There once was an American boy who dropped out of school at age 10 and ran away from home at 17. His early achievements were far from glowing.

Despite these false starts, he went on to found a popular newspaper, an almanac, and an Ivy League university. He discovered the Gulf Stream, the nature of lightning, and found ways to harness electricity. He invented the lightning rod, bifocals, and a unique musical instrument popular to this day, amongst other things. He wrote prolifically and peppered his publications with now well-known pithy sayings, such as “A penny saved is a penny earned.”

A few decades later, another American boy would read this inventor’s autobiography. Though this boy was raised in poverty in a log cabin and given little formal education, he read ravenously and developed prodigious speech and debate skills. He became a self-taught lawyer, argued 175 cases before the Illinois Supreme Court, invented a flotation device, and ascended from state politics to become President of the United States.

Shortly after this President’s death, a mostly deaf newsboy with only a few months of schooling invented and patented the first electronic vote recorder. He would go on to patent 1,092 more inventions, including the phonograph, the motion picture camera, and the lightbulb.

These three autodidacts – Benjamin Franklin, Abraham Lincoln, and Thomas Edison – amassed their expertise largely through their own inquisitiveness and experimentation. Though lacking in formal credentials, they advanced the frontiers of knowledge and accomplished world-changing feats in science, technology, civics, and statecraft.

Moreover, this has been the case for most of history; people have long been making scientific and technological progress without fancy degrees, federal funding, or university IRB approval. Creative souls wrote captivating lines of poetry and prose, composed awe-inspiring music, and created beautiful works of art without spending extravagant sums on MFAs or art school.

People have long been making scientific and technological progress without fancy degrees, federal funding, or university IRB approval.

A few ever-present forces have long led people to discover new knowledge, develop sophisticated machinery, and beautify the world without the academy’s sway: man’s curious nature, the desire to succeed and create a legacy, and, of course, that famous mother of invention: necessity.

Today’s experts, professionals, and creatives are a different stock. Degrees, certificates, and licenses abound. The share of the American populace holding a bachelor’s degree increased from 27.5% in 2005 to 32% in 2019. In just the last decade, the number of Americans holding a master’s degree increased 51%. Employers seek candidates with bachelor’s degrees for even some of the most rudimentary positions. Many professions require a license to practice, even for things like hair braiding and dog sitting.

With all these credentials, are today’s experts that much more knowledgeable, innovative, and virtuous than those of yesteryear?

They are not. The minds of today’s experts are less like libraries and more like piñatas: chock-full of sugary platitudes and the “confetti of meaningless qualifications” about which Margaret Thatcher warned.

Though more and more Americans have attained higher education, this has not led to any comparable explosion in knowledge or skills. Various tests to assess college graduates’ literacy, as well as their knowledge of science, history, and civics, have revealed dismal results. A recent Heritage Foundation study found that the average full-time college students spends 2.76 hours per day on education-related activities. At this pace, it seems fair to deduce that most universities are not creating the kind of well-rounded, erudite scholars about which their marketing departments are sure to bloviate.

Many occupying the most elite echelons of our society have proven themselves to be activists, propagandists, pagans, and mountebanks peddling all manner of flimflam, and the public is noticing that the emperor has no clothes.

To add to the irony, millions of jobs in skilled trades are going unfilled as more young adults have clamored for the golden ticket of a college degree. As Mike Rowe often laments, too many young people are opting to take on massive debt to obtain a degree, while jobs in skilled trades which pay well and require shorter, less expensive education are going wanting.

Recent events have demonstrated that having a degree is a weak predictor of a strong mind. Many occupying the most elite echelons of our society have proven themselves to be activists, propagandists, pagans, and mountebanks peddling all manner of flimflam, and the public is noticing that the emperor has no clothes.

The covid drama of the last few years revealed public health officials to be wildly authoritarian and unscientific. They repeatedly failed to allow new data or reasonable observations to alter their views on the lethality of covid, the efficacy of masking, or the wisdom of the policies they enacted. True to their utopian worldview, they envisioned a country free of covid cases and ran roughshod over the reality of policy tradeoffs, wreaking much havoc on public life by locking down schools and businesses.

Doctors at top hospitals have made clear that they believe children can have a latent, unfalsifiable other gender inside. Some have made careers out of chemically castrating and mutilating the bodies of these children to mimic those of the opposite sex.

The would-be Shakespeares of today cluster in graduate creative writing programs and publish nihilistic, angsty poetry in academic journals read only by other people in graduate creative writing programs.

The progressive skew of American universities, especially at the most elite, has been well-documented. Given this reality, it is fair to question whether they are teaching students bona fide knowledge, or simply making them sufficiently fluent in tendentious drivel.

The progressive establishment has launched a wholesale assault on merit itself, leading to one of its many idiosyncratic contradictions: the belief that we should only trust credentialed experts, paired with the belief that the very notion of expertise is irredeemably white, Western, and patriarchal.

The progressive establishment has launched a wholesale assault on merit itself, leading to one of its many idiosyncratic contradictions: the belief that we should only trust credentialed experts, paired with the belief that the very notion of expertise is irredeemably white, Western, and patriarchal. Thus, our finest universities routinely admit some applicants and reject others on the basis of race, and our sitting president openly admitted to selecting his vice-president and a Supreme Court justice nominee on the basis of race and sex. While China is improving the hypersonic missile, American schools are nixing their gifted and talented programs for containing too many Asians and not enough blacks. Credentials these days are, quite literally, skin-deep.

To put faith in credentials is an appeal to authority and an exercise in hearsay. The letters after someone’s name ask us to trust that an institution we may know nothing about has bestowed upon this person a stamp of approval for meeting some minimum standard of knowledge or competence. The current era is highlighting the imprudence of trusting others to think rightly on our behalf.

Credentials do not an expert make. When it comes to discerning someone’s expertise, accomplishments, and character the old Anglo-Protestant wisdom rings true: actions speak louder than words, and the proof of the pudding is in the eating.