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We Need Our Elite Universities. But We’ve Destroyed Them.
The SAT has allowed students from all different backgrounds to compete for spots in our elite schools. And as Charles Murray documented in “Coming Apart” and other works, when we send the brightest 0.01% to a few elite schools for their late teens and early 20s, many of them marry and produce really smart kids. So when it seems that the students at places like Princeton and Yale seem to be getting smarter, it’s true. And every generation it gets better and better. Or worse and worse, depending on how you look at it. The SAT hasn’t leveled the playing field the way we had hoped. It’s actually increased the divisions in society.
Then again, at the same time, we’ve been increasing the impact of affirmative action on admission policies. When you combine that with athletes, around a quarter to a third of an incoming class at a place like Duke or Stanford is made up of people who wouldn’t have qualified for admission, if they had been competing with everyone else.
So these extremely selective schools now have a significant percentage of students in each class who have no hope of passing the classes at that school. So the elite colleges had to start offering classes and majors that affirmative action students and athletes could pass, so they wouldn’t all flunk out (which would not have been their fault – they shouldn’t have been there to begin with).
Then guess what happened: The valedictorians at elite colleges tended to be black women who majored in Afro-Feminist Sexuality or something. And all those brilliant kids in the chemistry and math classes didn’t win any awards, because they were getting B’s and C’s in impossibly difficult classes. That didn’t seem right. For those and many other reasons, the grading at elite schools became less stringent.
As college administrations made their student bodies more ethnically diverse, they made them much less diverse ideologically. And the incoming students were children of the intolerance of social media and left-wing indoctrination of our secondary schools – they were happy to enforce strict speech codes, etc., via shaming and canceling. Independent thought at our universities became verboten. Which made teaching and learning nearly impossible. Which changed our universities from institutions of higher learning into, well, into something else.
And then, at the same time, we started sending everybody to college. Everybody. High school guidance counselors instructed the vast majority of their students to apply to college, telling them that a college degree was their best chance at a good life.
Once everybody started going to college, obviously a college degree became less rare and less special. Then, obviously, it started to matter even more where you got that degree from. At one time, college graduates were a select group. Now that they’re not, that made the elite schools much more desirable.
Our government has been pouring more and more money into higher education, ostensibly to fund the dreams of millions of young people. Or perhaps to fund the indoctrination of a new generation of Democrat voters. Whatever, I suppose.
But the result of all that government money flowing in has been that higher education has gotten much, much more expensive. At the same time, the quality of that education has gotten much, much worse. Which would be the end of the road, if this were a free market system. Which, of course, it is not. Monopolies are less subject to things like market pressures, innovation, and reality.
My youngest goes to Georgetown (on an athletic scholarship, thank God), which if you include all the fees, etc., it’s $85k per year. That’s $340k for four years. For an undergraduate degree. Imagine starting out your life at age 22, with a debt of $340k and a B.A. in Psychology. What if your wife has college debt, too? How does that even work? How do you buy a house and start a family?
Anyway, for various reasons, men started leaving the college track. Now, most colleges are between 60-70% women. This has changed the culture of collegiate life in many ways. Some of them good. Some of them less good.
So now our elite colleges are attended by the very bright and the very aggrieved. Once there, we teach the bright to also be aggrieved. We do not teach the aggrieved to be bright. Then we teach them all to think the same way. Then all these people spend hundreds of thousands of dollars of real money to get fake degrees in fake majors with fake grades, having wasted four of the most important years of their lives.
So our geniuses are no longer graduating with degrees in chemical engineering. They’re graduating with degrees in, well, nothing at all. But with higher GPAs, more emotional problems, and much more debt.
We’ve destroyed our higher education system. It no longer exists. And that’s a shame. It was once a source of tremendous growth and innovation in our country. Now it enforces conformity and discourages achievement.
I was once jealous of Ivy League graduates. I went to Denison, which was an above-average school, but it did not have the reputation of Harvard. I viewed Ivy League graduates as smarter and better educated than me. And in the 1990s, they probably were. So I got used to the fact that there were people better than me, and I did the best I could with what I had. In fact, it motivated me to work harder, knowing that I was competing with people smarter and better educated than me. I had enormous respect for the elite colleges.
Now, I’m not sure what to advise my kids.
Two of my daughters are world-class athletes and got athletic scholarships to Georgetown and Duke. My other daughter was a good athlete, but not on that level. So she went to Clemson, because Daddy wasn’t convinced that a degree from Georgetown was worth $300k more than a degree from Clemson.
Of the three schools, my wife and I are most impressed with Clemson. Outstanding professors, eager to teach, and eager to get to know their students. Practical subject matter. Good mix of kids – about half-and-half women and men, and about half-and-half conservative and liberal. Independent thought is permitted. Very little COVID silliness. The kids goof off from time to time, but are clearly there to work. We’ve been so, so impressed.
We were much less impressed with Duke and Georgetown. And remember, we weren’t paying for those. Even for free, they seemed like a rip-off.
Except for the name on the diploma, of course. When my oldest graduated from Duke, she got job offers that she would not have gotten out of a state school. Many of these companies only send recruiters to MIT, Duke, Princeton, Stanford, and so on. They don’t even bother to recruit elsewhere. So she’s got a great job. So Duke was worth it. Which I guess is the whole point.
If our elite colleges are so screwed up, why do these companies continue to recruit there? Because they know how hard it is to get into those schools. It saves their personnel department time – if you got into Harvard, you’re probably extremely smart and hard-working. They’re not sure if you learned anything in college, but they’ll teach you what they want you to know on the job. They recruit brains and teach skills. No problem.
The destruction of America’s higher education system is tragic, and will have catastrophic consequences for decades to come.
I don’t think this can be fixed. There are too many things wrong, as I listed above. I think we have to start over. Perhaps we could simply divide the colleges into two separate institutions: Real colleges with real students studying real topics, and have a sister institution for affirmative action students and athletes to study whatever they want. I’m not sure.
But what we’re doing is not sustainable. This is bonkers. I pray that it implodes quickly now, so we can get to work building something great in its place.
Because we need our elite schools to turn out elite graduates. We need people like that. We need to encourage those people. Not destroy them.
Published in General
I am so glad I went to Dallas Baptist, and then to Baylor for grad school in the days before BLM.
I don’t think Ivy Leaguers are any smarter. I think they’re more intellectual. It may be that the rest of them has atrophied so much that normal-sized heads look big in comparison.
That was Lewis’ line. Because at DBU we read The Abolition of Man.
Do you think that it would help to allow employers to use IQ tests? I think that these were essentially outlawed by SCOTUS in 1971, on a disparate impact theory under the anti-discrimination laws.
If you’re white or Asian in an Ivy League school, you’re pretty darn smart…
The SAT is very similar to an IQ test. So perhaps all this just allows employers to use IQ tests to screen employees, as long as the colleges do it, rather than the employers themselves.
The true elite universities are what they always were.
They have characteristics like little government involvement, rigorous Greek or Latin education, logic classes, and ideals higher than “critical thinking” and “democracy” and “diversity.”
They’re probably Christian, and their websites have detailed statements of faith.
They teach how to think, starting by teaching what to think, and what to think includes a lot of completely unoriginal content.
They don’t farm out undergrad teaching to overworked peons while tenured Professors apply for government grants. They don’t spend a lot of time on quality assurance paperwork because they’re too busy teaching. They work for the students, not the bureaucracy.
Name a few of those…
Who could have foreseen this!?
:: raises hand ::
Do they think properly?
Hmm . . . in the 1930s maybe. I think by the 1990s they had already become leftist indoctrination centers, but their graduates hadn’t yet gained the power that they have today to destroy the country.
These days, it’s because other family members went there and are donating to the endowment fund. And you’re a stupid idiot, but here, we’ll give you the credentials and you can go work in Washington DC with other stupid idiots.
I’m more familiar with Notre Dame, and other schools run by the Holy Cross Order (CSC). There are other schools out there that have good graduation rates for their athletes. Notre Dame football recruits have two interviews. One with Athletic Department and one with the Admissions Department. If the Admissions Department doesn’t believe an athlete will be able to complete the course work needed to graduate the athletic scholarship will not be offered.
ND does not offer what they call “Bunny Majors” for athletes. For example, recreational science or hospitality management. ND athletes must select a major that is available to all students. There are no athletic dorms at ND, and athletes are assigned roommates at random in the dorms. ND athletes must live on campus for the first three years of their time at ND, just like any other student.
Stanford, Notre Dame, Wake Forest, and the military academies have excellent graduation rates for student athletes.
ND has about 8,700 undergrads, a small school compared to the football factories, and diploma mills of the large state schools.
All I got is approximations. University of Dallas. St. John’s College. Any college attached to an SBC seminary.
Yeah, that’s the point. Employers can’t directly screen for IQ, but colleges can, so an elite college degree is an indirect way to measure IQ.
This is not correct. The elite schools admit students with very high SAT scores, with a few exceptions for race preference, athletics, and legacies.
Sorry not to have a link. I’m on my phone. You can look up something like “average SAT Ivy League” to find the data.
The top three majors on the Notre Dame football team are Communications, Exploratory Studies, and Business.
So after four years they can talk, they can find the bathroom, and they can work at McDonalds.
Ha! Sorry. Just kidding, of course. I don’t know how difficult those majors are. They may be extremely challenging, for all I know. And two of my kids are D1 athletes, so I cast no stones, here.
But seriously, remember that Notre Dame doesn’t just have top level athletes, they have affirmative action students as well. They must have classes they can pass. As long as they offer those classes to everyone (not just athletes), then they’re not “Bunny Majors for athletes”.
The North Carolina Men’s Basketball team won a national title recently, and soon thereafter it came out that their basketball players were getting A’s in classes like African American Studies – classes which they had never attended. When interviewed, many of these players didn’t even know where the buildings were that housed these classes. It turned out that this had been going on for 10-20 years.
They nearly lost their national title, until it came out that they offered those classes to affirmative action students as well. And once that was discovered, the scandal disappeared instantly. Special treatment for athletes is criminal. Special treatment for affirmative action students is encouraged. So there you go.
This is not sustainable.
This is not correct. Up to a quarter to a third of an incoming college class will be made up of athletes, affirmative action students, and others who would not have been admitted if they had been competing with the applicant pool as a whole.
They are not “a few exceptions”. They are a significant portion of each and every class. They must be accommodated.
Sort of OT, but this gives me an opportunity to recycle something I saw a week or two ago on a faraway website. Seems some “teens” or “youths” – possibly a journalistic codeword for “people whose complexions we cannot mention” – stole a car and went for a joyride, only the ending was far from joyous: the driver crashed, and most of his pals were fatally thrown from the vehicle. The commenter who quoted the news story intromitted: “Seatbelts are an IQ test.”
I think a better way to look at colleges and universities is that high schools should offer two paths. Trades and the college option.
When my HVAC system needed work in Arizona no one at the University of Arizona was on my contacts list. What we are seeing in America is not a problem with race relations. It is a form of class warfare. Those who work with their hands are disdained. Those who major in sociology, the slut of the sciences are revered, among any number of majors I could list.
I absolutely agree. My high school in Ohio was designed this way. Well over 70% of our students were in the trades. We had auto mechanics, cosmetology, carpentry, and several others. Plus, we had college prep. Thus, if you didn’t want to go to college, you could leave high school with practical job skills. It was a good system. Served everybody well.
Even THIS is not correct.
When I was at Princeton in the early 1990s, 1/3rd of the class did not belong there, academically. Athletes, legacies and minorities. I was shocked then by the number of idiots who needed special classes (Math for Plants, Rocks for Jocks, Physics for Poets, Clapping for Credit, etc.)
Now it is certainly a higher percentage. Not of Minorities, Athletes or Legacies, necessarily, but because the Ivies have stopped taking kids who are prepared for college (by getting excellent high school educations), most of the student body are admitted for non-academic reasons (first kid to go to college, coming from an underprivileged high school, Transgender, Woke, etc. etc.)
What surprises me the most is that the professors have put up with the enormous drop in talent with nary a peep.
Hillsdale? Grove City?
We may be disagreeing on the meaning of “few.” I’m back at my computer, and can provide some links and data on SAT scores. For older folks like us, remember that the SAT scoring was re-normed in 1996. Our older scores are on a somewhat tougher scale.
Here are the reported SAT scores for the 25th percentile of students at the Ivies, plus Duke and Georgetown:
Overall for the Ivies, the 25th percentile student is at 1468.
According to this chart, 1400 is 93rd percentile, 1450 is 96th percentile, and 1500 is 98th percentile
So for most of these elite schools, 75% of the class is above the 96th percentile. The bulk of the students are highly qualified, contrary to Drew’s suggestion.
I do agree that there are some athletes, legacies, and racial preference admissions. They appear to be less than 25% of the students at the listed schools.
I also agree with one of your major points — that the admission of sub-par students necessitates either allowing them to fail, or the creation of an easier curriculum — maybe something like “fake learning” — to allow them to pass.
I suspect that this started with the “studies” departments, which appear to be utter nonsense, though there is good, empirical work to be done in these areas. It moved to other departments, quite quickly in the humanities, then history and social science (other than economics), and only recently into economics and the hard sciences.
As I’ve recently mentioned on another post/thread, my youngest brother occasionally passes by the High School that we both went to, and which was greatly remodeled within the past few years. According to my brother, even though they added a lot more total classroom space and now also occupy the space that was used by the Jr High School (now called “Middle School”) when I was there, all of the classroom space for shop classes etc, is now gone.
I guess they needed more space for teaching CRT.
That. That right there. They may be educated, though probably “indoctrinated” is more accurate. They may know things, but they stink at thinking.
Bring back the Platonic Academy.
I stopped teaching at medical schools because I got frustrated with the decreasing quality of their students.
Of course, I’ve got a day job. I was just part time – I practice medicine for a living.
But I can only imagine how frustrated the full time professors must be. Privately.
Publicly, it would be very difficult for them to stand up to all this. Imagine a Princeton professor complaining that affirmative action had led to an enormous drop in talent. Oh my goodness…
I think it’s more than a few.
(EDIT: Ah, I see others have already weighed in agreeing with me.
I also admit that I think more highly of a guy who went to the tech college, learned a valuable trade, and is now out there providing a needed service. These seem to be the happiest people I know with large, happy families.
They are teaching at Harvard. They have Made It. There’s nowhere to go but down.
Hillsdale yes! Can’t remember much about GC.
It’s hard enough for some people to admit that affirmative action has led to an enormous drop in quality of presidents and vice-presidents.
When the Devonian rocks were aborning they promised inclusion for all
By fudging the metrics of entry for street kids who play basketball
Till our colleges taught only grievance, and tutored nothing but fools
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said “Wisdom is worth more than jewels.”
It’s the foreign RAs doing their research that keeps them sweet and coauthoring.
Edited to add:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/941523/ivy-league-international-students-class/