Not your mother’s Cabinet; Trump’s appointments have a diverse education background

Donald Trump’s presidency is a departure from previous administrations in many ways, but notably in who he chose to be his closest advisers. Out of a list of 23 members of his Cabinet that includes the 15 department heads and the additional eight senate approved advisers, only eight have degrees from classically elite institutions like the Ivy League schools and MIT, Stanford and Oxford. One of them, Elise Stefanik, has not yet been confirmed. Only 32% of the total number of degrees his team received came from gate-kept institutions that most folks will only ever read or dream about.

“It is a shift away from what we’ve considered to be the traditional markers of success, or of the credentials that we would typically see for Cabinet selections,” said Lindsay Chervinsky, the executive director of the George Washington Presidential Library and author of “The Cabinet: George Washington and the Creation of an American Institution.” “This is one factor of many that reflects a pretty significant shift in how selections are made.”

Today, of the 340 million Americans, less than 33% of the whole country has a college degree or higher according to Nature Magazine, and only 18 million attend college every year. The current Cabinet’s top-shelf education is much greater than the 1.9% of the U.S. population that attends “elite” schools, but it’s still a closer representation of those Americans who graduate college than typically seen with political appointments. And much closer than the folks who were in the administrations of Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Trump’s predecessor, Joe Biden, whose resumes make it seem like there’s a super highway between Yale, Harvard and Washington.

For a president with a populist message and an intention to change political norms, this is a clear way to show the country that you don’t need an education from a prescriptive series of schools or specific educational trajectory to be a subject matter expert or make a difference in Washington. Marco Rubio, the unanimously approved Secretary of State, for example, bounced between schools — including a year at Tarkio College in Missouri on a football scholarship and another at the Santa Fe Community College — before finishing his Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Florida, and, later, his law degree from the University of Miami.

Biden’s Cabinet had 13 members with degrees from elite schools. Over their two administrations, Obama’s had 31 (with 62 top-tier degrees among them), while Bush and Clinton each had 22. Though, during Clinton’s administration, there were two fewer agency leads requiring Senate approval. Over the past 30 years, the highest percentage of degrees from top institutions in a presidential Cabinet — outside of Trump — was over 60, while the lowest was around 52.

Even Trump’s first presidency, which had a tremendous amount of turnover across the four years (92% of his list of broader advisers and cabinet members flipped, according to the Brookings Institute), had 17 individuals with elite degrees out of 38 included (any “acting” member who managed departments in the interim between appointments was excluded from these numbers). That first term had nearly 45% representation from elite schools and, today, only 35% of Trump’s Cabinet studied at that tier of institution.

“It’s a shift away from expertise, but I think that it’s more that they’re looking for other qualifications,” Chervinsky said. She added that prior to the 1800s, “you didn’t necessarily have to have an elite degree to have experience in the military or anything else.” And that idea — in a moment where there is growing distrust in institutions of higher learning — that a particular degree from a particular school automatically makes you more qualified, better suited to make decisions or in touch with the needs of the nation, is being questioned at the highest level.

“What has happened in this administration, is that there is more of a focus on Cabinet secretary loyalty, as opposed to their prior experience,” said Kathryn Dunn Tenpas, a presidential scholar and senior research fellow at both the Miller Center and the Brookings Institute. Adding that, “smart people are everywhere and it doesn’t matter the caliber of the school they went to; what matters is what you did afterward with that degree.”

Historical precedent

There is no mention of the president’s Cabinet in the Constitution and the idea was “explicitly rejected by the delegates” at the Constitutional Convention in 1787, said Chervinsky. The original departments themselves — Defense, State, Treasury and Attorney General — were included, and in Article II, Section 2, the executive branch was bestowed the power to name ambassadors and “key appointments,” which was left undefined. Precedent has institutionalized the positions as they’re known today. What was once four, is now 16 official members with several other additional roles that require Senate approval, such as the U.S. trade representative, the United Nations ambassador and the director of the CIA, which were among those included in the figures for this article.

George Washington did not convene a Cabinet until two years into his first presidency. Washington attempted to use his Cabinet as an opportunity for a larger swatch of the country to be represented in the executive branch with folks from different religious, economic and educational backgrounds participating in governing.

Washington thought of his Cabinet as “individual advisors” before thinking of them as a group. ”That each one was to have expertise in their field, experience and knowledge that was different than his own,“ said Chervinsky. ”He was very intentional about not surrounding himself with a group of yes men. They had to be different from each other.”

This effort to bring together a coalition style government is the hallmark of great presidents, said Chervinsky. Abraham Lincoln famously appointed three of his former competitors — a “Team of Rivals,” as the historian Doris Kearns Goodwin named them — to run the various agencies at his command.

Though, according to Chervinsky, the “high water mark of a bipartisan Cabinet” came during FDR’s presidency. “In his third term, he got rid of a lot of the Democratic appointees ... and put in rock-ribbed Republicans,” to prepare for the coming war. But, after FDR, she said, the emphasis moved from bipartisan Cabinet appointments to diverse ones, with an increase of faiths, demographics, genders and races representing a broader range of America in the Cabinet.

But someone’s educational background wasn’t necessarily a qualification for an appointment before the mid-20th century — Washington did not go to school past 12 years old, himself — and, Chervinsky points out, that the education piece has only become important in the past 70 years.

What does ‘elite’ mean?

The term “elite” has a broad range of interpretation and has changed significantly since the middle of last century. Even if the schools considered within that tier are commonly understood to be a specific few, rankings change year to year and there’s room for a lot of variable interpretation. Since half a century of attendance was considered, the schools deemed “elite” are broader than current rankings.

Those schools are the eight Ivy League schools, as well as Stanford, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, University of Chicago, University of California at Berkeley, Duke, Georgetown, University of Virginia, Swarthmore, and the small Ivy League schools (Wellesley, Williams, Amherst, Wesleyan). It also includes similarly regarded international universities, such as Oxford and the London School of Economics in England, and the Sorbonne and Sciences Po in France.

In recent years, the term “elite” has become a pejorative to some, garnering a negative connotation that is symbolic of a particular ideology rather than academic excellence. Victor Davis Hansen, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institute and a Stanford grad himself, has covered this change in perspective.

In 2021, he wrote a National Review article titled, “American Universities Have Lost Their Prestige,” and just recently wrote in an op-ed that was widely distributed to newspapers across the country that “over the last three decades, elite American universities have engaged in economic, political, social and cultural practices that were often unethical, illegal — and suicidal.” He pointed out that, “once-iconic degrees (are) no longer any guarantee of the ability to write and speak well, think analytically or compute competently.”

The majority of the degrees the current national department leaders received are from state or regional universities that are much more familiar, approachable or less-competitive to attend. Several are nationally known like University of Texas or University of Miami, but others are institutions like East Carolina University or Stetson University College of Law that do not have the same national cache.

Some of his Cabinet did not graduate in the expected four-year cadence of undergraduate degrees. Kristi Noem, Secretary of Homeland Security, was already an elected official when she completed her degree, after years of collecting credits from several different schools while working and parenting. This extended college experience is one that many Americans may relate to as six years is now considered a “successful” graduation period by the government and colleges, according to The Hechinger Report.

Additionally, Rubio is not the only member of the Cabinet who took classes at a community college before completing an undergraduate degree. The director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard took classes at Leeward Community College in Honolulu. There are some 9 million Americans enrolled in community colleges — far more than the 60,000 odd undergraduates at Ivy League schools. While only 13% of those community college students graduate from a four-year degree program in the decade following taking classes, Rubio and Gabbard were among them, with the new DNI director finishing her studies at Hawaii Pacific University. And, just like Noem, Gabbard, too, was elected to public office before completing her degree.

Of those six that attended “elite” schools, they received 18 degrees in total, with 14 coming from top-tier institutions. Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent both graduated from Yale. Elise Stefanik, the nominated ambassador to the U.N., graduated from Harvard. As did Pete Hegseth, the secretary of Defense, who completed his bachelor’s degree at Princeton. The U.S. trade representative, Jamieson Greer, has degrees from Sciences Po and the University of Virginia (and BYU). The secretary of the Interior, Doug Burgum, has an MBA from Stanford. The director of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has degrees from Harvard, LSE, and the University of Virginia. The secretary of Energy, Christopher Wright, went to MIT for two degrees.

None of that accounts for the unofficial advisers — the “kitchen cabinet,” that presidents rely on for advice. Trump’s most visible member of this cohort is Elon Musk, whose success is marked from his creation of society-altering companies that include Tesla, SpaceX and others, as well as his acquisition of Twitter, now named X. This list also includes influential media personalities such as Steve Bannon, Charlie Kirk and Tucker Carlson, of which only Bannon attended the likes of Georgetown and Harvard.

“The Cabinet is an incredible opportunity to bring people together and to make sure that lots of different viewpoints are represented because there is no one way to be an American,” said Chervinsky. “And a good president understands that they are not going to have all the answers.”