Well, let’s see... Franklin Pierce, Thomas Reed, Longfellow and Hawthorn, George Mitchell, Bill Cohen, and Robert Peary are, to name a few, alums. You would be hard pressed to find another school of this size that has produced whose graduates are so well known. As far as I know, Rush flunked out of Southeast Missouri State in less than a year - maybe he’s not the right guy to be talking about formal education.
This is now.
Institutions change. From 1820, they change a lot. It's pretty clear that none of those gentlemen (except possibly Cohen and maybe Mitchell) would even recognize the place as it stands.
My own alma mater is unrecognizable, and not for the better.
And I'm not sure that attacking the messenger's lack of a formal degree is a rational response. I've two degrees - one from an Ivy - and I'm seeing the same thing here.
As far as I know, Rush flunked out of Southeast Missouri State in less than a year - maybe he’s not the right guy to be talking about formal education.
And I bet Rush knows a whole hell of a lot more American History than any Bowdoin graduate.
When I'd see him, the one thing that absolutely set him off was the quality of the students being sent to the school. On average the so-called “best” students had to do a semester to one and a half semesters of remedial work in their areas of study to be ready for the level of education they were doing. He swore on a stack of Bibles that each year's group of incoming students was actually dumber than the previous group.
The skills, abilities, and education level needed was not there among incoming students; instead they'd been indoctrinated to think they were the best of the best. They could not think and could not do the work expected of them. He said they were “affirmative action” students, in the sense they were accepted because of the money they paid the school, and not on ability.
He told me the graduates only worth their degrees came from these hard sciences, medicine, engineering, IT, and math because they actually knew something and could apply that knowledge. The liberal arts people didn't know squat and their degrees were useless.
That was 15 years ago. He went on to get his double PhD in both physics and chemistry. The quality of the students in colleges and universities has continued to decline since he graduated. Now, 85% of these newly minted grads cannot find jobs, have huge loans incurred for worthless degrees, and they are living in their parent's basement.
Yeah it was a decent school in the 1800's, but became a preppy boys' diploma mill in the 1900's, and is an academic outhouse now. My daughter graduated from Hillsdale College and received twice the education available at dear old Bowdoin.