Survey Finds Congress’s Talent Pipeline Flush With Wealthy Students From Elite Schools

By Jonathan Nicholson, Huff Post

Almost half of this summer’s Capitol Hill interns surveyed by a good government group are attending private colleges or universities.

The newest crop of fresh-faced, eager interns has arrived on Capitol Hill for the summer, and they’re largely from rich households and selective schools.

In a new survey of 487 Hill interns, almost half, 46.7%, are attending a private college or university, which is about twice the rate seen in the overall student population. And 23.4% grew up in a household with an annual income of $200,000 or more.

“If you care about a functioning Congress, you should care about who serves as congressional interns,” said Anne Meeker, the director of strategic initiatives at the PopVox Foundation, a good government group.

“Today’s interns are tomorrow’s staffers. Policy gets shaped by who is in the room, including both [congressional] members and staff; and almost universally, the path to becoming a staff member starts with an internship,” Meeker said.

For perspective, annual tuition at public colleges averaged about $9,600 in the 2021-2022 academic year, while at private schools it was about $33,200, according to EducationData.org.

And median household income in 2020 — the number in the exact middle of all incomes — was $67,251, according to the U.S. Census Bureau…

The PopVox survey found that 45.9% of interns responding were white, down slightly from 50% reported in the spring survey. Nineteen percent were Black, 9.9% Asian or Asian American, and 7.1% Hispanic or Latino.

Those figures actually reflected more diversity than did the Pay Our Interns study, which found that 76% of all interns from April to September 2019 were white while only 6.7% were Black, 7.9% Latino and 7.9% Asian/Pacific Islander.

Read the rest of the survey findings.

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