‘Nobody Wants to Run for Office’
“In today’s media environment, you would have to be crazy to run for office.”
That’s what one student told Shauna Shames, an assistant professor of political science at Rutgers University-Camden, during her study of more than 700 top grad students in law and public policy. Shames wanted to know whether Millennials are interested in becoming political candidates. She figured that if anyone would be interested in getting elected to government, it would be people at Harvard, one of the top feeder schools for national public service, or Suffolk University Law School, which sends a lot of its grads into state politics.
What she found is that elite young people—even those who are pursuing advanced degrees in law and policy—think running for office sounds terrible.
“You have to raise a lot of money to be viable,” one public-policy student told
