Where did every U.S. president go to college?
Where did every U.S. president go to college?
“Where did you go to school?”
It’s a common question asked of anyone these days. So we’re asking it of the men who have served as President of the United States.
What follows is a list of the schools and institutions our leaders have graduated from. Fair warning: A college degree was not always a prerequisite for becoming commander-in-chief, as exhibited by our first president, George Washington.
1. George Washington — None
The father of our country never received a formal education, but he did receive a surveyor’s license from the College of William and Mary.
2. John Adams — Harvard
Adams was the first of seven presidents to hold a degree from Harvard. He entered the college in 1751 at age 16 and graduated in 1755.
3. Thomas Jefferson — William & Mary
Jefferson entered the College of William & Mary at age 16. He would later found the University of Virginia as a much older man.
4. James Madison — Princeton
Madison is one of two presidents to graduate from Princeton. He also has his own college named after him now — James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia.
5. James Monroe — William and Mary
Monroe entered the College of William and Mary in 1774 at the age of 16. Two years later, he joined the Virginia Infantry and became an officer in the Continental Army.
6. John Quincy Adams — Harvard
Is JQA the first legacy case at Harvard? He might be.
7. Andrew Jackson — None
Andrew Jackson didn’t have much formal education, but he was self educated and later became a lawyer.
8. Martin Van Buren — None
The New York native briefly studied at a seminary, but his formal education came to an end when he began working in a law office.
9. William Henry Harrison — Penn
The shortest-serving president attended Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia before studying medicine at Penn.
10. John Tyler — William & Mary
Tyler’s aristocratic family had a tradition of attending William and Mary. He entered the school’s preparatory branch at age 12.
11. James Polk — North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Chapel Hill’s enrollment was only around 80 when Polk attended in the mid-1810s. There was no basketball team at the time as the sport had yet to be invented.
12. Zachary Taylor — None
Raised on the frontier in Kentucky, Taylor’s schooling was inconsistent. The future war hero attended a few schools and academies but never a formal college.
13. Millard Fillmore — None
Fillmore’s family lived in poverty while he was growing up, and he worked as a labor apprentice during his teenage years. Unhappy with his lot in life, he began to educate himself through books. He’d later learn law in a local office.
14. Franklin Pierce — Bowdoin College
Pierce entered the college in Brunswick, Maine in the fall of 1820.
15. James Buchanan — Dickinson College
Buchanan, considered one of history’s worst presidents, was almost expelled from the school in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. Sounds about right.
16. Abraham Lincoln — None
America’s ultimate self-made man mostly taught himself, though he did take advantage of the traveling teachers that came through the frontier.
17. Andrew Johnson — None
Johnson grew up in poverty, never had any formal schooling and spent some of his formative years working as an apprentice for a tailor.
18. Ulysses S. Grant — United States Military Academy
Grant was appointed to West Point by an Ohio congressman in 1839.
19. Rutherford B. Hayes — Kenyon College
Hayes graduated from the Ohio college with the highest honors in 1842 before moving to Boston to get a law degree at Harvard.
Fun fact: Hayes’ wife Lucy was the first presidential wife to to graduate from college, earning a degree from Cincinnati’s Wesleyan Women’s College.
20. James A. Garfield — Williams College
Garfield first attended Hiram College, then finished off his degree at Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts.
21. Chester A. Arthur — Union College
Arthur attended Union College in Schenectady, New York, starting in 1845.
22 and 24. Grover Cleveland — None
The only president to serve two non-consecutive terms never attended college.
23. Benjamin Harrison — Miami of Ohio
Here’s a fun trivia question for you: Four universities have produced both a U.S. president and a Super Bowl-winning quarterback. Miami of Ohio is one of the four, thanks to Harrison and Ben Roethliseberger.
(Keep reading for the other three answers.)
25. William McKinley — Allegheny College
McKinley’s time at Allegheny in Meadville, Pa., was short. He left after just one year in 1860 as he fell ill and his family’s finances suffered. He later served under Rutherford B. Hayes in the Civil War.
26. Theodore Roosevelt — Harvard
Roosevelt was an active student at Harvard. He was a fraternity member, a rower and boxer, an editor, and a fraternity member.
27. William Howard Taft — Yale
Taft was an intramural wrestling champion at Yale and also finished second in his class. The future president and Supreme Court justice later got a law degree at the University of Cincinnati’s law school.
28. Woodrow Wilson — Princeton
The scholarly Wilson attended Princeton and would later get a Ph.D from Johns Hopkins. He’s currently the only president to hold a Ph.D.
29. Warren G. Harding — Ohio Central College
Harding started a small newspaper while enrolled at Ohio Central College in Iberia. The school is now defunct, though an unaffiliated school named Ohio Central Bible College was established in Iberia in 2009.
30. Calvin Coolidge — Amherst College
“Silent Cal” was actually a debating star at Amherst.
31. Herbert Hoover — Stanford
OK, here’s the second school from our president-quarterback question.
Hoover attended Stanford, the same school that produced Jim Plunkett and John Elway.
32. Franklin D. Roosevelt — Harvard
FDR was editor-in-chief of the Harvard Crimson while on campus. He later attended Columbia’s law school, but dropped out in 1907.
33. Harry S. Truman — None
Truman is the last U.S. president to not earn a college degree.
34. Dwight D. Eisenhower — United States Military Academy
The World War II general was the first U.S. president to attend West Point since Grant. They are still the only two commander-in-chiefs to attend the institution.
35. John F. Kennedy — Harvard
Harvard’s public policy school now bears Kennedy’s name.
36. Lyndon Baines Johnson — Texas State
Johnson took a nine-month break from Texas State (then Southwest Texas State Teachers College) to teach Mexican-American children at a segregated school
37. Richard Nixon — Whittier College
Nixon had a grant to attend Harvard, but had to stay in California to run his family’s store because of his brother’s illness. He’d later graduate from Duke Law School.
38. Gerald Ford — University of Michigan
If you know anything about Ford, it’s probably that he played football at Michigan … the same program that also produced Tom Brady.
(That’s the third answer in our trivia question.)
39. Jimmy Carter — United States Naval Academy
And here’s the fourth answer: Jimmy Carter graduated from the same place that produced Roger Staubach.
40. Ronald Reagan — Eureka College
Reagan was a C-student at Eureka College, a small liberal arts school located just outside Peoria, Ill.
41. George H.W. Bush — Yale
The lifelong baseball fan played first base for the Bulldogs while at Yale.
42. Bill Clinton — Georgetown
Clinton attended Georgetown before attending the University of Oxford. (He’s the only president to have been named a Rhodes Scholar.) He returned to the States to attend Yale law school, where he met his future wife.
43. George W. Bush — Yale
The two Adams men attended Harvard while the two Bush presidents attended Yale.
George W. Bush also got an MBA from Harvard in 1975. He’s the only president with a MBA.
44. Barack Obama — Columbia
Obama started his college at Occidental College in California before transferring to Columbia. He also got a law degree from Harvard.
45. Donald Trump — Penn
Trump started off at Fordham in 1964 before transferring to the University of Pennsylvania two years later. He graduated in 1968 with a B.S. in economics.
46. Joe Biden — University of Delaware, Syracuse
President Joe Biden attended the University of Delaware, where he had a double major in political science and history (and a minor in English). He would go on to earn his Juris Doctor at Syracuse University.
