One fact about Karoline Leavitt that often gets overlooked in the commotion surrounding her daily press conferences is that she was the first member of her immediate family to earn a college degree. On the surface, that fact is quiet and unremarkable, but it reveals something genuine about her journey to this point. Not everything is explained by it. However, it’s worth pausing to consider it before continuing.
Leavitt was raised in a family that owned a used truck dealership and an ice cream shop in Atkinson, New Hampshire. She played softball well enough at Lawrence, Massachusetts‘ Central Catholic High School to be named an All-Star for two consecutive years. That same sport played a part in her decision to enroll on a softball scholarship at Saint Anselm College in Goffstown, New Hampshire, in 2015.
Saint Anselm is a small Benedictine Catholic school that doesn’t produce many well-known figures. You get the impression of an institution that values tradition and measured seriousness when you stroll around its campus. It doesn’t attempt to be Harvard and isn’t. In hindsight, it seems almost too obvious that Leavitt chose to major in communications and minor in political science.
Her time there is intriguing because of how fast she changed course. Given that the scholarship served as her entry point, she gave up softball by the end of her sophomore year, which must have required some serious reconsideration. She had already worked at the local television station WMUR, interned for a U.S. senator, and become involved with the New Hampshire Institute of Politics by that point. Even though it wasn’t fully expressed yet, she was constructing something purposeful.
In addition, she started the college’s broadcasting club and contributed to The Saint Anselm Crier, the student newspaper. In a 2016 opinion piece, she described the media as “frankly crooked” and “unjust, unfair, and sometimes just plain old false.” That article might now be seen as a sneak peek at the stance she would eventually adopt in the White House briefing room. She claimed to be the “token conservative” on campus at the time, a position she seemed more at ease adopting than expressing regret for.
Additionally, a semester was spent at Rome’s John Cabot University. Studying abroad at an American university in Rome raises questions that aren’t always addressed in the political biography version of her story, but it’s easy to ignore that detail. It’s difficult to say whether that experience expanded her perspective in ways that subsequently influenced her communication instincts. However, it did occur and is included in the picture.
She earned a Bachelor of Arts in communication and politics in 2019. Soon after, she received an offer to work full-time as a letter writer for President Trump in the White House Office of Presidential Correspondence. She transitioned into an assistant press secretary position in less than a year, a career path that most graduates in communications wouldn’t dare sketch out on paper for fear of appearing naive.
Overall, Karoline Leavitt’s education was not developed through prestigious graduate programs or in elite lecture halls. Coursework, campus initiative, internships stacked on top of one another, and an early willingness to occupy uncomfortable political ground in an area where that was genuinely unpopular were all used to build it. It’s difficult to ignore the fact that the preparation was genuine and that the journey from that tiny college in New Hampshire to the podium in the briefing room was much more deliberate than it might seem, regardless of one’s political views.
