If you're talking about someone applying for a job at a regular company, it's a red flag, but maybe not a fatal flaw.

If you're talking about someone running to be one of the 1-2 most powerful people in the country, then I think it's a much bigger problem. Plus, I think there's a huge difference between transferring from your original school and transferring a number of times, no matter the schools involved.

Were you around for Dan Quayle?

I was... and that's about how bad this was... times 4.

I'm still wondering what she's going to do. And this is purely emotional: I hope it's just to retire to private life because that salvages the most of what I liked about her.

I know it's really bizarre to feel any personal investment in her, but as screwed up as the campaign was, I believed her to be a fundamentally competent person. I had little problem with her political record, such as it was.

I don't know that she was ready to be VP or maybe more importantly run for VP, but we've got Biden; we had Quayle; that bar isn't real high.

If she really resigned because she's going to run for President even though she didn't even complete one term as governor or because she imagines she's going to be this important conservative voice, it's hard not to see my assessment of her basic decency and competence as horribly flaw. And it makes me sad :( to have been so mistaken.

I agree it's a red flag at your initial interview. I don't think it's still a red flag when you've been gainfully employed (such as it is in politics) for a decade or whatever.

In non-political life, I'd be amazed if an employer looked back at the college record of a 44 year old applicant who had been successfully working in the field. So, if you didn't continue to switch jobs like you had switched colleges, I don't think it would really matter.

But I work in a really low pressure field. If you hold the credential needed and graduated from state U, you're good to go.

(But I do wonder if some of this is age based. I think I'm a decade older at least that you and Munchkin, so I don't regard someone's college experience as being as character defining. I believe that Munckin has a pretty awesome job after rigorous college preparation and I know that you are in law school, so I'm not belittling you guys with "in the real world" kind of junk. I just mean that perhaps the more you watch people professionally sink or swim, you realize that outside of a pretty limited number of elite colleges, what someone did in college doesn't mean that much compared with what they do after.)

I was, but I don't see it as anything like the personal nature of the criticism of Palin. He was hammered for being dumb, but I never once heard critiques of his personal appearance as whatever the masculine equivalent of "slutty" is. He could have his family at appearance and I don't remember them being attacked.

Then, there's this:

http://www.reuters.com/article/press...08+PRN20081105
[/QUOTE]

I didn't doubt SNL, The Daily Show, Stephen Colbert, etc. could have influence some people, but I'm saddened by how lazy and uneducated people have let themselves become. Especially when information is so easily available.

I agree with this statement. I'd care less if she was applying to be my cubicle mate, etc. Running for Veep or president, yep, I want someone who's hit a few less schools. If you can find a previous candidate for VP or president who attended that many colleges (for undergrad), I'd like to know.

and being hammered for dumb wasnt enough?

it's really hard to make a point by point comparison of Quayle vs Palin. I think the bottom line is that critics of Palin saw her as ill prepared (you know I said it enough times) and wrong on so many levels to be VP and what she is doing right now by resigning with no solid explanation is enforcing that point.

Maybe I'm missing something. What do you all think that attending four colleges says that lackluster performance at one mediocre college doesn't?

Or is it that you basically feel that you feel that an elite education is needed to be a good VP?

Or maybe that you feel like educational experience is a good proxy for intelligence? I think it's much more likely to be a proxy for your parents' social class, assuming that you went to a lame college or four.

I think I'm coming down hard on the "college hopscotch" due to personal experience. But, sometimes it does make a difference. There have been evenings that I present to a client; the next morning the client calls my boss to request a copy of my resume/CV. They never have any questions about the information I've provided, but they several have been concerned with my "experience and background."

Is it because I'm young (and I look even younger), female, or a person of color? It probably depends on the client; sometimes it's probably all three. Usually, after looking at my staff bio, they tend to be very good clients. BUT...what if I had done what Ms. Palin did? What if my family hadn't encouraged me to go to the best schools I could get into? What if I hadn't researched colleges very well and found the perfect school for me right away? There's a good chance that those clients would have requested another architect and could sit behind my "qualifications" as an excuse.

Basically, I don't get any slack--so why should she?

I don't know if it's necessarily age-based; I can't speak for Munchkin (although I believe she's been in the working world for a few years, between full-time and summer work during grad school), but I've been working full-time since 2001 (I worked full-time during college as a preschool teacher, after college in public relations, and I've worked during law school as a law clerk). I'll agree that in many fields there's a point where your professional credentials will have (at least) as much importance as your academic credentials.

As far as the importance of it - I think that going to what works out to be one college per year for four years shows the same types of red flags that it does for someone who changes jobs every couple of months. I think that, barring any significant experience since that point, it's a detriment.

Now, it's true that Palin has served as a mayor and governor since that period. However, she's also running against other people who have served as governors, senators, leaders of industry, etc. That type of experience becomes the baseline, and all other things being equal, switching between several colleges works against her.

It may be acceptable for other professions where you're talking about experienced professionals, but it becomes a bigger issue in this specific context.

This seems like kind of strange to me.

Her CV is out there. She has a political record to use for evaluation, but you want to look at her pattern of college attendance and make a judgment on that?

Do you submit records for all the classes you took on your CV? Basically, I'm wondering that if they really looked at Palin the way you're suggesting people look at you, wouldn't all they see is the college she graduated from and the work she'd done since graduation?

I'm surprised that it's college background that clients want on you now. I can completely understand wanting to see the projects people had worked on previously if I were hiring in your field though. What I imagine will happen is the longer you work, the more your name will be associated with certain projects and people will be able to quit asking.

it's kind of funny that we are discussing this in detail now.

When I brought up during the elections...it was immediately shot down.

Even I have to side with the fact that if the woman could be picked to be VP candidate, then obviously the vetting committee had no problems with her educational resume, but....then again, if the general GC populace NOW has an issue with this, then what does this say about the vetting committee?

I think, based on your postings about politics, that you like a certain amount of wonkiness in your politicians. I would be surprised if someone with Palin's education background could deliver what you're looking for.

But I don't know if that's what's really important (although it drives me crazy that so many conservatives look dumb) so I'm likely to use a different standard.

I don't think though it can be said that in other fields that people would go back to your undergraduate transfer record to make a decision about your qualification about employment once you've out of school for 20 years.

People didn't really worry about Biden's academic background at all, and he had a scant five years of experience between law school and the US Senate. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Biden

(It seems strange to me that being elected by the people of Delaware would be regarded as a qualification in its own right when you think about it. Because they are repeatedly willing to send him back, the rest of us should regard him as qualified and doing a good job?)

I don't know that the general populace of GC has a problem with her education now or then, at least in the sense that it was decisive in their evaluation of her an a candidate.

I'm interested in it now as a possible predictor of her flakiness in light of her resignation.

Munchkin brought it up in the context of people who believe she never graduated from college.

It may be strange but, unfortunately, it's the truth. It's happened more than once. I do suspect that it will calm down as I get older, but will never go away (for those other two pesky reasons). Come on, you really think they're concerned with what classes I took in college? They look for reasons to get rid of me. When the resume is irontight, they have nothing else to complain about.

Honestly? I had more pressing issues to be concerned with her about, like her politics and the fact that she couldn't even hold her own in an interview with Katie Freaking Couric. I'm sure the school thing came up and while I didn't shoot it down, I just saw it as less important. Now that she can't even finish up a single term as governor, it's just more of the same.