Where Did JD Vance Go to College?

As he campaigns to regain the White House, former President Donald Trump has announced his running mate to be vice president: Republican Ohio Sen. JD Vance.

Vance, 39, has been an outspoken critic of higher education during his time in the U.S. Senate. However, Vance himself graduated from an Ivy League institution.

Following his graduation from Middletown High School outside of Cincinnati, Vance enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps where he served as a combat correspondent and completed one tour of duty in Iraq. After his return to civilian life, he attended The Ohio State University, earning a bachelor’s degree in political science and philosophy in 2009.

After graduating, Vance attended Yale Law School, earning his Juris Doctor degree in 2013.

While in law school, Yale Professor Amy Chua encouraged Vance to write a book about his experiences growing up in Middletown.

Published in 2016, “Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis,” earned a spot on The New York Times Best Seller list in both 2016 and 2017, with the publication calling it “one of the six best books to help understand Trump’s win.” The book was also adapted into a Netflix movie in 2020.

As his book garnered accolades, Vance visited at least 18 universities, including Yale and Ohio State, to deliver graduation speeches, lectures, or political talks, earning more than $70,000, according to reporting from The Associated Press. Vance praised universities for providing “high-quality talent” and “intellectual property necessary for folks to get their businesses off the ground.”

But a Trump victory in November — with Vance as his vice president — could have big implications for America’s colleges and universities.

As the junior senator from Ohio, Vance voiced support for multiple pieces of legislation that would impact higher education. This includes a bill to ensure that universities were complying with the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling blocking affirmative action and another that would require schools to report gifts of any value from “foreign adversaries.”

He has also said that the country’s colleges and universities are controlled by left-wing politics and approved of authoritarian Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s approach to state universities.

“The closest that conservatives have ever gotten to successfully dealing with left-wing domination of universities is Viktor Orbán’s approach in Hungary,” Vance said in an interview with The European Conservative. “I think his way has to be the model for us: not to eliminate universities, but to give them a choice between survival or taking a much less biased approach to teaching.”

In the interview, Vance said the U.S. government should be “aggressively reforming” institutions, such as Harvard University “in a way to where they’re much more open to conservative ideas,” suggesting amending the tax code to take away the university’s charitable status for tax purposes and going after the “bureaucracy focused on diversity, equity, and inclusion.”

The same day Trump, a graduate of elite college prep schools and the University of Pennsylvania, announced Vance would be his vice presidential nominee, delegates at the Republican National Convention approved a new party platform with massive implications for America’s higher education system.

Those proposals would:

The platform also pledges to: