Category:Bachelor of Arts Graduates
The Bachelor of Arts is the ordinary American first degree, which makes this the broadest and least discriminating grouping on the wiki: almost anyone who attended a liberal arts college holds one. The category collects biographical entries recorded as holding the degree. Its practical value is as a navigation layer between entries rather than as a browsing axis, since knowing that two people hold the same undergraduate qualification says nothing about either of them.
Background
The membership skews heavily toward serving American elected officials, and the reason is a documentation artifact rather than anything about the degree. Members of the United States Congress and of state legislatures publish complete official biographies, so their undergraduate degrees are recorded where a comparable figure in business or the arts often has no sourced entry at all. Read the category as a map of whose education is well documented, not of who studied what.
The institutions behind the degree are correspondingly varied. Small liberal arts colleges appear as often as the research universities: Anthony Fauci took his at the College of the Holy Cross in 1962, Angus King at Dartmouth College, Adena Friedman at Williams College, Abigail Johnson at William Smith College, Amy Coney Barrett at Rhodes College. Amal Clooney read jurisprudence at St Hugh's College, Oxford, which is the same qualification under a British system.
What the roster actually holds
The largest identifiable group is American federal and state politicians, with members of the House of Representatives the single most common role. Alongside them sit lawyers, diplomats and business executives whose careers began with an arts degree and turned elsewhere: Barack Obama finished at Columbia in 1983 with a degree in political science focused on international relations; Antony Blinken took his at Harvard before Columbia Law School; Alberto Gonzales took his at Rice University before Harvard Law; Bill Ackman took both his bachelor's degree and his Master of Business Administration at Harvard; Anderson Cooper graduated from Yale in 1989; Andrew Mason took a Bachelor of Arts in music in 2003 before founding Groupon.
Because a first degree is a weak organizing principle, readers looking for a meaningful grouping should use the institution categories or the occupation categories instead. This category exists to give members a home and to keep the link graph connected.
See also
This category currently contains no pages or media.