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Tuesday, February 17, 2015

A surprising number of presidents never graduated college

Media and potential opponents are scandalized that Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker is considering a run for president even though he didn’t graduate from college. But if Walker (who dropped out of Marquette University in his senior year) won in 2016, he would be joining an exalted group that includes the two presidents most frequently named as the favorites of the American people.

Eleven presidents — exactly 25 percent — were not college graduates. Most prominent on that list are George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, who make up half of Mt. Rushmore’s foursome and are in the top three or top five in virtually every popular survey of favorite presidents. (A 2007 Rasmussen poll put Honest Abe and the Father of Our Country at number two and number one, respectively.) The most recent president to forego the benefits of a sheepskin was Harry Truman, and the list includes other fondly remembered (and a few barely remembered) chief executives.

Meet the presidents who dropped out or didn’t make it to college at all:

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6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Don't forget the current President. His records are sealed because they reveal that he was a foreign student from Indonesia.

Anonymous said...

Times are very different now. A college degree is equivalent to a high school diploma generations ago. Oranges to oranges, please.

Anonymous said...

I kind of like Scott Walker and being a college graduate is not a requisite for the presidency. With that said, it is a bit too early to compare Walker to Washington, Lincoln, et al.

Anonymous said...

A college degree to a politician is like a contractors license is to a scammer..A LICENSE TO STEAL!

Anonymous said...

And Lincoln became a lawyer not by going to law school, but by reading the law under the tutelage of other lawyers. Times have changed.

Anonymous said...

It's the educated idiots that get us in all the jams. I'd rather have a President with common sense any day of the week than one that has a piece of paper to hang on the wall.