Universities attended by U.S. presidents by level of achievement 1751-1991

37 of the United States' 45 presidents (officially 46 as Grover Cleveland is counted as both the 22^nd and 24^th president) attended a university, college or other institution of higher education; 34 of these completed their studies and graduated. After completing their undergraduate studies, twenty U.S. presidents attended a graduate school, with eleven attaining a qualification (seven of which were law degrees). Only eight U.S. presidents, including two of the most highly regarded, George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, did not attend college, while all presidents since Dwight D. Eisenhower have attained some form of degree or equivalent qualification.

Institutions

Harvard University, the oldest institution of higher education in the U.S., has the highest number of presidential alumni, with eight in total. Of the eight Ivy League schools, widely regarded as the most prestigious universities in the United States, five include U.S. presidents among their alumni, and fifteen U.S. presidents have attained a qualification these universities. Only two U.S. presidents have studied abroad; they were John Quincy Adams, who studied at Leiden University in the Netherlands while his father was stationed in Europe, and Bill Clinton, who studied at Oxford University in England. John F. Kennedy had planned to study at the London School of Economics, but fell ill after enrolling and transferred stateside to Princeton, before illness again forced his withdrawal a few months later. Two U.S. presidents founded universities; the University of Virginia was founded by Thomas Jefferson (and attended by Woodrow Wilson), and the State University of New York at Buffalo was founded by Millard Fillmore; one of the eight U.S. presidents who never attended college. Donald Trump did establish a company called "Trump University" in 2004, however this provided training for potential property realtors, and was not an educational institution (in 2016, Trump paid 25 million U.S. dollars to settle a lawsuit with the State of New York, as Trump University was deemed to have defrauded customers and made false statements).

Most educated presidents

In 1751, John Adams was the first future-president to go to college, entering Harvard at the age of sixteen, and graduating with a Bachelor of Arts in 1755. The most recent presidential graduate is Barack Obama, who attended Occidental College from 1979 to 1981, before transferring to Columbia University where he majored in political science, graduating in 1983; Obama later obtained his law degree from Harvard Law School in 1991. Woodrow Wilson is the only U.S. president to have obtained a Ph.D., which he received from Johns Hopkins University in 1886 for his work titled "Congressional Government: A Study in American Politics", and George W. Bush is the only U.S. president to have attained an MBA degree. Three U.S. presidents attended military universities, with both Ulysses S. Grant and Dwight D. Eisenhower graduating from West Point Military Academy, and Jimmy Carter graduating from the U.S. Naval Academy (Eisenhower also attended three other U.S. Army colleges during his military career, which began in 1915 and ended in 1969). Incumbent President Donald Trump obtained a B.S. in economics from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania in 1968.