Thinkstock I am the founder and president of an investment consulting firm in Orange County, Calif. I carry an alphabet’s worth of financial licenses after my name, plus multiple degrees.
Not one of those credentials ever taught me how to read a distressed balance sheet or catch a fraud before the regulators did. Clients hired me because I could do the job, not because I held the right degree. That distinction, competence over credential, is disappearing from American life, and the country is sorting itself by it.
Call it the diploma divide — it is now the sharpest fault line in American politics. It is sharper than race, income and region. Whether a voter holds a bachelor’s degree predicts a ballot almost as well as party registration does.
The 2024 election proved it. Pew Research Center’s validated-voter study, which checks survey responses against actual voting records, found college graduates favored Kamala Harris by 16 points, whereas voters without a degree favored President Trump by 14. Back in 2016, that non-college margin sat at 8 points for Trump. It nearly doubled in two cycles. The share of a state’s adults holding a four-year degree turned out to be one of the strongest predictors of whether that state went red or blue.
I live on both sides of that line. I graduated from Marine Corps Officer Candidate School in 1988, worked in private security, and rode in an ambulance before I ever sat in a boardroom. Most Saturdays, you will find me coaching sports for youth athletes whose parents never finished a semester of college. And no, the guys in the ambulance weren’t less capable than the partners across from whom I have sat as an expert witness in depositions. They were just less credentialed, and American institutions have wrongly decided those are the same thing.
History already ran this experiment once of replacing merit with credentialism. Medieval guilds controlled who could cut hair, forge iron, or sell bread — not by testing whether the applicant was any good, but by controlling who got to try in the first place. Milton Friedman spent a career warning that occupational licensing “frequently establishes essentially the medieval guild kind of regulation.” We have rebuilt the guild and moved it to the admissions office.
Roughly 5 percent of American workers needed a government license in Friedman’s day. Today it is more than one-fifth. Some estimates put that closer to 30 percent, spread across more than a thousand occupations. California requires 400 hours of training to become a licensed manicurist, more than twice as many hours as it takes to become a licensed EMT.
A degree does not, on its own, confer common sense or merit. Strada Institute and Burning Glass found humanities and cultural studies majors carry an underemployment rate of 55 percent one year after graduation. That is more than twice the rate for engineering or health grads, implying that some degrees are more worthy than others. A large loan balance and a diploma do not make a person wiser or more employable than the guy who skipped campus and went straight to work as a plumber. Hard work and the ability to deliver real value to somebody else remain the actual measure of a person.
To be fair, credentials serve a real purpose. I do not want a surgeon who skipped medical school. But the question is who gets to build the gates and what they actually screen for. That question runs straight into elite college admissions, too. After the Supreme Court struck down race-based admissions in 2023, many medical schools leaned into holistic review and adversity narratives to keep sorting by group identity anyway. It didn’t work: Black medical school matriculation fell 11.6 percent, and Hispanic matriculation by 10.8 percent, in the first cycle after the ruling, even as applications from both groups rose.
Non-college voters did not wake up one morning angry at smart people. They have long lived in a world where an entire layer of gatekeepers decided a diploma was a moral credential as much as an academic one, then rebuilt the economy around that belief. Non-college voters now outnumber degree holders at the ballot box, and Republicans figured out which side of that math to stand on.
Trump and Harris agreed on almost nothing in 2024, but both agreed on stripping degree requirements from federal jobs that never needed one. Trump did this by executive order in 2020, and Harris pledged to do it in her campaign four years later.
That is the right instinct, and both parties should run further with it, rolling back occupational licensing that protects incumbents rather than the public. They should reward apprenticeships and demonstrated skill the way the building trades already do.
My old FINRA exams never made me trustworthy. They only proved I could pass a test. The country will be better served by asking what people can actually do, not by what permission slips they have been handed to try.
Jay Rogers is a financial professional with more than 30 years of experience in private equity, private credit, hedge funds, and wealth management.
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