Item #1: The headline in today’s business news reads: “Wake Forest to Drop Standardized Tests in 2009.”

Item #2: A professor at Stanford complains to me recently that “Today’s students are institutionalized grade-making machines.”

Item #3: The person I know with the most money in his bank account does not have a college degree.

Item #3A: His wife has a PhD., he reads like a maniac, and they strongly support one another in every way imaginable.

Item #4: One of the most brilliant and creative people I know enrolled in college at the age of 14 and has never gotten a degree. He describes himself as a ’serial dropout’. There is, it seems, always a lot of self-designed drama accompanying his dropping out. He says, ‘The ritual and circumstance with which I drop out creates far more value for me, in terms of building awareness for my personal brand, and in terms of the lasting relationships I make with the faculty as part of this dropping-out process than any degree possibly could.” (more…)