Being educated and going to college makes you 'elitist' in their minds
More and more studies, more and more evidence, show heavy correlations between the following:
University is1 all about having your existing perspectives challenged, and learning new things to broaden your horizons about the world. Self-described liberals have the personality type that likes that sort of thing. Self-described conservatives have the personality type that finds that threatening. And when the liberals graduate from college and try to act upon and share their broader knowledge and broader perspective, conservatives find that threatening. So they mock it.
This, of course, is A Bad Thing, because the result is that if real evidence and data and actual results from what's happening in the real world suggest that public policy or something else should change in order to be better/more effective/more efficient/cheaper/whatever, you end up with liberals saying "Let's make the change and make improvements and make things better!", and conservatives saying "I don't wanna change things, things are fine the way we are, stop rocking the boat," which makes them look like hypocrites when they whine about government waste and inefficiency at the same time that they whine about not wanting to make changes that would reduce waste and inefficiency.
Seriously, putting your fingers in your ears and shouting "La la la I can't HEAR you!" as a reaction to new knowledge, which has been a huge part of GOP SOP for the last few decades, is a piss-poor way to govern a nation or a state or a county. But that, in a grossly over-generalized way, is exactly what's been happening.
Al Gore was too much of an intellectual...Kerry was too international and too 'French'...Obama is an elitist with his fancy law degree and his position at Harvard...in a nutshell, they were 'too educated'.
Funny how Mitt Romney's graduating from Harvard's joint-MBA-JD program didn't seem to be a problem in 2012.
ObFootnote: 1 Of course, a lot of "conservatives" think universities should change to being places which would spit out, as George Carlin put it in his "American Dream" bit, "Obedient workers, people who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork. And just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shitty jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, the reduced benefits, the end of overtime and vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it...." For evidence, see what Scott Walker is trying to do to the University of Wisconsin system, such as removing that whole "search for truth" bit.