Early Life and Education
Rivlin is a daughter of the physicist Allan C. G. Mitchell and a granddaughter of the astronomer Samuel Alfred Mitchell. Her ancestry is in the main Cornish from Cornwall in the UK. She is a member of the Rivlin family.
Rivlin grew up in Bloomington, Indiana where her father was on the faculty of Indiana University. She briefly attended University High School in Bloomington before leaving to attend high school at The Madeira School. She then went on to Bryn Mawr College. Initially, she studied history, but after taking an economics course at Indiana University she decided to major in economics instead. She earned her Bachelor's of Art in 1952, writing her senior thesis on the economic integration of Western Europe.
Upon graduation, Rivlin moved to Europe. In Paris she held a junior position working on the Marshall Plan.
Rivlin applied to the public administration program at Harvard, but was rejected on the grounds that as a woman of marriageable age she was a poor risk. Instead she applied to Harvard's economics program and earned a Ph.D. from Radcliffe College (Harvard's private program for women) in 1958.
Read more about this topic: Alice Rivlin
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