be increasingly difficult.”

Even leading Republicans who do have elite credentials have essentially shunned their academic backgrounds and are instead leading the charge against these universities. President Donald Trump (University of Pennsylvania) and Vice President JD Vance (Yale Law School) have led a GOP assault on top colleges, accusing them of being overly “woke” and harbors for antisemitism, demanding financial settlements in recompense. Republicans in Congress wrote punitive tax provisions for college endowments into this summer’s massive policy agenda.

“These recent policy developments have not occurred in a vacuum but rather correspond to a profound divide in the educational backgrounds of Republican and Democratic members,” wrote Craig Volden of Virginia, Jonathan Wai of Arkansas and Alan E. Wiseman of Vanderbilt.

Some Republicans revel in this as a confirmation of the success of their effort to shed elitist labels like “country club Republicans.”

“Republicans were viewed as the party of the rich and Democrats the party of the poor, the working class. That dichotomy has flipped. Today, Democrats are the party of rich coastal elites, and Republicans are a blue-collar party. We’re a working-class party,” Sen. Ted Cruz , R-Texas ,said in an interview earlier this month.

Cruz is a rare double-elite Republican, a Princeton University undergraduate and alumnus of Harvard Law School. Despite stories that he traveled in only the most rarefied air at law school, Cruz has turned his elite background into a punch line on the campaign trail in talking to conservative voters.

“I would tell folks, I went to Princeton and Harvard. So as my father says, I’ve got a lot to apologize for,” he said.

Democrats get irritated by what they consider faux-populism from Cruz and Vance, whose campaigns relied heavily on billionaires funding super PACs. They suggest GOP policies tilt toward multinational corporations despite their tough talk about liberal academia. .

“Look, I come from a working-class family. My father was an ironworker. My grandfather was a carpenter,” said Sen. Ben Ray Luján (D-New Mexico). He said he is one of just two senators who grew up in the Head Start program for children in low-income families, the other being Sen. Raphael G. Warnock (D-Georgia).

“Let’s have a conversation about who’s closer to people, and who’s not closer to people. Let’s look at the policy that is coming out,” said Luján, who got a business degree from New Mexico Highlands University.

The authors of the academic study acknowledge that some will question their metrics because of the difficulty in determining what an “elite” college is. Over a roughly 20-year period in each category, they sorted through the top 20 rankings in U.S. News & World Report for undergraduate studies, law schools and business schools to create a list of schools that regularly appeared in those rankings.

The resulting “elite” field includes all of the Ivies and a range from renowned large colleges, such as the University of Michigan and the University of Texas at Austin, to small colleges, such as Bowdoin and Swarthmore colleges. Few reading their list of 46 schools would argue against their status, although some might push for more colleges to be included.

The results are stark.

In 1973, 55 % of Senate Republicans attended one of these elite colleges for undergraduate or postgraduate studies, along with more than 40 % of House Republicans.

Forty years ago, with their party’s broader geographic diversity, Senate Republicans held nine of the 18 seats that run along the Interstate 95 corridor from Philadelphia into Maine. Six of those Republicans came from an elite education: Pennsylvania’s John Heinz (Yale) and Arlen Specter (Penn), Connecticut’s Lowell Weicker (Yale), Rhode Island’s John Chafee (Yale), Vermont’s Robert Stafford (Middlebury) and Maine’s William Cohen (Bowdoin).

Today Republicans hold just two of those 18 seats.

By the end of 2022, when this study’s data concludes, just 34 % of Senate Republicans came from one of those top schools. However, additional research by Wiseman found a continuing decline, with just 26 % of the current Republican crop coming from these top schools.

Just 15 % of the House GOP caucus hailed from a top school, as defined by this research in the 117th Congress of 2021-22.

A more narrow way to consider the academic shift is simply to slice the data down to the two most elite East Coast schools, Harvard and Yale.

At the start of the 93rd Congress, in 1973, an approximately equal number of House Republicans and Democrats had obtained an undergraduate or postgraduate degree from Harvard, accounting for 10 percent of the 435-member House.

Over 50 years, those numbers went in opposite directions, with 15 % of House Democrats holding a Harvard degree and just 3 % of Republicans in the 117th Congress.

Sen. Richard Blumenthal , D-Conn., who graduated from Harvard and sent three children there, said the campus of the late 1960s was almost all white, full of elite prep-school graduates and almost all Protestant.

Sen. Ruben Gallego, D-Ariz, who was raised by a single mother in the Chicago area, would not have been a likely student at Harvard in Blumenthal’s era, but by the late 1990s, the son of Mexican and Colombian immigrants was on campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

“There are people from all different economic and social strata. It is far more diverse now,” Blumenthal said, suggesting it is tricky to predict “values” based on education.

Yale’s undergraduate school – which produced two Republican presidents with the name Bush – also used to serve as a feeder to the Senate GOP caucus. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, more than 10 % of Republican senators had received undergraduate Yale degrees.

Not a single one has been a Yale undergrad in more than 20 years.

Shifts in which party embraces elite education haven’t just been seen in lawmakers, but in voters, too. For at least 25 years, voters have increasingly broken along what a pair of political scientists called the “diploma divide,” the chasm that has seen Americans without college degrees favoring Republicans and college-educated voters backing Democrats.

The shift can be viewed through recent presidential contests. In 2016, Trump defeated Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton by seven percentage points among voters without a college degree, a margin that ballooned to 14 points last year against Vice President Kamala Harris, according to the Pew Research Center. Clinton won voters with at least an undergraduate degree by 21 points, while Joe Biden won that bloc by 24 in 2020.

With voters breaking in such sharp directions at the presidential level, it’s not shocking they have sorted their members of Congress along educational divides.

The study’s authors worry that the emerging gap will only further exacerbate the polarization of the past quarter-century.

“What are the implications,” they wrote, “of entering an era of two governing classes – divided by party and lacking common educational bonds – for governance, policymaking and the future of American democracy?”

Cruz expects more of this diploma divide, saying that “so-called elite institutions have gone badly off the rails,” so many conservative families will decline their acceptance letters, which is likely to mean fewer GOP lawmakers from top schools in future years.

“A lot of people choose: No, thank you, I’ll go elsewhere,” he said.