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All of the presidents who did not have college degrees were born in the 18th or 19th century.
66% of the presidents who served between Washington and Truman were college graduates. Woodrow Wilson was a college president.
77% of all US presidents have been college graduates.
All presidents who served in the last 60 years have been college grads, and several have had graduate degrees.
So we are regressing on the ladder of evolution, so that our presidents are too dumb unless they are held by the hand and book learned in a room with 50 other students like they were in an assembly line?
Many presidents who did graduate from college and were elected 30-40 years later. College was their formative years, everything else they acquired after college is what made them the man we elected as president. Besides, most of the worthless crap they learned in college was forgotten.
The point is, go to college, fine, but the things you learn later are self taught, or come from personal experiences are more important to who you are as an adult, then the wild days of college, partying, and falling asleep in class.
So in the old days, men could be self taught and go on to be great presidents, but today they are dumb as dirt.
There is a reason we do not elect kids right out of college to be president, they don't really know anything yet.
Here's some very wealthy people who also did not graduate from college:
Steve Jobs
Bill Gates
Frank Lloyd Wright
Buckminster Fulle
James Cameron
Mark Zuckerberg
Last edited by Ibginnie; 02-12-2015 at 09:45 PM..
Reason: hotlinking and/or copyright violation
Not surprisingly, your post is getting drowned out by anti-intellectual thinking (or at least those who seem very distrusting of formal education), but I think you make a great point. A degree isn't the "be all, end all", but it does imply a certain base level of education, and a level of commitment and responsibility since degrees involve following through with an educational accomplishment.
With that said, I don't think the biggest red flag for a candidate would be that they don't have a degree but that they don't respect a degree or the pursuit of being well rounded and balancing practical skills with higher, abstract critical thinking. If someone is mouthing off about others "being all highfalutin gettin' em' one of thowse diplomas at some colledge in da big Sid-E", is that the kind of person we want making important decisions about education policy, public safety or economic development?
If a candidate is extremely knowledgeable or skilled and has intelligence or experience that's commensurate or exceeds the qualifications that a degree bestows upon a person, but doesn't happen to have a traditional degree, I don't think that's as much of a deal breaker as the candidate who foolishly celebrates a lack of education in themselves or others.
Of course. This is only common sense.
These posters think that you can just grab the local mechanic and make him the president because he's plain spoken, bombastic, gives a firm handshake, looks you in the eye, and drives a pickup.
most politicians happen to have law degrees, and the only people that are worse than lawyers are tax agents.
I think that's an over-generalization about lawyers, but I do think that sometimes they are over-represented. Some elected officials that have some really great come from other backgrounds (i.e. medical doctors, chemistry professors, etc.). But some actors need to just stick with acting and not ride the coat tails of their fame into elected office. And it might not be bad to have a plumber (one who's really intelligent and knows about the science of why it's not a good idea to pollute the water supply and contaminate wells, the economics of running a small business, and great skills in dealing with people). Just as long as it's not that Joe the Plumber guy.
The key is the elected officials in a representative government should be representative of the population they serve, but they do need to be the best and the brightest in whatever they do, and most importantly, use that brain power for the public good, and not to head down the path of corruption or egocentricity (which both happen much too often). In my opinion, they can be from different backgrounds (white collar and blue collar), but the intelligence that's needed for an elected official is the ability to let those various skills be transferable to making decisions on behalf of those they serve that aren't always so easy to decipher.
Also, just very generally, I think the higher up a candidate goes (having to deal with a larger, more complex population) should raise the bar on experience, education, and intelligence. In other words, someone who is very effective at being Mayor of a small, rural community may not be so well qualified to be Governor of a large, densely populated state.
What are you going to do about it? I keep daydreaming about being a street-corner bum. Newport Beach, California, I need to go there and bug you.
First you'll need to learn they're called beach bums in Newport Beach and you'll probably have to strip naked and set fire to yourself if you want to set yourself apart from the dozens of guys, many of them with a college education, who do pretty much nothing but hang out, smoke pot and surf.
Last edited by DewDropInn; 02-12-2015 at 07:15 PM..
The worst American prez ever was also the only prez who held a PhD: Woodrow Wilson. He kicked off the war on drugs (Harrison act of 1913), started the federal income tax, which was only supposed to impact the very rich. He started the concept of US as world police with WWI. He tossed people in jail for speech (Schenk case), initiated the swarms of federal police that we have now, and was a stalwart proponent of racial segregation.
Harry Truman, now rated by historians as a great prez, did not have a college degree. Ronald Reagan attained a degree at a minor university only because he was a good football player.
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Keep that in mind. Lol