John Adams was the first president to go to college.

Harvard College and Memorial Hall

While George Washington was famously eulogized as “first in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen,” his trendsetting record did not extend to the halls of academia. The founding father was finished with formal schooling by age 14, and although he later earned a surveying license from the College of William & Mary, it was not an accreditation that counted him among the student body.

As such, it’s Washington’s successor, John Adams, who holds the distinction of being the first U.S. president to go to college, although there were various points in his early life where that outcome was in doubt. According to Richard B. Bernstein’s The Education of John Adams, the statesman struggled to remain focused in the classroom as a child despite his sharp mind; he even tried to convince his father that he wanted to leave school and become a farmer, to no avail. Adams soon realized that the root of the problem lay with his teacher, whom he later described as “the most indolent man I ever knew,” and his learning flourished after he switched schools.

Despite earning an invitation to take the admissions test for nearby Harvard College, Adams almost backed out of the opportunity due to the petrifying idea of meeting the institution’s distinguished faculty members by himself. Then he nearly had a panic attack upon glancing at the raft of words he had to translate into Latin on the entrance exam, until realizing he’d have a dictionary to help. Adams ultimately gained entry and excelled amid a curriculum centered on math, philosophy, and natural sciences. He even delivered a formal disputation in Latin at the graduation ceremonies of 1755, his impressive presentation leading to a job offer as a schoolmaster and the first steps toward becoming a seminal figure in the nation’s history.

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Harry S. Truman was the last president who didn’t have a college degree.

While several 19th-century presidents either dropped out of college or bypassed higher learning altogether, Harry S. Truman became the last of the breed when he took over the nation's highest office in 1945. Ironically, the Missourian was a person who relished intellectual stimulation: Smart enough to skip third grade, he was known to read four or five newspapers every morning as commander in chief. However, Truman's hopes of earning a degree after high school quickly ran into the course-correcting forces of reality, and he dropped out of Spalding's Commercial College in Kansas City to financially assist his poor farming family. Truman later took night classes at the Kansas City School of Law after becoming a Jackson County judge in the 1920s, but again abandoned his studies due to a lack of time, noting, "I had so many people interested in the welfare of the county who wanted to see me that I couldn't study law." Regardless, after multiple terms as a district judge and his successful election to the U.S. Senate in 1934, it was clear that the lack of a college degree was no hindrance to Truman's aspirations.