The United States prides itself on the belief that “anyone can be president,” and what better example than Barack Obama, son of a black Kenyan immigrant and a white American mother — neither of them rich.And yet more than half the presidents over the past 110 years attended Harvard, Yale or Princeton and graduates of Harvard and Yale have had a lock on the White House for the last 23 years, across four presidencies. Thus we have become both more inclusive and more elitist.It’s a surprising contradiction. Is the confluence of these two movements a mere historical accident? Or are the two trends related?
Bill Clinton attended Yale Law School, but got his undergraduate degree at Georgetown. Is it quite fair to count law schools? That would bring Gerald Ford into the list.
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