degrees != ability
Having degrees does not necessarily mean you're able to work productively. Academia is not the real world. There are great founder-CEOs, and scientists and engineers and computer wranglers who dropped out of high school.
As someone else pointed out, it's difficult to gauge how well someone else is actually performing, and how hard they're working, in a job you don't understand. That works both ways -- B-school bozos who don't understand software product design, and programmers who don't understand finance and PR. (And yet, an awful lot of B-school profs and students at every level, and executives, do seem averse to, you know, actual work, effort, digging deep, and care far too much about appearances.)
