GayPatriot

The Internet home for American gay conservatives.

Is a College Degree Proof of Intelligence?

by

Sensing that Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker may be a threat to Hillary’s Ascendancy (and Jeb’s… six of one…), the left has been trying to dig up some dirt on him; desperately hoping to find an unverifiable claim that he gave his dog a gay haircut, or something… anything… they can smear him with.

In the last two weeks, leftist media establishments have done more digging into Scott Walker’s college records than they have done into Obama’s in the last eight years.  Many on the left are squawking that having left college his senior year to take a job with the American Red Cross, Walker is unfit to be president.

“The issue is, how well educated is this guy?” said Dean, a former Vermont governor who ran for the Democratic nomination in 2004, on MSNBC’s Morning Joe on Feb. 12, amid a surge in polls for Walker. “I worry about people being president of the United States not knowing much about the world and not knowing much about science.”

Here’s a question, does college degree automatically equal smart? Consider the following:

  • Sheila Jackson Lee — the dumbest woman in Congress — has a degree from Yale, and a law degree.
  • Marie Harf, the bubbleheaded spokesbunny of the Obama State Department has a Master’s Degree in foreign affairs from the University of Virginia.
  • The people who masterminded the policies that brought on the Economic Crash of 2008 (like the harebrained scheme of forcing banks to give out mortgages to deadbeats) were all graduates of Harvard and Yale.

All things considered, a president who ditched college in favor of a job in the real world may not be such a bad choice after all.

Comments

  4. My favorite uncle, in his youth, after one of my grandfather’s horses bit him, he turned around and punched the horse in the mouth, loosening some teeth. This angered my grandfather. Forced to leave home he joined a circus. Making his way too the u.s., he became a professional boxer and for a time, the state bantamweight champion. On becoming a citizen he registered Democrat. The Teamsters Union used his talent to punish scabs

    When I was in college he told me what I had was book smarts, but what I lacked was street smarts and street smarts is what you need to survive in the world. Maybe wqe can equate street smarts with innate intelligence, as seen in people like Steve Jobs

  6. A college degree is a credential that helps you get a job. Once you get a job the credential shouldn’t matter but the work performance.

    Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and others didn’t finish school but nobody would ever accuse them of ignorance.

    People who have access to a library or the Internet can easily build their knowledge base. It is a know fact that one thing engineers have to be able to do is self teach because the field progresses rapidly. And college is more general knowledge-in the field an engineer may have to learn something more specific to their job. Intelligence is about a hunger for knowledge and the ability to self teach when needed.

  7. Not at all. First off, they have dumbed down college, so the first two years are the last two years of what high school use to be. Second, I got a Bachelor’s degree, but I learned more in my field after I graduated just be by working in it. Could have skipped the degree altogether. My hubby is getting his Master’s but only because he wants to teach, and he said the same thing. Came out of school knowing nothing. Wasn’t until he actually worked that he learned anything. Sometimes I think a trade school education is better. Hands on learning.

  8. And the Fact that Sheila Jackson Lee has a law degree and graduated from Yale. I got a degree in paralegal studies. I am constantly asked snarkily if I didn’t get my law degree because I wasn’t smart enough. I always laugh, and say have you seen some of the lawyers out there. They would be clueless without their paralegals. I just didn’t want any more debt, and I was tired of going to school after four years. I have the luxury of having a husband who is a major bread winner, so I didn’t need an overly lucrative job. And no, I don’t care that I am the anti-thesis of feminism. Screw them bitter beyotches. 🙂

  11. A good thing can be over-rated, and that’s college. I tell my nephews to go if they want to, but, avoid the heavy debt (go to cheap schools) and be sure to get a few business courses in.

  12. Being “educated” has nothing to do with intelligence.

    When I was in school everyone thought I was smart. I wasn’t smarter than anyone else, I was blessed with a photographic-type memory. I could just repeat stuff better than most.

    I have worked with some very well educated people who were as dumb as could be. I have had some uneducated trades people work on my house when were extremely intelligent. IQ is based on thought processing not knowledge.

  14. There are certain fields you just flat-out need a degree in. If I want any prayer of working in a field pertaining to geology, I need that B.S. I’ll eventually go back to school for my Master’s, but that’s only because it would give me hiring preference for positions, and a zero or two to the end of my paycheck.

  15. Barack Obama spent many years at several colleges and earned two degrees. I think that proves that a college degree — or several — means nothing. He could have read a teleprompter just as well if he had never attended college at all.

  16. There is too much credentialization and grading on a curve for degrees to mean much. Military nurses that pass the military nursing course who fail their state boards 3 times get transferred to another state for extra tries. You have a lot of 6 figure affirmative action tokens that cant balance a checkbook/budget.

  17. Old but worth repeating:

    I’d rather entrust the government of the United States to the first 400 people listed in the Boston telephone directory than to the faculty of Harvard University.

    To survive, academia needs to maintain the illusion that it’s relevant and necessary. Cost, foreign competition, and outdated, impractical models of education (the four-year liberal arts degree, for example) are raising doubts and creating alternatives. I remember watching a documentary about high schools and colleges/trade schools in Germany and Japan. What impressed me most is what they don’t offer: farm teams for professional athletic organizations (organizations — such as the NFL — that often pay no taxes) and other activities that should not be part of any serious curriculum, but should be left to personal interest. The focus in all the schools this documentary featured is purely on education, preparation for a professional, productive life.

    One of the purposes of American elite education has always been to exclude. We are a nation without royalty and so some of us seek to create one. While I don’t like everything about what is typical of European education systems (the early tracking system, for example — I prefer a student’s ability to change and thus change courses later on; an ideal system accounts for this flexibility), our American system is not universal and, in my opinion, isn’t tooled for modern life because it was never intended to provide professional knowledge and skill; rather, it was intended for the wealthy to connect, marry, and keep it in the family. Dean is not so much attacking Walker’s education but defending his own and the idea that exclusive schools are just that. His is an old Eastern family of Dean Witter fame.

  18. the truth is the more people that go to college the more college becomes like grammer school. with the number of people attending college today having a college degree doesn’t mean a whole lot.

  19. George Washington didn’t have a college degree nor did Abraham Lincoln or Harry Truman (off the top of my head).

    Post Reagan, we’ve been governed by Harvard and Yale graduates. Given the state of things, Harvard and Yale owe us an explanation. And Yale needs to explain Sheila Jackson Lee.

  20. I will vote for Scott Walker if he runs for president.

    Ideally, I want a woman. But if no woman can rise to his level, than I will vote for Walker. I don’t see Clinton or Warren as rising to his level. I hope he’s the Republican option so we have a choice this time around.

  23. I certainly agree with most on here in terms of looking at degrees as a credential. As I work in higher education, I need the proper credentials to be hired for the jobs I want, as well as the salary that I want. I will graduate with my MA in May, and I expect that I will need to earn a PhD at some point in my career if I want to maintain the current direction of my career. At the same time, I recognize that my degrees are not an indication of my intelligence. I am very proud of what I have accomplished in my formal education, but that accomplishment only proves I can follow through with what I set my mind to.

  24. Why a women? Why not the best possible person?

    Comment by TnnsNe1 — February 18, 2015 @ 8:43 pm – February 18, 2015

    Because, Tnns, CrayCray judges people by the color of their skin/shape of their genitals instead of the content of their character.

    Which is the way the liberal mind works. Which is to say, racist and sexist.

  26. Rand Paul or bust. After stuff I’ve been reading about Walker the more hesitant I am to support him. He doesn’t seem to be very tolerant of differing views, given his operatives’ expulsion of the liberty movement from the Wisconsin state GOP.

  27. CrayCray judges people by the color of their skin/shape of their genitals instead of the content of their character.

    Learn to read. I said if a female could rise to the level of Scott Walker (meaning equal in qualifications), I’d vote for her. But, she doesn’t exist.

  28. @ Paul: That’s troubling. Walkers more libertarian that most of the prospective candidates, but that information doesn’t reassure me. Pinochet was a fan of free markets, too- and he slaughtered thousands to keep them that way. Do we know why Walker purged the liberty movement from WI?

  30. I have respect for people who earned degrees by going to classes on their own time, in addition to working full-time jobs. It does not always prove superior intelligence, but it often indicates self-discipline.

    It’s something else, though, when you are talking about adultolescents who went to school at Ivy League universities, attending class 15 hours a week, and partying the other 153 hours a week, while their parents supported them (paying their room and board as well as tuition). Most of these people only went to college to postpone growing up for 4+ years.

    We’ve had Yale and/or Harvard graduates running the country for years, with disastrous results. It’s time to try an alternative, like maybe electing people who have experience working at real jobs in the real world. They can’t possibly do any worse.