“Would you ever think that he didn’t go to college?” I was asked recently by a friend about a mutual friend. “No,” I readily admitted, “I certainly would not.” The friend who didn’t go to college has somehow managed to develop into a real live human being with all parts working and intact. He is successful, cultivated, intellectually curious, an engaging conversationalist with a whimsical sense of humor. And he even wears a hat.
I’m being only mildly facetious. In recent decades, the idea that everyone must go to college has become something of a national obsession, as if not to go would put one’s humanity in doubt. President Obama certified the obsession, it seemed, when he vowed to make America first in the world in its proportion of graduates—right now we are number nine out of thirty-six developed nations.
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