It's mostly a mix of this and financial means in terms of explanatory power. HN seems to routinely forget that about 64% of Americans 25+ don't have anything be

It's mostly a mix of this and financial means in terms of explanatory power. HN seems to routinely forget that about 64% of Americans 25+ don't have anything beyond a high school degree. Since financial means also probably correlates with employee potential, the signal works in the same direction regardless of the explanation. The people who were smart enough to go to college but didn't broadly fall into two buckets: (1) insufficient financial means, (2) nonconformists. I strongly suspect the latter group are statistical outliers.