Where Do Leaders Come From?
By Josh Levin and Matt Dodson and Dan Check and Erin Nichols
Nov. 14, 2011
A Fortune 500 CEO, a university president, and a Supreme Court justice have wildly divergent duties, educational backgrounds, and salaries. There’s one important thing they have in common, however: They are members of America’s leadership class.
For as long as the United States has existed, a small group of leaders has made decisions that affect the rest of our lives. We typically think of these leaders as distinct groups: members of the Cabinet, billionaires, mayors. At Slate, we wondered what we might find if we looked at this country’s leaders as one big group.
We’ve compiled a database of 1,410 prominent Americans—business leaders, thought leaders, legislative leaders, and more—and mapped where they were born, where they went to school, and where they live now. We’ve also charted the distance they’ve traveled from their birthplaces to college, and from college to their current residences. Finally, you can take a look at where our leaders go to school—how many attended Harvard and how many got their degrees at state universities.
On the map below, you can examine the leaders’ birthplaces, alma maters, and workplaces as separate maps. You can also hit the play button and watch what patterns emerge—where our leaders tend to start their lives, where they aggregate to pursue their educations, and how they disperse once they enter the workforce. You can also look at subgroups of leaders by selecting from the drop-down menu to the right, and you can find the names of individual leaders by mousing over the map. (Due to gaps in our database, it’s possible that some subgroup views will be empty.)
In the following chart, we’ve documented how far leaders travel to get their educations and once they enter the workforce. The diagonal line in the middle of the graph is crowded with members of the House and Senate, who tend to travel back to their place of birth after they finish school. Governors, by contrast, don’t ever stray far from home. If you exclude those groups of politicians, you’ll notice that a large proportion of leaders travel a great distance to go away to school. (To highlight or exclude any subgroup of leaders, click on the name of that subgroup in the graph key.)
In this chart, we’ve collected data on where America’s leaders went to school. For most leaders, the school represented here is their undergraduate university; in the cases where an undergrad school was not present in our data, we’ve substituted a graduate school. How important is it to attend an elite institution? Harvard grads are best represented in the executive branch, the judiciary, the Senate, and among college and university leadership. The Ivy League school is far less of a presence among mayors, governors, and sports team owners, who have a far greater tendency to attend state universities. (To focus on or exclude any university or subgroup of universities from this graph, click on the name of that school/subgroup in the graph key.)