The Chronicle of Higher Education unveiled a sleek interactive map earlier this week that measured how educated each state’s lawmakers were. While Texas is far behind the rest of the nation in virtually every major education metric – including the percentage of the population with a college degree – our state’s legislators are regular academics compared to those in other states.

Texas leads the nation in percentage of its lawmakers who actually have a law degree, with a rate of 30.4 percent compared to 17.2 percent nationally. Despite this legal expertise, Texas’ lawmakers have recently passed several bills that are already being challenged in the courts, including the recent sonogram and the Voter ID legislation.

Also, both the congressional maps and the school finance plan approved just this week will also likely be deemed unconstitutional by the courts in the near future.

According to the chart, 86.2 percent of lawmakers received a bachelor’s degree or higher, compared to 74.7 percent nationally. This makes Texas’ representatives and senators the fifth most learned legislative body in the country – at least on paper.

A whopping 20 percent graduated from UT Austin, which is double the amount from Texas A&M. However, given the fact that A&M did educate our current governor, I’m not sure which school deserves more blame for the state Texas is in.

Only 71.1 percent of lawmakers received a degree from a college or university in Texas. In the off chance a legislator makes it out of the state for his or her education, they tend to make the most of it. Harvard was the most popular choice outside of Texas, awarding nine of our lawmakers with their degrees.

But, alas, postsecondary education does not a good legislative body make. Despite their sterling academic credentials, we’ve seen our leaders do and say dumb things like this, this, and this.

Now if we can just get them to act as smart as they apparently are…