College crush

Charles Murray says America has an irrational love for the Bachelor of Arts degree, and he offers a way to get over it | Marvin Olasky

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Charles Murray has done it again. Murray is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank in Washington, D.C., but he is best known for books that are scholarly yet readable and provocative: Losing Ground, which eviscerated the American welfare system; The Bell Curve, co-authored with the late Richard Herrnstein, which analyzed the role of IQ in American society; and now Real Education (Crown Forum, 2008), which offers conventional U.S. educators a dose of reality.

Q: Why this book?

The definition of educational success in this country is, you've got to get a B.A. That is drummed into kids from the time they're young. Let's face it: If you don't have a B.A. at this point in this country you are in some sense a second-class citizen. That's the driving force behind a lot of kids struggling to get B.A.s, to achieve this status. Also, they read all the econometrics studies that say that the average B.A. makes x dollars more. So the book is in some sense a crusade to destroy the B.A. as a measure of educational success.