The Washington Post has a long article up about Scott Walker’s formative years. It has some fine reporting, but the overall tone and headline are curious: “As Scott Walker mulls White House bid, questions linger over college exit.”
Questions linger? Over what, exactly? It’s not a secret and it never has been that Walker didn’t finish college (well, it hasn’t been a secret in spite of the fact the obtuse scolds at Daily Kos are a bit confused). He left Marquette in his fourth year. Since then, Walker has had quite a political career as Milwaukee county executive, in the Wisconsin state assembly, and now governor. After all that time in public life, the majority of voters of Wisconsin haven’t had an issue with the man’s general intelligence level and it seems obvious enough that he’s a capable man. So why is the Post implying that his lack of a college degree is some sort of liability?
In fact, it’s already become something of a Democratic talking point. Howard Dean recently told Joe Scarborough, “I think a lot of people are going to be worried about this.” Maybe Dean can speak with more authority on this than most Democrats because he’s a medical doctor, but let’s not kid ourselves that a college degree means much here. Joe Biden did manage to finish law school, despite being busted for plagiarizing a law review article, and I doubt many parents are saying to their kids, “Stay in school, and someday you could end up an affable laughingstock like the vice president.” Barack Obama may have two Ivy League degrees, but his academic career is shrouded in mystery—which is usually not a sign of stellar grades. Democrats had a field day painting George W. Bush as dumb, and yet, only after the 2004 election did Kerry finally agree to release his military records. Those records contained a college transcript showing Kerry had a slightly lower grade average than George W. Bush when the two overlapped at Yale. (Oh, and military intelligence tests seem to indicate Bush has a higher I.Q. as well.)
Insisting on academic credentials as a way of evaluating leadership abilities — let alone suggesting that being a few credits shy of an undergraduate degree is disqualifying — is so worthless that it boggles the mind that Democrats would even float this as a talking point. In fact, based on the 2014 mid-term results, Democrats’ inability to woo white voters without college degrees is starting to really hurt them at the ballot box.
For decades now, America’s higher education system has poorly served Americans. If you can weld, you can land a job making six-figures tomorrow. If you recently acquired a B.A. in sociology, well, can you tell me how you do that thing where you make the foam on top a latte look like a heart? There’s a reason why the lack of a college degree is practically celebrated in Silicon Valley. Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates are all college dropouts. Peter Thiel says a college “diploma is a dunce hat in disguise” and wants to blow the higher-ed system up entirely. Sixty-three of the people on the Forbes 400 don’t have college degrees.
Pointing all this out is not to devalue education. I, for one, am glad Howard Dean went to medical school before becoming a doctor. But most liberal arts degrees are overrated as a precondition for success and they are indisputably overpriced — hence the current student loan crisis. In the Internet era, there are many, many new ways to become educated. This sudden suspicion of Scott Walker seems a product of the fact that higher education is a world that liberals control utterly, and the entire economic model supporting it is on the verge of collapse. If the American people start to get hip to the idea that people such as Mark Zuckerberg and, yes, Scott Walker can succeed without a degree, well, that’s one less power base for liberals—and a lot more independently educated voters who are going to think for themselves.
As he runs for president, I hope that Democrats lodge this criticism of Walker loudly and often. It’s high time we had a robust public debate on the value of a college degree, and whether or not subsidizing the ivory tower is worth it. And I suspect that Scott Walker would emerge from such a national conversation looking like a very good candidate indeed.
