Roger Simon on Is Rick Perry a Dope?
I can also attest to the fact that an Ivy League education isn’t all that it is cracked up to be. Whatever small accomplishments I have in life are not easily traceable to my academic achievements (even though I was considerably closer to Clinton than Gore in class ranking). Arguably, the most successful president of the post-war period, Ronald Reagan, attended the ultra-obscure Eureka College. I don’t know what his grades were and I don’t much care. All I know is he got Gorbachev to “tear down that wall.” (Not exactly, but you know what I mean.)
Turning to Perry, he was a mediocre student at Texas A & M, a school that emphasizes a more practical form of education than Yale. What does this mean? Don’t know, but these days going to an Ivy no longer appears to be the royal road to career success it once was. This study of Top 10 Job Placement Colleges only shows one Ivy, Cornell, in the tenth position. Number one, not surprisingly, is The University of Texas at Austin.
Perhaps more importantly… and amusingly… this study from the Wall Street Journal shows Perry’s Texas A & M the number two choice of corporate job recruiters with nary an Ivy in sight until Cornell (again) at fourteen. Harvard, Princeton and Yale did not make the top twenty-five.
