For better or for worse, there are no education requirements to become president of the USA, and you study the profile of those that have been elected, that fact will stand out. You’ll notice that some have degrees from public colleges and universities, others have graduated from the most prestigious private ones.
Several have achieved graduate degrees, however, 12 presidents don’t have a formal degree at all; this includes Abraham Lincoln and George Washington. Presidents of the USA have gone to small schools and large research universities, some have gone thanks to their abilities in playing football.
There hasn’t been a constant when it comes to the education level of those elected President, except that since Dwight Eisenhower, they have all had at least a bachelor’s degree. But, to answer the question at hand, the university that can say that has had the largest number of U.S. Presidents in their list of alumni is Harvard University.
Harvard University was founded in 1636, and it is located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Its existence precedes the U.S. presidency by more than a hundred years. No other university has graduated more future presidents than Harvard.
The first president that ever graduated from a university was John Adams, and he studied at Harvard, his son John Quincy Adams also attended Harvard and he was the sixth president of the United States.
The list of alumni from this institution that later became Head of State in the United States include Teddy Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt, who then earned his law degree at Columbia University and John F. Kennedy, each receiving their undergraduate degrees from Harvard.
But Harvard is also known for its graduate programs, which have also been attended by several future U.S. Presidents. Rutherford B. Hayes got his law degree from Harvard, but his undergraduate degree was from Kenyon College in Ohio, his hometown.
Barack Obama, the most recent graduate to become President, got his undergraduate degree from Columbia University, and then went to Harvard Law, earning his degree in 1991 where he also took part in the Harvard Law Review as their editor.
George W. Bush has a degree from Harvard Business School and is the only President to have a business school graduate degree. Besides presidents, Harvard also has vice presidents in their alumni list, including Elbridge Gerry and Al Gore.
Yale University comes in a close second with their undergraduate and graduate students eventually becoming presidents. Those include William Howard Taft, George H.W. Bush, and George W. Bush with their undergraduate degrees coming from Yale, while Gerald Ford and Bill Clinton went to Yale Law and earned their graduate degrees in New Haven.
Clinton got his undergraduate degree at Georgetown University, while Gerald Ford earned his at the University of Michigan. Taft was also a faculty member of the university, both at Yale and Yale Law in the 1900s.
