If you had to bet on one school having the most US presidents with an earned degree, would you pick Harvard, Yale or Princeton?
Harvard. Of the 45 people who have been president, 8 earned a Harvard degree, about 1 in 5.6. Yale has 5 and Princeton 2, counting earned degrees only.
The counting rule is simple: a president counts for a school only if he earned a degree there. Grover Cleveland and Donald Trump each served two non-consecutive terms and are each counted once, so 47 presidencies come to 45 people.
The eight, in order
John Adams earned his A.B. from Harvard College in 1755, and his son John Quincy Adams followed with an A.B. in 1787. Rutherford B. Hayes finished at Kenyon College in 1842, then took a Harvard law degree, an LL.B., in 1845.
Theodore Roosevelt earned his A.B. in 1880, and Franklin D. Roosevelt his A.B. in 1903. John F. Kennedy earned a Harvard degree in 1940. George W. Bush earned an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School in 1975, and Barack Obama, after a B.A. from Columbia, earned his J.D. from Harvard Law School in 1991.
Sorted by school, that is 5 from Harvard College (both Adamses, both Roosevelts and Kennedy), 2 from Harvard Law (Hayes and Obama) and 1 from Harvard Business School (George W. Bush). So only 5 of Harvard’s 8 presidents were Harvard undergraduates. No president since Obama has a Harvard degree: Joe Biden’s degrees are from the University of Delaware and Syracuse, and Trump’s is from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.
A three-year degree, a four-year label
Franklin D. Roosevelt finished Harvard College in three years and received his A.B. in 1903, yet Harvard files him with the Class of 1904. He stayed on for a fourth year of graduate work as president of The Harvard Crimson. His class’s own report lists his A.B. under 1903 and explains the custom in another member’s entry: a degree received in the spring of 1903 “as of the Class of 1904.” Harvard’s timeline puts “FDR graduates” in 1904, which is his class year, not the date on his degree. Class years, it turns out, are a matter of loyalty as much as calendars.
The man on two lists
George W. Bush is the only president on two of these lists. He earned a Yale degree in 1968, then the Harvard M.B.A. in 1975.
Yale’s five, in order, are William Howard Taft (B.A., 1878), Gerald Ford (Yale Law School, 1941), George H. W. Bush (Yale, 1948), Bill Clinton (J.D., Yale Law School, 1973) and George W. Bush (Yale, 1968). That is 1 in 9 of the 45. Princeton’s two are James Madison (A.B., 1771) and Woodrow Wilson (A.B., 1879), both from the College of New Jersey, as Princeton was then called. That is 1 in 22.5.
Add the three schools and you get 8 + 5 + 2 = 15 degree holders. Count George W. Bush once and the three schools together account for 14 people, not 15, or about 31% of the 45.
What does not count
Honorary degrees are out. The Harvard Gazette’s 2008 list shows honorary Harvard LL.D. degrees for six of the eight, including one for Theodore Roosevelt in 1902, but only earned degrees are counted here.
Study that was started but not finished is out too, at any school. Franklin Roosevelt did course work toward a law degree at Columbia but earned no degree there. Theodore Roosevelt enrolled at Columbia Law School and dropped out after one year. Kennedy entered Princeton with the Class of 1939 and withdrew after several months because of illness, so Princeton’s count stays at two.
Data limits
This page counts earned degrees only. Honorary degrees and unfinished study are left out, so a looser “went to Harvard” count could come out differently. Each school’s tally comes from its own published list, checked against the University of Virginia Miller Center profiles. Where degree letters are disputed or rest on a single source, as for Kennedy, Ford and the Yale degrees of both Bushes, we give the school and year only. The denominator is 45 people as of Oct 19, 2026, not 47 presidencies. We did not tally other universities, so this page makes no claim about which school leads overall.
The short version
Harvard leads these three schools with 8 of the 45 people who have been president, about 1 in 5.6, ahead of Yale’s 5 and Princeton’s 2. The count changes only when a new president takes office, so we recheck it then.
Last checked: 2026-10-19, against the Miller Center presidents index and the Harvard, Yale and Princeton records listed above. This article was machine-checked against the sources above and has not been expert-reviewed. Spotted an error or a newer public figure? Please tell us on our contact page with the article link and we will review it.
Sources
- S1 UVA Miller Center, “U.S. Presidents” index and each president’s profile (Education field and “Life Before the Presidency” essays), https://millercenter.org/president . Accessed Oct 19, 2026.
- S2 Harvard Gazette, “Obama joins list of seven presidents with Harvard degrees,” Nov 6, 2008, https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2008/11/obama-joins-list-of-seven-presidents-with-harvard-degrees/ . Accessed Oct 19, 2026.
- S3 Harvard University, “History timeline,” https://www.harvard.edu/about/history/timeline/ . Accessed Oct 19, 2026.
- S4 Harvard College Class of 1904, Second Class Report (about 1910), Internet Archive full text, https://archive.org/stream/n02reportclass1904harvuoft/n02reportclass1904harvuoft_djvu.txt . Accessed Oct 19, 2026.
- S5 FDR Presidential Library, “FDR Biography,” https://www.fdrlibrary.org/fdr-biography . Accessed Oct 19, 2026.
- S6 Yale News, “Yale Alumni in U.S. Politics,” Mar 27, 2009, https://news.yale.edu/2009/03/27/yale-alumni-us-politics ; Peter Salovey, “A Legacy of Public Service,” https://salovey.yale.edu/writings-and-speeches/notes-woodbridge-hall/legacy-public-service ; Yale, “Why Yale?” timeline, https://forhumanity.yale.edu/why-yale . Accessed Oct 19, 2026.
- S7 Alexander Leitch, A Princeton Companion (Princeton University Press, 1978), “Presidents of the United States,” https://pr.princeton.edu/history/companion/united_states_presidents.html . Accessed Oct 19, 2026.
- Method: the shares (8 of 45, 5 of 45, 2 of 45), their “1 in” forms and the 14 person total for the three schools are Book of Odds arithmetic from the counts above.