You do him a great disservice, sir.

He doesn’t just happen to be ignorant —
he works
very conscientiously at it.
In this case, cultivating ignorance, like being
president, is hard work.
He’s proud of it because he’s worked harder at that
than anything else in his life. Please don’t take that accomplishment away from him.

One problem, mentioned above, is that for people who *really* want to learn, college is great, and you’ll learn a tremendous amount.

Then there’s the ones that want to squeeze by with just-passing grades, because to do otherwise would interfere with their carousing.

But both get the same piece of paper, saying they got a college degree.

Even saying “they went to an excellent school!” isn’t enough. Need I point out a certain Yalie with a Harvard MBA, who happens to be ignorant and proud of it?

Employers being lazy with hiring decisions are the real problem here, but where there’s a labor shortage and having good employees really matter (cf. Silicon Valley), employers or their hired headhunters, find it to their advantage to get the best people, whatever their credentials.

I wound up taking ten years to get a five year
degree, and had more than 200 credits at the end.

But I’m an aberration.
My daughter, who is about to graduate, has gotten
a superb free education in the CUNY system,
made great friends, and seen much of western
and central Europe in her semester abroad.

There’s good higher education, OK higher education,
and lousy higher education available out there.

I always respond, “You say that as if every college graduate you ever met was smart.”

While not denegrating academia and the scholarly achievements of my peers, nor overly pumping up the folk wisdom of my furniture-moving buddies, I’ll shout out an amen to the idea that a BA doesn’t “prove” anything.

The lack of a degree kept me limited to manual labor positions under the supervision of a bunch of pompous, ex-frat boy dolts who had somehow managed to put down their beer mugs and bongs long enough to be awarded a business degree at some fourth tier college.

Today, I have a vested interest in encouraging young people to go to college (or else my classes will be canceled and I’ll be back toting pianos and sofas up and down stairs all day). But I still can’t get over the fact that some of the dumbest people I’ve ever met had a “BA” after their names.

As the late southern comedian Brother Dave Gardner said, about segregationists trying to shut down public schools to avoid desegregation, “Why not let the little chirren go to school? We did. We didnt learn nothin.”