best political science school

juillet
Tue, 08 Mar 2016 07:23:54 +0000

“Government member” is a broad category. There are state legislatures, too, and representatives and senators in state legislatures are very likely to have gone to public and local colleges/universities. Many Congress members start out in their state legislature and go national later.

Even nationally, though, Senators and U.S. representatives are likely to have gone to local universities. For example, I just looked up the Senators for my state (WA). Patty Murray went to Washington State University (and started out serving on her local school board and then the WA state legislature before going national). Maria Cantwell actually went to Miami University in Ohio before relocating to Seattle to work on a presidential campaign; she, too, started in the WA state legislature. And then I looked up our U.S. representatives:

David Smith: Transferred from Western Washington University to Fordham; JD from UW-Seattle
David Reichart: Concordia Lutheran College
Cathy McMorris Rodgers: Pensacola Christian College, and then UW-Seattle for her MBA
Jim McDermott: Wheaton College (IL), then an MD from University of Illinois
Rick Larsen: Pacific Lutheran University and then the University of Minnesota for an MPA
Derek Kilmer: Princeton, then a PhD at Oxford
Jaime Herrera Beutler: UW-Seattle
Dennis Heck: The Evergreen State College
Dan Newhouse: Washington State University
Suzan DelBene: Reed College, then UW for her MBA

So there’s a mix, and you can get a BA from anywhere and still serve in Congress. Also, you don’t need to major in political science. One thing that most of them shared in common, though, is that they held lower office (including a lot of state legislature seats) before running for national office.

So, for Congress, it largely doesn’t matter. For a judge, it also kind of doesn’t matter, although judges do tend to skew towards more competitive colleges (and especially the higher up in the judgeship you look the more likely you are to find elite schools). Still, your law school matters far more than your undergrad for judge careers.