The University of Alabama has as many graduates working in Republican U.S. Senate offices as Harvard, Yale, Princeton and the other five Ivies combined.
Only Ole Miss sends more, and Auburn University ranks fourth, according to a study of nearly 2,400 Capitol Hill résumés published August 26 by the Young Men Research Project.
Alabama placed 26 alumni in Republican Senate offices. Auburn placed 19. The two flagships together account for 45 — one more than the University of Mississippi’s 44, which topped the list, and well clear of the 26 Ivy League graduates working in Republican offices across the entire chamber.
“Of the 102 Ivy League undergraduate alumni in the Senate, 76 work in Democratic offices,” the researchers wrote.
Counting both parties, Alabama ranks sixth among all Senate staffers with 29 graduates, behind George Washington, Ole Miss, American, Michigan and Georgetown. Auburn ranks 13th with 21. Of Alabama’s 29, 26 work for Republicans.
The researchers found the GOP pipeline runs through the South almost entirely. Republican staffers “are significantly more likely to come from the South: of the ten most common undergraduate schools, eight are located in this region,” the study said. Republican staffers graduated from public universities over private ones by 61% to 39%.
The study did not break its counts out by office, so those Alabama and Auburn graduates are spread across Republican offices nationwide — not just the staffs of U.S. Senator Katie Britt (R-Montgomery) and U.S. Senator Tommy Tuberville (R-Auburn).
Britt named longtime confidant Sean Ross her chief of staff in 2023.
The Democratic roster looks nothing like it. The top schools for Democratic staffers are George Washington, Georgetown, American, Michigan and Cornell. Georgetown alone accounts for 29 undergraduate alumni in Democratic offices and 4 in Republican ones. A majority of Democratic staffers, 53%, graduated from private institutions.
Charlie Sabgir of the Young Men Research Project and Naisha Roy, a journalism student at Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism, built the dataset from a winter 2026 roster covering every Senate office, excluding interns and fellows. They said they set out to check a post-2024 assumption about the two parties’ staffs.
“We wanted to test the accuracy of this assumption,” they wrote. “Are Democratic staffers really that different from GOP staffers?”
Their answer: “Republicans are more likely to graduate from Southern public universities, while Democrats are slightly more likely to go to private Northeastern schools.”
Both staffs share one trait the researchers flagged as a problem. Virtually every legislative, administrative, communications and press staffer in the Senate holds a four-year degree, against 39% of Americans over 25.
Nearly half of all Senate staffers, 48%, majored in political science, international relations or public policy. About 6% majored in a STEM, environmental, agricultural or health science field.
Auburn has been collecting national marks elsewhere, landing in the top 20 for free speech and holding the top spot in the state in U.S. News & World Report’s rankings.
Grayson Everett is the editor in chief of Yellowhammer News. You can follow him on X @Grayson270.
