By Degrees
By Mitch Berg
I have a college degree.
And other than writing for some portion of my living for pretty much my entire adult life, I’ve never really “used it”. My BA was in English, with minors in History and German (and two courses short of a minor in Computer Science, although it was the type of computer science that is pretty obsolete today). Most of what I use for a living, I picked up on my own – and yes, college certainly helped me “learn how to learn”, which has been the stated justification for humanities degrees among the independently-non-wealthy for decades.
So college was good for me; I’m glad I went. But a degree doesn’t say all that much about a person.
Least of all an “elite” degree. The best thing an Ivy League degree says about a person is that between the ages of 14 and 17, they knew enough to play the paper chase with enough excellence to punch all the tickets that “elite” school recruiters were looking for, because they had a sense of the importance of that most important byproduct of an “elite” education; access to the alumni directory. And that’s the best thing it says. The other things it says – legacy admission, overentitlement, educational stage parents – are less salutary.
In the meantime, many of the greatest Americans – from Abraham Lincoln to Bill Gates – had no college education (at the least).
So after eight years of stonewalling about Barack Obama’s college transcripts, the media is suddenly obsessed with Wisconsin governor Scott Walker’s college career – which was cut short when he dropped out to start his career.
Will that scupper Walker with the American people? Charles CW Cooke says there are a couple sides to that question:
How effective the approach would be during a general election is anybody’s guess, for at present Americans exhibit a strange and inconsistent attitude toward their dropouts. In theory, this is a nation that was built by the rebels and the nonconformists — more specifically, by the recalcitrant revolutionaries of Valley Forge, the chippy entrepreneurs of the frontier and of Silicon Valley, and by the ambitious Lincolnian auto-didacts who looked at their conditions and sought to improve them on their own terms.
Indeed, many of the great advances in human history came from the self-taught autodidact.
In practice, however, America is becoming increasingly rigid and Babbit-like. When a given individual makes it without school, we lavish him with praise and with adulation and we explain his rise with saccharine appeals to the American spirit; when our own children suggest that they might wish to dropout, however, we tut-tut and roll our eyes and make sneering jokes about Burger King.
There are, of course, two Americas:
This is no accident. Rather, it is the product of an increasing tendency among college-educated Americans to regard the letters after their names as a distinguishing mark that renders them as part of a special, exclusive class. By willfully conflating their established educational achievements and their presumed intellect or societal worth — in Dean’s words, their “education” per se — these people extract every last ounce of social value from their investment, and make it appear as if the only way to compete with them is to join them…Sorry, Mr. Walker, you have the wrong colored dot on your forehead to run for higher office.
I think a person whose life has been focusing on accomplishing things would make a nice switch from a President with all sorts of credential who has accomplished nothing.
February 13th, 2015 at 12:20 pm
Considering the cesspools of anti-American hatred most college campuses have become, lack of a degree is most definitely not a detriment if one has a track record of success, which Walker most certainly has.
When the scumbag left starts in about his lack of a sheepskin, it is of course appropriate to point out the giants that made history without having graduated from college, but how about putting the spotlight on some of academia’s shining stars, like Bill Ayers, Angela Davis, Ward Churchill, Steven Salaita, Leonard Jeffries and to a lesser extent, PZ Meyers.
To be able to say you weren’t exposed, as an impressionable youngster, to the corrosive twaddle, lies and foaming hate of such as they is a feather in one’s cap.
February 13th, 2015 at 12:52 pm
It’s worth noting that while Mr. Gates and Mr. Limbaugh do not have a sheepskin, they did spend some time at college before deciding they wanted to do something else. That said, some of the smartest engineers I’ve worked with also do not have a degree, or they have a degree in something else. it’s thinking, not degrees.
February 13th, 2015 at 1:49 pm
I’ve reported to people who attended the following schools:
University of Illinois-Chicago
Washington University
Georgetown
Harvard
Tulsa
Rhode Island
Oklahoma State
No college
Minnesota
St. Mary’s (Winona)
UW-Whitewater
UW-River Falls
Of these, the best boss I’ve had, by a significant margin, was the one who attended Oklahoma State. Where you spend your early adult years isn’t particularly important.
February 13th, 2015 at 6:37 pm
Neither my wife nor I have college degrees and we ain’t exactly livin’ check to check.
Despite how fouled up the military can be sometimes, I learned more about responsibility, leadership and hard work before I was 20 than many people that have degrees. I believe that I have shared this before on these discussions, but when I was 20 years old, I was given the responsibility for maintaining a B-52 bomber, worth, in 1974 dollars, about $41 million, not to mention the lives of anywhere from eight to ten people, sometimes including myself, that flew in them. I also supervised, managed and guided five team members on my ground crew.
I also learned to clear jams on M-60 machine guns in less than 30 seconds. Priceless!
February 15th, 2015 at 9:27 am
It does seem odd that every officer in every branch of the military must have a college degree, but the Commander in Chief doesn’t.
All the historical facts come from a different age–when going to college was a lot more rare than it is now. Dropping out in your senior year shows a disturbing inability to finish your commitments …. a disinclination to learn–to value knowledge.
Mr. Walker’s state record speaks for itself. He led his state to a projected $2.2 billion deficit while Wisconsin’s wage and job growth sag below the national average.
At least Walker isn’t claiming degrees he didn’t earn or basing his resume on plagiarism.
February 15th, 2015 at 10:40 am
Does it mean you can’t finish your commitments, or the scales fell from your eyes and you realized it was all PC bullshit?
Or your Dad died, your family ran out of money and you had to drop out to work to support your younger siblings?
Or you jumped at a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to become the most successful businessman in decades?
Beware the “I did it and was successful so everybody else should do it, too” fallacy.
February 15th, 2015 at 11:27 am
“Dropping out in your senior year shows a disturbing inability to finish your commitments …”
yeah like mounting and completing 3 campaigns in 5 years for governor against increasingly nasty opponents and winning!
February 15th, 2015 at 4:33 pm
There’s a difference between not having attended college (hence no college degree) and dropping out of college (34 credits short) especially when you are close to graduation. I would argue that Mr. Walker could just use all of his experience in the private sector to overcome not having a degree. Although that wouldn’t be true either as Walker has nuzzled at the breast of government his entire adult life.
February 15th, 2015 at 8:11 pm
Emery: Officers only need a degree to reach O-3. That can be waived as well.
February 16th, 2015 at 7:24 am
Dropping out in your senior year shows a disturbing inability to finish your commitments
What commitment? To whom? Starting a career fit his priorities at that time of his life.
TWO AND A HALF DECADES AGO.
Even IF leaving school to start a career says anything bad about a person – it doesn’t – it was in his early twenties. Ones college education does not define a person; in fact, anyone who’s still barbering about where they went to school after age 25 who isn’t some form of academic needs to get a life, stat. They’re like those homecoming kings who peaked in high school and spent the next forty years talking about their big touchdown at the homecoming game.
Nobody cares where you went to school, whoever you are. All that matters is, can you do what you say you’re going to do?
For all of Barack Obama’s formal education, the answer is a derisive giggle. For Scott Walker, the answer is yes; not getting a piece of paper at age 22 isn’t even a blip on the radar anymore.
February 16th, 2015 at 12:03 pm
Walker’s lack of a degree doesn’t matter, it’s just the handiest stick for Liberals to beat him with. If it wasn’t that, it’d be something else.
Suppose Walker took a few more credits and graduated from Liberty On-Line University, would Liberals suddenly become proud of his commitment and dedication to completing what he started? Would they suddenly agree his ideas have merit, now that they’re backed by a College Degree?
No. Of course not. They’d sneer that it was an on-line degree, that it took too long to complete, that it wasn’t in the right field, that it’s only a BA, that . . . he’s not a Liberal, which is their real complaint except they’re too chicken to flat out admit it
February 16th, 2015 at 7:13 pm
Walker has nuzzled at the breast of government his entire adult life
So amusing to see the Left calling this a bad thing after all these years.
February 16th, 2015 at 10:02 pm
I like John Kasich, whom i consider to be a pragmatic conservative.
February 17th, 2015 at 9:00 am
Actually, unlike Governor Dayton and President Obama, Governor Walker has held an honest job in his adult life. He sold warranties for IBM mainframes and worked for the Red Cross. He’s also an Eagle Scout, so unlike Dayton and Obama, he’d contributed something to his community even before he ever went into politics.
And regarding that deficit, that’s simply the first part in the budgeting process where the state agencies make their requests. If there was not a massive deficit at this point, I’d be surprised. The next step is for the adults in the room to tell state agencies that their actual spending in the first 11 months of the year was X, hence their funding will be Y= 1.09 x + 2% for inflation, not Y+ 20%. And then the deficit will largely disappear.
Plus, if we want to talk about our own state, it’s worth noting that we run a deficit most years of about a billion bucks called the “bonding bill”. Why we need to be issuing lots of bonds 157 years after we became a state, I really don’t know, but let’s not pretend that Minnesota is balancing the budget. When honest accounting is used, as opposed to government accounting, we are not.