You know, I don't agree that America is a particularly anti-intellectual place. Certainly there are some anti-intellectual strains in the culture. But if the cu

You know, I don't agree that America is a particularly anti-intellectual place. Certainly there are some anti-intellectual strains in the culture. But if the culture as a whole were truly anti-intellectual I would expect college as a right of passage, particularly to elite positions, to be a far more minor phenomenon. In America, whether you go to college, and particularly whether you went to the couple of dozen top colleges, is hugely important. For example, virtually all members of Congress have college degrees. As do all military officers. And good luck finding a major business leader who never went to college. There are some jobs which require very specific training that is available only in college; no getting around that. But it goes much further. In America, some jobs that _don't_ require mastery of any specific body of knowledge still require a college degree, any college degree, just as a test of basic competence. And a society that looks askance at intellectual activities just would not do things that way. It would use other criteria for judging general character and competence: achievements in sports, the arts, the military, something like the Scouts, or maybe leadership in organized religion. If America were truly anti-intellectual, it would not trust a sector as intrinsically intellectual as colleges to do its social sorting. And with much less ability to confer social status on those they admitted, colleges would matter far less.