Snob Appeal

Rick Santorum was not thoughtless to use the word snob in connection with college education.

Like Rush Limbaugh, who is the well spring of Republican Party thought, he knows to which resentment he can appeal.

I interviewed a man today who has been a welder for 30 years. Welders these days are not just guys with torches and masks. This guy had welded everything from space shuttles to airplane engines to medical devices and what he does is very high tech and highly skilled and requires a talent for measurement and a lot of practical math.

But some years ago he was working at a company, managing thirty employees in his department and doing a terrific job. The company's earnings had risen ten fold over his tenure there and his supervisors and bosses decided it was time to bring him into management.

Until they found he had never been to college. He was not only not promoted, but because they felt they could not simply keep an employee who had become so visible and valuable in a non management capacity, they fired him.

All because he had not earned his merit badge: A college B.A..

In this, I find myself in odd company: Charles Murray of the American Enterprise institute says we should prick the BA balloon. It's become a pretty meaningless credential. It's only meaning is bestowed upon it by mindless, lazy "human resources" types who don't want to have to devise ways of actually evaluating people in a meaningful way--they want to just throw out all applicants who do not have B.A.'s. It makes the life of the HR person easy--she can go to lunch on time.

So when President Obama says everyone should be able to go to college, for people who smoulder with the resentment of that experience, they hear it as, "Everyone should go to college." And they think: Why? Why should some feckless privileged frat boy who spent four years drinking on his fraternity porch be promoted because his father paid for 4 years of college.

Fact is, not everyone should go to college. Fact is, the college degree should not be a ticket to promotion at the workplace and should not even be a ticket to the hiring interview. In our zeal for a "meritocracy" we breed understandable and justifiable resentment among those who have been mindlessly made into losers.

Funny thing is, the resentment is not directed toward the owners of the factories, but always toward the President and the Democrats.

That one, I'm still trying to figure out.