The Educational Attainment of Four National Cabinets
A Comparison of China, India, Russia, and the United States
By Jeffrey Sachs & Anastasia Shakhidzhanova
In this note we offer a cross-national comparison of the highest educational attainment of the cabinet members of four major countries- China, India, Russia, and the United States. In our technologically advanced era, the technical knowledge of government officials has become increasingly vital for effective governance. We therefore investigate the extent to which each country’s current cabinet has the mix of skills required for effective governance. We classify each official’s highest degree by level (bachelor’s, master’s, doctorate) and field (economics, law, business/management, STEM, and other). We present the findings here as a concise dataset that can be extended to additional countries of interest and updated over time.
The contribution is threefold. First, we create clear coding rules for meaningful cross-country comparisons. Long first degrees (e.g., Russia’s Specialist diploma) are treated as bachelor’s; professional degrees including the Juris Doctor (JD) and the MBA are counted separately from other masters. Research Doctorates include the PhD and Russia’s kandidat nauk (Candidate of Sciences). In-service, "on-the-job," or party-school training is not counted as an academic degree unless the credential is explicitly designated as an academic degree in the dataset. Second, we provide a straightforward tabulation of highest educational attainments of each cabinet. Third, we provide a brief comparative narrative that highlights the differences across the four countries.
The enumeration of highest degrees is shown in Tables 1-4 and the listing of individual cabinet ministers, and their specific degrees, is shown in Tables 5-8. In these tables, each person is counted only once. Note that our classification records only the cabinet minister’s highest degree. Thus, if a minister holds a master’s and a PhD, only the PhD is counted.
We see that the attainment of at least a bachelor’s degree is nearly universal across the four cases in the dataset: 100 percent of cabinet members in China, Russia, and the United States hold at least a bachelor’s degree, while in India the proportion is 90.6%. Yet for academic degrees above the bachelor’s level, significant differences appear across the countries.
The government with the highest proportionate share of advanced STEM training is China, with 20% of the cabinet having a STEM degree at the master’s or PhD level. Overall, China’s share of PhD’s in the cabinet is 37.1%, and is diversified across STEM and non-STEM fields, yielding a cabinet with a very high technical depth across the sciences, engineering, and social sciences. Russia share of PHD degrees is even higher, at 63.6%, but is concentrated in economics and law, with only 9.1% of PhD degrees being in STEM fields. Russia is also the only cabinet out of the four that includes a member with an advanced medical degree. India has only one cabinet member with a Master’s in a STEM field (3.1%), and none with a PhD in STEM. In the United States, too, there is only one cabinet member with a Master’s in a STEM field (4.3%), and remarkably, there is not a single PhD (0.0%). Note that while both India’s and Russia’s cabinet show extensive higher-level education, it is concentrated in law and economics rather than STEM fields. China’s is the only cabinet of the four countries with advanced training across a broad mix of STEM and non-STEM fields.
No US cabinet member has advanced training (master’s or PhD) in a climate-related field. The closest is a single master’s in electrical engineering. It is perhaps no wonder that President Donald Trump declares human-induced climate change to be a “hoax.” There is no cabinet minister to indicate otherwise. Of course, the more likely logic is the reverse. Trump seeks to avoid the climate issue for ideological reasons and the preferences of lobbyists and donors, so he has filled his cabinet with individuals that have no advanced training in climate-related fields.
We note that the Politburo of the Chinese Communist Party (CPC) shares the high technical level of the Chinese Cabinet. Of the 24 members of the Politburo shown in Table 9, 10 have a PhD degree, of which 4 are in STEM fields. In addition, there are two STEM Master’s degrees.
The national and global stakes of cabinet-level expertise are high. The twenty-first-century governance agenda is defined by complex, interconnected challenges: climate change, energy security, public health, biosecurity, food and water stress, AI governance, supply chain vulnerabilities, urban resilience, demographic change, nuclear risk, and recurrent cycles of financial instability and sovereign debt stress. Governing these domains requires highly educated, forward-looking experts able to assess technologies, data, uncertainties, and interdependencies of critical issues (e.g. climate and infrastructure). In that context, the U.S.’s under-education at the cabinet level- no PhDs, a single STEM master’s, and no highest degrees in energy or climate systems- constitutes a significant problem for the U.S. and for the world.