Scott Walker's national education effect: Column The college dropout governor may bring reality back to an Ivy League-suffocated government.

Glenn Harlan Reynolds | USATODAY

A lot of people don't know much about him yet, and he may not even be running, but if Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker is elected president in 2016, he'll immediately accomplish something that no other candidate being talked about can: He'll lay to rest the absurd belief that you're a nobody if you don't have a college degree. And he might even cut into the surprisingly recent takeover of our institutions by an educated mandarin class, something that just might save the country.

Though Walker attended Marquette University, he left before graduating, which has caused some finger-wagging from the usual journalistic suspects. After all, they seem to believe, everyone they know has a college degree, so it must be essential to getting ahead. As the successful governor of an important state, you'd think that Walker's subsequent career would make his college degree irrelevant, but you'd be wrong.

And that's why a President Walker would accomplish something worthwhile the moment he took office. Over the past few years in America, a college degree has become something valued more as a class signifier than as a source of useful knowledge. When Democratic spokesman Howard Dean (who himself was born into wealth) suggested that Walker's lack of a degree made him unsuitable for the White House, what he really meant was that Walker is "not our kind, dear" — lacking the credential that many elite Americans today regard as essential to respectable status.

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Of course, some of our greatest presidents, from George Washington to Abraham Lincoln to Harry S. Truman, never graduated from college. But the college degree as class-signifier is, as I note in my book, The New School , a rather recent phenomenon. As late as the 1970s, it was perfectly respectable for middle-class, and even upper-middle-class, people to lack a college degree. And, of course, most non-elite Americans still do: 68% of Americans, like Scott Walker, lack a college diploma. But where 50 years or 100 years ago they might not have cared, many now feel inferior to those who possess a degree.

But without much reason, as many college degrees don't signify much besides a limited ability to show up on time most of the time, and avoid getting so falling-down-drunk that you flunk out. Nor does attendance at college necessarily even produce a leg up economically. Some studies suggest that attending college can actually increase economic inequality, as graduates emerge with no better prospects of employment, but heavy student loan debt. Many students also don't learn much: In Academically Adrift, a study by Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa, researchers found that 36% of students "did not demonstrate any significant improvement in learning" over four years of college.

But the college degree — especially a degree from an elite school — has become an entry-level ticket into the educated mandarinate. In his important book, The New Class Conflict , Joel Kotkin calls it the "clerisy" — that now dominates government, journalism and academia. And as a result, an America that once prided itself on real-world achievement and practical good sense now runs largely on credentials.

Today, the Supreme Court is composed entirely of Ivy Leaguers: five from Harvard Law School, three from Yale Law School, and one, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, from that scrappy Ivy League upstart Columbia Law School.

Likewise, you have to go back to 1988 to find a U.S. president who wasn't a graduate of an Ivy League school — George W. Bush and Barack Obama upped the ante by having attended two each, Yale and Harvard for Bush, Columbia and Harvard for Obama. In Congress,94% of the House, and 100% of the Senate, have college degrees of some sort. President Obama's Cabinet is all college-educated, with just under half having an Ivy League undergraduate degree; almost 35% have an Ivy League graduate degree.

All this credentialism means that we should have the best, most efficiently and intelligently run government ever, right? Well, just look around. Anyone who has ever attended a faculty meeting should recognize that more education doesn't produce better decision makers, and our educated mandarinate doesn't seem to have done much for the country.

Already people can point to tech pioneers like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs as evidence that a college degree isn't essential to getting ahead. But just as electing America's first black president had a resonance that no other achievement did, so, perhaps, electing America's first non-college-grad president in many decades will serve to remind people that a college degree isn't the be-all and end-all, and that accomplishments and practical skills are, in the end, more important than credentials. It would be educational.

Glenn Harlan Reynolds, a University of Tennessee law professor, is the author of The New School : How the Information Age Will Save American Education from Itself.



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