As Scott Walker surges in the 2016 GOP primary polls, Democrats and the mainstream media have taken a newfound interest in the well-known fact that the Wisconsin governor never received a college degree. The Washington Post asserts there are “lingering questions” surrounding Walker’s departure, but Mark Hemingway correctly points out there really aren’t.
Walker’s story about his departure from college has always been straightforward: He attended Marquette University in Milwaukee from 1986 to 1990, but in the spring of his fourth year he left Marquette “in good standing” in order to take a full-time job at the American Red Cross. He intended to finish, but couldn’t find the time.
The Washington Post‘s deep dive into Walker’s college years doesn’t unearth anything that contradicts his story, but it does make clear that there was another reason Walker left college early: He was bored studying politicial science; he wanted to start building his political career.
As a teenager, Walker had always thought he was going to study business until he participated in the Boys State and Boys Nation programs during high school. “Boys Nation gave me a sense that hey maybe this is something that I’m called to do,” Walker told me during an interview last August. “So I came back, changed my mind and went into political science.”
When he arrived at college, Walker threw himself into student government and campus politics, but was uninterested in class. The Post reports:
“He seemed utterly bored,” said Michael Fleet, who taught him in a class on the politics of the Third World. Fleet said he’d hoped to get Walker into debates with the liberals in the room. But it didn’t work. Walker would only give occasional short speeches that made conservative arguments.
So Walker abandoned the pursuit of a political science degree not only to take a full-time job at the American Red Cross but also to launch his political career. In the fall of 1990, Walker ran his first campaign for the Wisconsin legislature. He knocked on 13,000 doors only to lose badly, but his longshot campaign set him up for a winning campaign in another legislative district in 1993. In 2002, he was elected (and re-elected twice) as county executive in overwhelmingly Democratic Milwaukee county and went on to win three gubernatorial elections between 2010 and 2014.
When I asked Walker about his college departure last August, he observed that a local TV anchor had likened his experience to that of a number of successful entrepreneurs who left college early. “Once somebody tried to take a dig at me. Ted Perry, the anchor on Fox 6 in Milwaukee … he did this whole thing where he pointed out: What do I have in common with Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Zuckerberg? All of them left in their senior year. Arguably, they did much cooler things than I did. I went to go work at the Red Cross. They started these amazing companies. But it’s the same principle. It wasn’t like getting kicked out or leaving early. I had something to do,” Walker said.
One would think Walker’s practical political education, including all of the policy experience he gained, would put to rest any concern that he lacked the credits for a B.A. in political science. Of course, whether Walker’s lack of a college degree should matter and whether it will matter are two entirely different questions. It’s certainly possible that some voters, particularly low-information voters, will have concerns that Walker isn’t up to the job when they hear he’s a “college dropout.” If Walker is evasive on policy questions, the press may jump more quickly to the conclusion that Walker just doesn’t know much about the issues. Walker isn’t going to last very long if his main response to foreign policy questions is to point out that Ronald Reagan took on the air traffic controllers.
But if Walker has thought deeply about the issues and articulates a clear agenda, it’s doubtful that the lack of a college degree will significantly hurt him in the race for the presidency.
