There are reasons for college degrees. If you want to be an engineer, you need requisted training you are not going to get in the local vo-tech. Same with medical degrees, science, etc. If you want to build houses, you could get a degree in construction management, but then you might not need those skills until you are building dozens of houses. What you really need is carpentry skills to begin with, and those can be gained on the job or in a vo-tech.
For me it was a means to a dream. You needed a degree for Air Force pilot training. That same dream still requires a degree from an insitution of higher learning. O’vomit’s opinion that everyone goes to college, is an astounding pronounement blowing a degree out of proportion to it’s value to a dream, and watering down the entire concept, so what’s new, just one more in a long logn long line of disagreements with the ONE.
Basic concept of supply and demand applies here....
Having earned a college degree is a "marker" for reasonable intelligence, diligence, and academic skills. They could test for intelligence and use other factors to judge diligence and academic skills, but it would be much more complicated and perhaps not correlate as closely with success in pilot training as does the degree requirement.
You needed a degree for Air Force pilot training.
What is so technical about it that it requires a degree? Do they teach “piloting” degrees? Answer...Hell No!
An officer and a non-com have the equal ability to fly military aircraft if either has a highly rational and analytical mind. Prior education means nothing.
So, back to the question: The answer is that the officer (by virtue that he had a degree of any kind) cleared the #1 requirement to be selected for OTC. Nothing else mattered except that piece of paper. The common non-com did not have that wonderful piece of paper so he/she had no chance even though they may have run circles around the selected
one in the way of intellect.