The 2016 campaign has begun and higher education will probably play a bigger role than in any previous presidential campaign – and not because GOP contender Scott Walker is the first candidate in many years who didn’t earn a college degree.

Since LBJ’s Great Society, the federal government has been promoting higher education through grants and easy loans. Politicians in both parties hyped the personal and national benefits of college. Boosting it seemed like a good idea at the time, but then so did pushing home ownership to achieve “the American dream.” Like most federal policies, the college-for-everyone push led to unintended consequences that have recently become evident in high student debts, default rates, and underemployment among college grads.

Those are serious problems, but let’s get back to Governor Walker.

He was a student at Marquette University, but left school without completing enough credits for a bachelor’s degree. Leftist commentators quickly jumped on that supposedly damaging fact. Howard Dean, for example, declared that Walker was “unqualified” because he lacks college credentials.

Having a degree to your name, however, is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for being a good political leader. Long ago, Bill Buckley quipped that he’d rather be governed by the first 2,000 names in the Boston phone book than the Harvard faculty. What he was getting at is the tendency among highly educated people to fall for utopian ideologies that bring misery, compared with ordinary “uneducated” people who are far less likely to think they know how to redesign society.

Underscoring Buckley’s point, politicians with lustrous educational credentials, Barack Obama for example, have led us into one costly blunder after another with their meddlesome laws and regulations.

What the nation really needs is a leader with the good sense to understand the proper scope of government — and you don’t need a college degree for that. Very few of the Founders had been to college, yet they constructed a remarkable framework for a limited and constrained government. In Wisconsin, Walker has shown that he realizes that excessive government must be scaled back. His success in doing so is, of course, the real reason for all the heat he’s taking; being a few credits shy of a degree is just a red herring.

Strangely enough, political office is one of the shrinking number of jobs in America that remain open to people regardless of their educational credentials. For an increasingly wide swath of the labor market, employers (both public and private) require that applicants have college degrees or they won’t be considered. Rarely does the work actually call for more than decent basic skills – we’re talking about jobs like sales supervisor and rental car agent – and the idea that only people who have graduated from college could possibly handle the job is ridiculous. But due to federal subsidies for college, the labor market is so awash in people who have degrees that many employers screen out all those who don’t have one.