But there is certainly a mistrust and suspicion of the educated man and the intellectual life in American Culture. This is not new, it probably has historical roots in colonial times, when men came to the New World and could amass great wealth without having been born into a landed aristocracy. In America, it was hard work and business skills which determined success, not a family that could get you into a great University. Work and entrepreneurial activity were not a guarantee of success, but they were needed. They were a necessary but not sufficient condition.

Although America has certainly had no shortage of great educational institutions and highly educated men, great intellects in every field, it was long considered that these were not a requirement of success. You could make it by hard work and frugal life, and by entrepreneurial activity. The great mass of people still looked at education and intelligence as suspect, as effeminate, as potentially seditious and arrogant and conceited.
The stereotypes were of the "pointy-headed intellectual who can't park his bicycle straight when he gets to the campus" (George Wallace), and the filthy hippy and the "Liberal take-over of the campus". The universities, since the 1960s, have been seen as a training ground for opponents, and even enemies, of the American Dream. and although not necessarily enemies of the Dream, these new scholars certainly questioned it. The graduates of those schools now did not necessarily open businesses or farms, they now moved into the new jobs and careers made possible by the administrative requirements of a highly advanced technical society. Their very existence threatened the old promise, the American Covenant: "Work hard and you will be rewarded."

Still, it was possible to get ahead by hard work and business, and it was possible to send your own kids to college even if you didn't go yourself. The opposition to education and the intellectual life was cultural, not political. And as long as the State subsidized the education of the children of the middle class, the opposition was not too serious or organized. In the old days, education was necessary only for preachers and lawyers.
For everyone else, it was just a luxury of the rich.

But times have changed. College has suddenly become very expensive, and more a requirement for financial success. People are starting to see that we are rapidly building a world where it doesn't MATTER how hard you work, or how thrifty you are, or how good at business you might be; unless you have the college degree you are more and more likely to be condemned to a life of ill-paying and insecure drudgery, and so will your children. Even entrepreneurial wealth has diminished as the large corporation has become the main driver of economic life. And rather than blaming those responsible for creating this world, or of the historical and economic conditions that have made it possible, the anger has been deftly shifted to the beneficiaries of this new order: the educated and intellectual classes.

It is true that education no longer provides training required to hold these new jobs, that it has become more and more a means of keeping the riff-raff out of the good jobs (IOW,its become a filter to make sure only the "right" people get on the executive track.) After all, most management jobs today do not require intense training, we are not all doctors, lawyers, scientists or other professionals. The degree has become a way of weeding out the socially unfit, the low-lifes, the lower social classes. Getting a degree makes it easier to get hired, and easier to get promoted. It has nothing to do with job skills, its strictly about social class. In order to get a good job today it is almost a requirement that you have a college degree. What the degree is in is irrelevant. What the degree tells the HR department is that you can follow orders, put up with bullshit, defer expectations, that you can operate in a hierarchy, and that you will have the basic skills (the stuff you used to have mastered in high school). It tells them you can work in the system and not cause trouble. Isn't it funny how the working stiffs have convinced themselves the colleges are turning out rebels, troublemakers and communists? Think about that.

No, this is not fair. But its the way it is.