From the Chronicle of Higher Education:
By Scott Smallwood and Alex Richards
It’s a tension that dates to the founding of the country: In our representative democracy, should those who make the laws reflect the entire citizenry, or should they be chosen from an educated elite?
Or to put it in terms that matter in the pages of The Chronicle: Should lawmakers be people who have seen the inside of a college classroom?
In Federalist No. 10, James Madison debated the merits of republics and democracies, arguing that delegating government to elected representatives should “refine and enlarge the public views, by passing them through the medium of a chosen body of citizens, whose wisdom may best discern the true interest of their country.” That sounds like a point for the ivory tower.
On the other hand, back in 1776, as the colonies were faced with creating new governments, John Adams wrote that the representative assembly “should be in miniature an exact portrait of the people at large. It should think, feel, reason, and act like them.” Score one for the 70 percent of Americans without bachelor’s degrees.
For the first time, The Chronicle has looked at where every state legislator in America went to college—or went at all. Starting with data from Project Vote Smart, a nonpartisan research organization, and expanding the scope with extensive research into more than 1,000 individual legislators, we set out to see which is the least-educated legislature in America, which is the most educated, where all 7,000-plus legislators went to college, and why it may or may not matter.
In doing so, we got a glimpse of the citizens who hold these seats and how they—so much more than Congress—reflect the average American experience.
Like most American students, the vast majority of state legislators went to public colleges. And most of them stayed close to home. In Louisiana, four out of five legislators never went to college outside the state. Across the nation, many lawmakers attended community colleges. Over all, about one in four don’t have bachelor’s degrees.
This is not an Ivy-educated, East Coast elite. Out of nearly 7,400 state lawmakers, just 39 went to Yale. There’s the Utah representative who listed himself simply as “self-educated.” And another who went to the “School of Life.” We saw one representative who noted that she went to “gun school,” and we found a dozen or so who told voters their college grade-point averages—even a lowly 2.0. Maybe that was just another way to make clear that these representatives are close to the people. See, it seems to say, we got C’s, too.
Ultimately, in a country where just 28 percent of adults have bachelor’s degrees, do we really want all of our state lawmakers to have sat in graduate-school seminars? Maybe it’s good to have some like Kyle Jones, a 19-year-old New Hampshire lawmaker who manages the night shift at a Burger King.
And for all you college presidents who insist your state has the least-educated legislature in America, you can stop complaining—unless you’re in Arkansas.
Representing Everybody
Earlier this year, Adam Brown, a political scientist at Brigham Young University, looked at the same Project Vote Smart data for a different research project. He didn’t have a squad of interns, as we did, to fill in all the blanks, but even so we saw some of the same things—notably that state legislators have much more diverse educational backgrounds than members of Congress do.
First, almost every congressman has gone to college. Just four of the 535 have no higher education. Compared with state lawmakers, congressmen are more likely to have gone to college outside their home state, more likely to have gone to a private institution, and more likely to have an advanced degree. Three out of four U.S. senators have advanced degrees, and more than half of them are lawyers. In the House, 65 percent of members have advanced degrees.
Congressmen also don’t describe themselves as “self-educated” or as attending the “school of life.” Remember those 39 Yale grads in the state legislatures? That means about one out of 189 state lawmakers has a Yale degree. In Washington, the figure is one out of 30.
Mr. Brown was also the first to bring up the Madison-Adams tension we mentioned above. He seems to lean a little toward the Adams camp.
“Legislators aren’t only supposed to represent the white-collar workers of the world,” he wrote in an e-mail. “They need to represent everybody. Bearing in mind how many voters lack higher education, I’m not sure that a legislature could fairly represent a state’s diversity if it didn’t include people from diverse educational, economic, racial, religious, and vocational backgrounds.”
Mr. Brown grew up in California, earned a bachelor’s degree at BYU, and then went to graduate school at the University of California at San Diego. Did getting a Ph.D. there teach him something about public higher education, or about education in California? No, of course not, he said; he was just a student.
“Ideally, liberal education ought to help you to think and to reason and to understand data,” he said. “And all of that, it seems, would be useful in setting policy. Would it help specifically with higher-ed policy? I don’t know.”
The Best-Educated Statehouse
Gary Moncrief has been studying state legislatures for decades. A political-science professor at Boise State University, Mr. Moncrief said, “When you’re talking about state legislatures, they’re all different animals. Really, they’re barely in the same species.”
In California, where nearly 90 percent of lawmakers have at least bachelor’s degrees—the highest share in the nation—each of 80 assemblymen gets a $95,000 salary, has a full-time staff, and represents about 400,000 people. In New Hampshire, which has the largest lower house in the nation, each of the 400 members gets paid $200 every two years and represents about 3,300 people.
Depending on how “most educated” is defined, it could be argued that Virginia tops the nation, on the basis of its high percentage of lawmakers with both bachelor’s and advanced degrees. The state ranks second-highest in both categories, right behind California for legislators with four-year degrees and on the heels of New Jersey for advanced degrees, with 89 percent and 58 percent, respectively.
In New Jersey, which has one of the 10 state legislatures generally defined as professional by political scientists, nearly 60 percent of the legislators have advanced degrees. New Jersey can’t quite match the bachelor’s-degree rates of California or Virginia, though—its rate is closer to 80 percent.
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