To follow up on yesterday’s musings about the educational history of Canadian Prime Ministers: I think you can tell something about a country’s social structure just by looking at the clustering of leaders’ educational backgrounds.

In this exercise, I look at the records for Canadian, British, Australian, Japanese, and New Zealand Prime Ministers, German Chancellors, and French and American Presidents.  I would have included Italy but politicians’ Wikipedia bios are weirdly silent on education (even in the Italian versions).  I take all leaders back to 1900, except in New Zealand where Dominion Status was not granted until 1907, and Japan where I stop at 1945 because holy moley there are a lot of them.

The most interesting thing to me is the degree of concentration we see in each country.  In the UK, it is absolutely absurd, with nine of the last thirteen prime ministers (dating back to 1940) having studied at Oxford (Callaghan and Major did not attend university, Churchill went to Sandhurst, and Brown studied at Edinburgh).  Australia runs a close second.  Of the fifteen prime ministers with a university education (fourteen did not attend), seven went to the University of Sydney, three to Melbourne, and one each to ANU and Western Australia (two went to UK universities, without ever attending an Australian one).

Japan and France have a different sort of concentration.  In France, where every head of state since 1900 had a post-secondary degree, fourteen of the seventeen Presidents studied in Paris.  Among the pre-WWI presidents, all of whom went to school before 1908 during a period where there was only one university in France (but lots of different affiliated faculties dotted around the country), they nearly all studied Law in Paris.  Since DeGaulle, all Presidents have attended a “Grande Ecole” in Paris, with the exception of Sarkozy who attended Paris X.  In Japan, 29 of 32 post-War prime ministers studied in Tokyo, the only exceptions being Uno (Kobe), Ikeda (Kyoto), and Tanaka (no PSE).  Eleven of these went to the University of Tokyo, and seven to Waseda, with the rest scattered around the capital’s other mainly private universities.  So, in the UK, France, Japan, and – perhaps oddly – Australia, elites come from a fairly narrow set of proving grounds.  The US is a bit better, but maybe not much: the last twenty Presidents have five Harvard Degrees and five Yale Degrees among them (only one – Bush Junior – has both).

However, Canada and Germany seem to have much less concentrated patterns of attendance.  In Canada, the university with the most prime ministerial graduates is U of T (four out of seventeen).  In Germany, you have to be careful how you count pre-WWII, because those guys went to school in the 1800s when it was still the tradition to wander around taking courses at three universities before eventually taking a set of exams somewhere (credits were not a thing back then), but Humboldt has five Chancellors  (out of twenty-seven) if you don’t get picky about where the exams were taken.  In other words, in these countries, the path to the top seems somewhat more open to people from a wider set of backgrounds.

But that’s nothing compared to New Zealand, where only seven out of twenty-two prime ministers even went to university (closest competitor on that score is Australia, where fourteen out of 29 were non-attenders), and no university can claim more than two of them.  In fact, they’ve had as many prime ministers who did not finish secondary school as they’ve had those who finished university.  The contrast with Canada is fascinating; even if you knew nothing else about the two countries, you’d know our society has been much more urbanized and stratified for longer than our kiwi cousins.

To summarize:

Another interesting comparison is with respect to study abroad. Canada looks pretty good on this measure with 6 PMs having got some education abroad, but we actually come second to Australia, which has seven.  The Japanese do well, too, with five.  Germany has a number of Chancellors who studied at Strasbourg, but at the time it was part of Germany – Adenauer (LSE) and Luther (Geneva) were the two who actually studied abroad.  The New Zealanders have one.  The Americans have one and change, what with Clinton having a couple of years at Oxford and Kennedy having a couple of weeks at LSE.  The French and English, needless to say, have none.

(A final completely tangential fact I have to throw in here, because not enough people know it: before moving to Columbia, Obama started his educational career at Occidental College, which was the real-life setting for “California University” on the original Beverly Hills 90210.  This means he literally could have been at the Peach Pit all those years.  Fabulous.)

Anyways, I’m not sure much of this means anything, but it is an interesting way to think about comparative stratification, both social and educational.