Wanted: Graduates from the School of Hard Knocks
Jennifer Senior, (Princeton ’91) notes that 95% of our Federal representatives graduated college, but despite their educational credentials few Congressmen are especially wise or empathetic. Senior is particularly irked by Ted Cruz (Princeton ’92) who she calls “quite arguably the Senate’s most insolent snob.”
You’re a mean one, Mr. Cruz
Senior doubts “more socioeconomic diversity would guarantee differences in policy or efficiency.” But if more elected officials graduated from the school of hard knocks than the Ivy League, she hopes voters would trust government more. Whether voters believed former Governor Scott Walker, a Marquette drop out, more than his replacement Tony Evers, who holds a PhD from Madison, depends on which Wisconsinites you ask.
The challenge is bigger than who represents us. The status arms race – in which college credentials are just one weapon - pervades modern American culture. Can Senior imagine a New York daily hiring the likes of Jimmy Breslin or Pete Hamill these days? Goldman hiring a Gus Levy? McKinsey hiring a consultant with a GED? Hell, state law forbids me from employing anyone at my school who doesn’t have a college degree. We elites don’t share cultural and economic capital: Through assortative mating, we hoard it.
A Texas acquaintance fears college has the opposite effect on kids; she finds grads often lack “drive, work ethic, humility, or even the self-awareness to ask for targeted help. At this point,” she wrote me, “I would hire someone who went thru a Chick-fil-a management training program over someone with a BA any day of the week.”
The Best and The Brightest?
College for all is part of a chimerical dream of equality of outcomes that elides our failure to create equality of opportunity. Denying dignity to the majority of Americans who will not obtain a college degree is immoral; electing more of them to represent us is an indirect route to addressing this challenge. Young people need affordable alternative programs that help them develop the wisdom and empathy college provides in the best of circumstances. And that shouldn’t take an act of Congress.
Former House speaker John Boehner once said of Ted Cruz: "I have never worked with a more miserable son of a bitch in my life." Having seen him in his salad days Senior may know better, but I suspect it wasn’t Princeton that made him that way.
