Face it. Usually a college education is what you make of it, not what your university makes of it. Whether it be Oregon or Washington you can be what you make of it. My best two teachers at Oregon was my freshman English professor in the U of O Honors College. He had been a professor of Ken Kesey. Super credentialed and still super engaged. The other was a TA in the Oregon PhD program in Asian Studies. She taught an upper level Japanese History course and she was was the poster child for a brilliant unattractive female. She was a great teacher, excited about the material and able to project the material into a modern context. Not credentialed.
The smartest dude in my law school class was a Yale grad from Milwaukie, Oregon. After graduating from Yale, he joined the Air Force and became a pilot. He flew F-111s out of England. He terrorized the professorship at Willamette. After two week in fall class, they would do their best to ignore him. Having the class laugh at the professor isn't a good thing. Even then, the rot was setting in.
Einstein ---
The son of a salesman who later operated an electrochemical factory, Einstein was born in the German Empire, but moved to Switzerland in 1895, forsaking his German citizenship the following year. Specializing in physics and mathematics, he received his academic teaching diploma from the Swiss Federal Polytechnic School in Zürich in 1900. The following year, he acquired Swiss citizenship, which he kept for his entire life. After initially struggling to find work, from 1902 to 1909 he was employed as a patent examiner at the Swiss Patent Office in Bern.
Near the beginning of his career, Einstein thought that the laws of classical mechanics could no longer be reconciled with those of the electromagnetic field. This led him to develop his special theory of relativity during his time as a patent clerk. In 1905, called his annus mirabilis ('miracle year'), he published four groundbreaking papers which attracted the attention of the academic world; the first paper outlined the theory of the photoelectric effect, the second explained Brownian motion, the third introduced special relativity, and the fourth mass–energy equivalence. That year, at the age of 26, he was awarded a PhD by the University of Zurich.
