Education: Or a Reasonable Facsimile

He was a marine, stationed in the Aleutians, and the call of the wild got him. Walking his post without even a tree for company, he thought it might be nice to settle down in Alaska after the war and mine platinum. Mining, he knew, was a science. There were colleges that could teach him—but he had enlisted after only a year and a half of high school.*

By last week the marine—and more than 500,000 other veterans and civilians —had earned a new kind of sheepskin called an "equivalency certificate." Equivalencies are the year-old idea of the American Council on Education,...