Degrees Of Success

In Friday's Wall Street Journal we learn that James Taranto is another among many who have enjoyed success without a sheepskin:

By all accounts Marilee Jones did an excellent job as dean of admissions at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. But she was forced to resign last month after it emerged that she had falsely claimed to hold three degrees when she first came to work at MIT 28 years earlier. In fact, she held only an undergraduate degree from an obscure Catholic college.

I feel her pain, for school never agreed with me. I repeatedly found myself in conflict with teachers and professors. I left high school after my sophomore year; and although I spent several years in college, I never bothered to graduate. In my 20s I considered a career in law, but I decided to stick with journalism in large part because the thought of spending three more years in school repelled me.

By no means am I against getting a college education and, mostly because of workplace requirements, I encourage all the youngsters I know to at least get a bachelors degree. You really have a hard time getting anywhere in corporate America without one.

But I find the emphasis that many of the elites (from both sides of the ideological spectrum by the way) still place on where people went to school a bit annoying. Arguments are often given greater weight and credibility if the person putting them forward graduated from one of "top tier" schools instead of being judged on their merits.

There is no doubt that someone who graduates from Yale, Harvard, Princeton, or Dartmouth (did you know the Power Line guys went there?) has attained a certain level of intelligence. But that doesn't mean they can think. Or write. Or effectively present an argument.

Sure I've met plenty of people from these schools who can do all of the aforementioned. But I've also meet many who couldn't think their way out of a paper bag.

At the same time, many of the most intelligent, thoughtful, and articulate people I know either graduated from one of second, third, or fourth tier schools (like the vast majority of us) or didn't graduate at all. The notion that what someone did or didn't do when they were in their early-twenties should by the basis for how you judge them now is shallow and short-sighted.