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Was Trump really a top student at Wharton? His classmates say not so much







Penn records, as well as some of President Donald Trump's classmates, do not seem to indicate that he was a top student at Wharton. Credit: Carson Kahoe

For years, President Donald Trump has said it’s clear that he is “a very smart guy” since he attended Wharton — a school he describes as “super genius stuff.”

Trump, who graduated from Wharton in 1968, has also never challenged the fact that he "graduated first in his class," which various publishers and news agencies such as The New York Times have reported.

Penn records and Trump’s classmates dispute this claim.

In 1968, The Daily Pennsylvanian published a list of the 56 students who were on the Wharton Dean’s List that year — Trump’s name is not among them.

“I recognize virtually all the names on that list, ” 1968 Wharton graduate Stephen Foxman said, “and Trump just wasn’t one of them.”

1968 Wharton graduate Jon Hillsberg added that there was no indication on the 1968 Commencement Program that Trump graduated with any honors. A copy of the program acquired from the Penn Archives lists 20 Wharton award and prize recipients, 15 cum laude recipients, four magna cum laude recipients and two summa cum laude recipients for the Class of 1968. Trump’s name appears nowhere on those lists.

“If he had done well, his name would have shown up,” Foxman said. Pages from the 212th Commencement show President Donald Trump as a 1968 Wharton graduate, but that he graduated without honors.

Given that there are 366 listed 1968 Wharton graduates on QuakerNet, Penn’s alumni database, the Dean’s List of 56 students represents approximately the top 15 percent of the class. The omission of Trump’s name suggests that his academic record at Penn was not as outstanding as he has claimed.

This is one of several stories that The Daily Pennsylvanian has written about Trump and his connections to Penn. Here is a guide to all of our stories, which include an investigation into his life as a Penn student as well as his ambiguous financial contributions to the University.

Penn spokesperson Ron Ozio said the University cannot release the academic records of alumni other than to confirm date of graduation, degree and major.

“[This] does not change because an alumnus is famous or holds a public position,” he said in a written statement.

Nonetheless, many of Trump’s peers in the Wharton Class of 1968 agree that he did not stand out academically, though many offer mixed accounts of how the 45th president acted in class.

A 1968 Wharton graduate who did not want to be named said that Trump “sat in the front row [of their Real Estate class], raised his hand a lot to answer questions and had a heavy New York accent.”

1968 Wharton graduate Roger Fulton Jr. made similar remarks, adding that he recalls Trump as “very focused on his studies.”

1968 Wharton graduate Edward Pollard also described Trump as “very professional” and “different from the rest of the class.”

“He was really off by himself. He didn’t party or go to football games ... [h]e didn’t mingle with the guys going back to hang out and chatting, and stuff like that,” added Pollard, who was, like Trump, a junior year transfer student to Penn.

While some remember Trump as a studious and solitary figure, others remember an individual who was less invested in his formal education and more involved with his future in real estate.

1968 Wharton graduate Louis Calomaris recalled that “Don ... was loath to really study much.”

Calomaris said Trump would come to study groups unprepared and did not “seem to care about being prepared.”

He added that Trump’s academic passivity likely stemmed from his passion for engaging directly in the real estate business.

“He spent all his weekends in New York because residential real estate is a weekend business,” Calomaris said. Five of Trump’s other classmates confirmed this.

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“He was not an intellectual man, but that wasn’t what his goal was,” he said. “He’s not an intellectual now, [and] that’s pretty obvious ... [w]hat I saw early on was an unbounded ambition that did come to fruition, because it matched his firm’s needs, and that’s how these things work.”

Excerpt from Penn's 212th Commencement Program





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