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Comment by arcanus | Hacker News Reader

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

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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...

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.

It is an interesting and cool effort!

I would however at least provide the option to sort by congressmembers, and likely would make that the default. That would be more informative: anyone can look up the USNEWS Top-25.

Very cool! Would NNDB maybe have more normalized data? http://www.nndb.com/people/106/000122737/

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

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

I was going to suggest looking at 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.

Even that is flawed because it is not Congressioanl Representation Per Capita.

Not having it be per-capita overvalues high population schools like Harvard.

I agree, needs to be ranked per capita, but I still think that Harvard would be #1.

Yale would be #1

You'd have to account for type and breadth of schools within each, in that case. Many schools don't have medical or architecture schools, so why include per capita counts?

What gives you the idea that Harvard is high population? It only has ~21000 at a time, including undergrad, grad, and professional students. Cal has 38000.

Princeton has 7,946 total undergrad and grad students. Dartmouth has just 6,298.

That sounds about exactly what one would expect. The best and the brightest of Stanford run into tech (mostly based in the Bay Area), and the best and the brightest from Princeton stream into finance and consulting firms (mostly based in New York.)

Princeton has the Wilson school for MPPs, so it's actually pretty big in Government and policy circles. I'm surprised the number isn't higher.

Princeton doesn't have any professional schools so no law degrees, medical degrees, or MBA's to fill the ranks with...

Correct. Princeton also has a small student body, it probably outperforms on a graduate per capita basis.

How did you calculate that?

Indeed. Also observable in the fact that while Harvard is the wealthiest school on an absolute basis, Princeton has the largest endowment per enrolled student. Harvard is more than twice the size of Princeton.

Similarly, I was surprised at how few had gone to John Hopkins, which also had a prestigious foreign service/ international relations program.

I have a feeling more SAIS alums end up in policy or foreign service jobs rather than pursuing politics.

Also, it's Johnssssssss =P

so we can blame these schools for our awful congress?

you jest but this is actually a valid point.

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