By Frank Bruni
Contributing Opinion Writer
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I believe as fervently as anyone in the value of a four-year college degree not just as a path to professional opportunity but also as preparation for informed, thoughtful citizenship. I’ve written extensively about that, and I wouldn’t take back a word.
But I also believe that this particular credential has become too divisive an emblem in our culture wars, too bold a fault line. For that reason among others, I’m impressed and excited by what Josh Shapiro, the newly installed Democratic governor of Pennsylvania, just did.
On Jan. 18, his first full day in office, Shapiro signed an executive order that dispensed with the requirement of a four-year college degree for 92 percent of positions in state government, meaning roughly 65,000 jobs. His action rightly recognized that such a degree is no guarantee of competence, no exclusive proof of intelligence and often less relevant than work and life experiences that have nothing to do with lecture halls.
But it recognized, too, ways in which the Democratic Party is vulnerable, and it sent an important message to voters who feel that the party doesn’t see or have much regard for them.
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Utah and Maryland made similar changes to their employment practices last year. But those states had Republican governors. That a Democrat followed suit in Pennsylvania — a much bigger political stage, with a much larger population — matters. Democrats have been wounded by charges of elitism over recent years, and Shapiro’s executive order is a forceful rebuttal of the Republican caricature of his party as the protector of a corrupt meritocracy that demands an expensive, radicalizing adventure in the woke precincts of higher education.
You have perhaps noticed that higher education is a current favorite bugaboo of Republicans on the rise. An excellent article in The Times this week by Stephanie Saul, Patricia Mazzei and Trip Gabriel examined how Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida has built his national brand by attacking the education establishment, including administrators at his state’s colleges.
DeSantis is hardly alone. Although she gets less attention, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who just became the governor of Arkansas, is using a playbook much like his, with an eye on the same sorts of voters. Democrats shouldn’t underestimate her, her ambitions or the way they fit into an increasingly coordinated Republican effort.
Democrats can’t just shrug all of this off. Shapiro obviously gets that. Rather than dismissing the voters his party has lost over the past decade, he’s trying to understand them. During his campaign, for example, he convened focus groups of Pennsylvanians who’d supported Donald Trump to figure out how Democrats might win them back. His executive order is a step in that direction.
I’m liking Shapiro. I’m liking him a lot. I like his perceptiveness and his acumen. I like that when he was Pennsylvania’s attorney general, he went after child sexual abuse in the Roman Catholic Church in the state, although he had to know that, as a Jewish public official who’s forthright about his devotion to his religion, he’d get a special kind of antisemitic pushback.
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I like that in response to a rise in antisemitism in this country, he has been extra clear about his faith. That’s authenticity.
The editorial board of The Times recently praised his executive order, writing:
That’s an accurate assessment and excellent argument for Shapiro’s decision, which not only makes practical and political sense. It makes moral sense as well.
Opinion | Something Very Important for Democrats Just Happened in Pennsylvania
Opening state jobs to more workers is a wise tweak to the party’s image.
