no college degree

It's not invariable or set in stone or always true, but I think I like people who have never completed college. I say this based on a newspaper profile I read this morning ... finding myself interested in a guy whose education was limited to high school and ... and ... somehow his answers to other personal questions took on more luster in my mind.

Maybe it's something as subliminal as the fact that I never finished college, but that doesn't feel like a complete explanation.

It's sort of like being at a party where others are dressed to the nines and this man is stripped to the waist: How did that happen? It's not as if tuxedos or evening gowns can't house pretty interesting people, but, well ... anyone who hasn't done college has had four years in which to be doing something else. And this guy in the profile called "Jeremiah Johnson" his favorite movie ... that made me like him.

Is it simply the "school of hard knocks?" Is it that the conclusions reached by the college-educated and the not-college-educated may be identical, but how they reached those conclusions and how compelling the experience was may vary widely and the one who learned on his own hook convinces me better?

It's all pretty amorphous and, as I say, not set in stone, but my heart seems to open a bit wider when I hear or meet someone who has slipped and slid and came up with whatever diploma s/he invented. Sometimes the self-taught can be dumber than a box of rocks, just like the degree-laden, but still ...

Scrappy? Self-reliant? Willing by necessity to face uncertainty without props? More on the ground and with fewer blithe and unwarranted assumptions about gravity? Edgy?

There is something about it....