"Do you think that having a degree makes a difference?"
First the context. I am in the social services field. Currently, the government entity I work for requires a Master's Degree for certain positions, though there is a provision for a combination of a non-graduate degree and experience in a comparable position. We do investigations of complex abuse against elders and vulnerable adults. We have had some hires recently and the topic came up about whether a degree matters.
For the record, I have a BA in psychology, a Masters in Public Administration, and am working on a Masters in Psychology with an emphasis in MFT. I have been in various fields within social services from hardcore mental health case management, to working with Developmentally disabled people for the last 27 years, and working my current job for 8 years.
I said what any over educated person would say, "It depends". As with your experience, I have seen brilliant people with an undergraduate degree or no degree, who assimilate information easily and articulate their situation better than I. I have seen complete morons with Doctoral degrees. "It depends" on the person and the education. University does two things in my opinion and experience. It provides you with some tools for critical thinking (evaluating information for accuracy, assessing the validity of evidence, forming logical argumentation, etc..) and it provides you with knowledge specific to your area of interest. What you do with that and how you carry it forward into your career and your life, cannot be imposed upon you by the University. Some people go in with a very narrow world view and come out expanded, inquisitive, and armed with the information needed to be "informed". Some people go in and come out with a piece of paper and the same poor skills they went in with. Some do not need a university to provide the framework for the above. It depends.
The thing that I took from University was from undergraduate. I was taking an elective in Social Psychology. My professor said during a discussion on media and influence (mind you, this was pre Fox and Rush Limbaugh even), "All information is biased. If anyone tells you different, they are lying. Bias is not bad, but you need to figure out what the agenda is. What are they trying to get you to think and is that pro-social or anti-social." To this day, I still use that framework to evaluate information.
I don't know if Greene is literally, academically and intellectually what we would call "stupid". She often shows an inability and maybe even an unwillingness to grasp and explain concepts. Whatever is in her head, she displays what we would call ignorance and like you said, there has always been a rather large market in the US for confident ignorance.
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