Where Did Pete Buttigieg Go to College?

Pete Buttigieg knew from an early age that he wanted to pursue a career in politics.

During his senior year of high school, he won first place in the national John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Essay Contest for his essay on U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who was a U.S. representative at the time. That same year, he was one of only two candidates from Indiana selected to serve in the U.S. Senate Youth Program.

However, it was his experiences in college through the Institute of Politics (IOP) at Harvard Kennedy School that sparked the fire in him and solidified his decision to pursue a career in government, Buttigieg told The Harvard Gazette.

The IOP shaped me as it has so many, meeting its mission as a place to cultivate the spark of service among undergraduates deciding what to do with their futures, Buttigieg said during his 2021 graduation speech to the Harvard Kennedy School. My memories of college are inseparable from the geography of the Kennedy School.

Born and raised in South Bend, Indiana, Buttigieg, 42, graduated from St. Joseph High School in 2000 and enrolled at Harvard University for his bachelor’s degree.

At Harvard, Buttigieg was heavily involved in the IOP, ultimately being elected president of the Student Advisory Committee in December 2002.

I didn’t attend the Kennedy School myself, but I spent so much time within its walls as an undergraduate involved in the Institute of Politics that at one point, my parents asked whether I was actually attending the college, or just the IOP — and it was a fair question, Buttigieg said.

In the summer of 2002, Buttigieg interned at WMAQ-Channel 5, the NBC-owned station in Chicago. Additionally, that same year, he interned for Democrat Jill Long Thompson’s congressional campaign.

In 2004, Buttigieg graduated from Harvard with a bachelor’s degree in history and literature and a language citation in Arabic. He was also elected to join the Phi Beta Kappa academic honor society.

After graduating, Buttigieg worked for John Kerry’s presidential campaign in Arizona until the November 2004 election. After this, he headed to Oxford University to study philosophy, politics, and economics on the Rhodes scholarship.

Buttigieg was one of six Harvard students selected as a Rhodes scholar in November 2004. The fully funded scholarship enables students with outstanding scholarly achievements to study at Oxford University for a period of 2-3 years.

During his two-year tenure at Oxford, Buttigieg joined Pembroke College and served as the editor of the Oxford International Review magazine. He also co-founded the Democratic Renaissance Project, an informal debate group comprising around a dozen students.

Following his graduation from Oxford in 2007 with a bachelor’s degree in philosophy, politics, and economics, Buttigieg started working as a consultant for McKinsey & Company, where he worked for three years. In the summer and fall of 2008, he took a leave of absence to work full time for Thompson’s gubernatorial campaign in Indiana.

In 2009, Buttigieg enlisted in the U.S. Navy Reserve. A year later, he left his consulting job to run for Indiana state treasurer, though he was unsuccessful.

In 2011, he was elected mayor of South Bend, Indiana, becoming the youngest mayor of a city with more than 100,000 residents in the country. Reelected in 2015, Buttigieg announced he was running for the Democratic nomination for president in January 2019, suspending his campaign in March 2020.

Following his departure from the presidential race, Buttigieg was appointed as a faculty fellow at the Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study (NDIAS), working on two research projects focused on rebuilding trust in political institutions and understanding the influences shaping the 2020s.

President Joe Biden appointed Buttigieg as secretary of transportation in December 2020, and the Senate confirmed his appointment in February the following year.

During his 2020 presidential campaign, Buttigieg’s higher education platform centered on three key elements: improving college affordability, investing in workforce development, and strengthening college safety and oversight.

Proposals included in Buttigieg’s “American Opportunity Agenda” included:

Buttigieg’s platform also proposed $50 billion in funding for historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs), tribal colleges and universities, and minority-serving institutions.

In a Baltimore Sun op-ed published in November 2019, Buttigieg highlighted his commitment to educational equity. He outlined his plans to increase funding to HBCUs, provide free tuition to low- and middle-income students, expand Pell Grants, and cancel predatory private student loans.

This was all part of his broader vision to tear down systemic racism.

It is not enough simply to replace a racist policy with a neutral one and assume inequity will take care of itself. Experience has shown that it doesn’t work that way. The policies that created today’s inequality were put in place intentionally, and we need intentional, anti-racist action to reverse these harms, he wrote.

Buttigieg did not campaign on universal student debt forgiveness, unlike his primary opponents including Sens. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and Bernie Sanders, I-Vt. However, his campaign backed several initiatives to make loans less burdensome, such as affordable, income-driven repayment plans and more expedited forgiveness for those in public service and nonprofit roles.

My administration will provide student loan forgiveness to teachers and other public servants, rewarding those borrowers for the sacrifices they have made for their communities. More broadly, we need to ensure that student debt is affordable, he said in a USA Today questionnaire.

I do not, however, support middle-class and low-income families subsidizing the higher education costs of the students of millionaires and billionaires.