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.

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  1. navyjag Coolidge
    navyjag
    @navyjag

    Lilly B (View Comment):

    As we are among friends here, I would like to point out to some in the comments that students at elite universities are very often smart and knowledgeable. And that matters for society. In my own experience, I got to know many students at Duke University when I was a grad student there. I knew students in the law school, med school, business school and school of the environment, as well as some undergrads. Those various schools definitely attracted students with different interests and backgrounds, but it was obvious to me that my med school friends were intellectually superior. Impressive. They had better vocabularies and were better read than my fellow environmental classmates. Among those, the ones who were accepted to get joint degrees in law and environment were noticeably more capable. My law school friends had studied harder in college and were worse at holding their liquor. People make trade-offs. Sometimes the SAT scores don’t just reflect innate ability, but also time spent reading and studying and practicing the SATs. For athletes and affirmative action students, they are actually making smart decisions about how to spend their time. Why study more when it’s not necessary? If you can get in as an athlete, you have spent more time playing sports and conditioning. You might be smart, but you can’t do everything.

    Ever meet a Rennaisance Studies majory? Daughter’s choice when she did not like the pre med courses. But then got a job, got real and went to Business Grad school.  Have no idea what she learned in her major.  Way before my favorite WWII history. 

    • #61
  2. Lilly B Coolidge
    Lilly B
    @LillyB

    DrewInWisconsin, Oik (View Comment):

    How can you people bear to be around a guy like me who just went to a state college?

    I usually agree with you, so I’m a fan. 

    • #62
  3. Henry Castaigne Member
    Henry Castaigne
    @HenryCastaigne

    Lilly B (View Comment):

    DrewInWisconsin, Oik (View Comment):

    How can you people bear to be around a guy like me who just went to a state college?

    I usually agree with you, so I’m a fan.

    I think you have enough redeeming traits to overcome your not-so-redeeming traits.

    • #63
  4. DrewInWisconsin, Oik Member
    DrewInWisconsin, Oik
    @DrewInWisconsin

    Thanks, it’s just that every now and then I realize that here at Ricochet I am a common peasant among the elite. I am a poor working stiff among the well-connected and well-to-do.

    It’s . . . weird and unsettling in a way.

    • #64
  5. Henry Castaigne Member
    Henry Castaigne
    @HenryCastaigne

    DrewInWisconsin, Oik (View Comment):

    Thanks, it’s just that every now and then I realize that here at Ricochet I am a common peasant among the elite. I am a poor working stiff among the well-connected and well-to-do.

    It’s . . . weird and unsettling in a way.

    Well I like you. … Moderately.

    • #65
  6. Dr. Bastiat Member
    Dr. Bastiat
    @drbastiat

    DrewInWisconsin, Oik (View Comment):
    Thanks, it’s just that every now and then I realize that here at Ricochet I am a common peasant among the elite.

    You should attend more meet-ups.  That would fix that. 

    • #66
  7. DrewInWisconsin, Oik Member
    DrewInWisconsin, Oik
    @DrewInWisconsin

    Dr. Bastiat (View Comment):

    DrewInWisconsin, Oik (View Comment):
    Thanks, it’s just that every now and then I realize that here at Ricochet I am a common peasant among the elite.

    You should attend more meet-ups. That would fix that.

    That . . . would not change my lowly status. It would . . . just make it more obvious, I think. : /

    • #67
  8. Dr. Bastiat Member
    Dr. Bastiat
    @drbastiat

    DrewInWisconsin, Oik (View Comment):

    Dr. Bastiat (View Comment):

    DrewInWisconsin, Oik (View Comment):
    Thanks, it’s just that every now and then I realize that here at Ricochet I am a common peasant among the elite.

    You should attend more meet-ups. That would fix that.

    That . . . would not change my lowly status. It would . . . just make it more obvious, I think. : /

    No.  It wouldn’t.  Trust me.

    • #68
  9. kedavis Coolidge
    kedavis
    @kedavis

    DrewInWisconsin, Oik (View Comment):

    How can you people bear to be around a guy like me who just went to a state college?

    #metoo

    But I didn’t graduate.  At that time, I already knew more about computers than they could teach me.

    • #69
  10. Henry Castaigne Member
    Henry Castaigne
    @HenryCastaigne

    Dr. Bastiat (View Comment):

    DrewInWisconsin, Oik (View Comment):

    Dr. Bastiat (View Comment):

    DrewInWisconsin, Oik (View Comment):
    Thanks, it’s just that every now and then I realize that here at Ricochet I am a common peasant among the elite.

    You should attend more meet-ups. That would fix that.

    That . . . would not change my lowly status. It would . . . just make it more obvious, I think. : /

    No. It wouldn’t. Trust me.

    I mildly like Drew.

    • #70
  11. DrewInWisconsin, Oik Member
    DrewInWisconsin, Oik
    @DrewInWisconsin

    Henry Castaigne (View Comment):

    Dr. Bastiat (View Comment):

    DrewInWisconsin, Oik (View Comment):

    Dr. Bastiat (View Comment):

    DrewInWisconsin, Oik (View Comment):
    Thanks, it’s just that every now and then I realize that here at Ricochet I am a common peasant among the elite.

    You should attend more meet-ups. That would fix that.

    That . . . would not change my lowly status. It would . . . just make it more obvious, I think. : /

    No. It wouldn’t. Trust me.

    I mildly like Drew.

    Is that better than “moderately”?

    • #71
  12. MarciN Member
    MarciN
    @MarciN

    Dr. Bastiat (View Comment):

    DrewInWisconsin, Oik (View Comment):
    Thanks, it’s just that every now and then I realize that here at Ricochet I am a common peasant among the elite.

    You should attend more meet-ups. That would fix that.

    Indeed. :)

    • #72
  13. Lilly B Coolidge
    Lilly B
    @LillyB

    navyjag (View Comment):

    Ever meet a Rennaisance Studies majory? Daughter’s choice when she did not like the pre med courses. But then got a job, got real and went to Business Grad school. Have no idea what she learned in her major. Way before my favorite WWII history.

    No, but I did take literature of medieval women. It might not have helped me professionally, but I think there’s value in the liberal arts. I do often doubt the expense of private universities these days, and really want to be careful about where my kids go. State university looks like a really good option (@drewinwisconsin).

    • #73
  14. MarciN Member
    MarciN
    @MarciN

    The higher education issues in general are complicated because you can’t look at them in isolation. Whatever happens in one affects the education layers above and below it. Let’s say we were to cancel all student loan programs tomorrow. A lot of kids would stop working in high school. The availability of the student loans has provided an incentive to lower-income students. Without it, American high schools will change.

    What bothers me the most is that I know how this escalating-tuition story will end: an international applicant pool. American students will get shut out. And that infuriates me because we have some really fantastic kids in this country. I wish we could fix American high schools. That’s where I want to focus our attention.

    I worked in a volunteer capacity with a lot of high school classical music students who were not wealthy. The funny thing about some lower-income kids, in contrast to the wealthier kids whose parents generally kept them pretty busy, is that they have time on their hands to practice an instrument or delve into whatever they are keenly interested in. I had one kid in our orchestra who was in the eighth grade. I called one afternoon to tell her about the upcoming banquet. And she said, “Wait a minute, Mrs. N. I’m babysitting for my little sister, and I’ve got supper started for when my mom comes home.” I was blown away. That’s a kid I want to see in college.

     

    • #74
  15. Lilly B Coolidge
    Lilly B
    @LillyB

    MarciN (View Comment):

    The higher education issues in general are complicated because you can’t look at them in isolation. Whatever happens in one affects the education layers above and below it. Let’s say we were to cancel all student programs tomorrow. A lot of kids would stop working in high school. The availability of the student loans has provided an incentive to lower-income students. Without it, American high schools will change.

    Interesting observations. I think a lot of schools are charging much less than full tuition for a lot of students (most?). My niece is getting a tuition break due to financial need. Word from a relative is that she doesn’t have to pay anything. I don’t know if that includes loans to be paid later, but there’s no way she’s getting loans for full tuition. In fact, a lot of schools won’t tell you what tuition is until you tell them how much you have to contribute.

    • #75
  16. MarciN Member
    MarciN
    @MarciN

    Lilly B (View Comment):

    MarciN (View Comment):

    The higher education issues in general are complicated because you can’t look at them in isolation. Whatever happens in one affects the education layers above and below it. Let’s say we were to cancel all student programs tomorrow. A lot of kids would stop working in high school. The availability of the student loans has provided an incentive to lower-income students. Without it, American high schools will change.

    Interesting observations. I think a lot of schools are charging much than full tuition for a lot of students (most?). My niece is getting a tuition break due to financial need. Word from a relative is that she doesn’t have to pay anything. I don’t know if that includes loans to be paid later, but there’s no way she’s getting loans for full tuition. In fact, a lot of schools won’t tell you what tuition is until you tell them how much you have to contribute.

    The financial aid programs are usually fantastic the first year. After that, it can be a struggle for the student. I hope your niece asks about subsequent years. 

    And you are right about the parental contribution component. 

    It creates a lot of stress in families. The kid gets into the school he or she applied to, but the financial aid won’t work for the parents. It causes a lot of conflict senior year. 

    In cases of complete dire poverty, it’s not a problem. It’s people who aren’t quite poor enough for whom the financing is a problem. 

    • #76
  17. Lilly B Coolidge
    Lilly B
    @LillyB

    MarciN (View Comment):

    The financial aid programs are usually fantastic the first year. After that, it can be a struggle for the student. I hope your niece asks about subsequent years.

    And you are right about the parental contribution component.

    It creates a lot of stress in families. The kid gets into the school he or she applied to, but the financial aid won’t work for the parents. It causes a lot of conflict senior year.

    In cases of complete dire poverty, it’s not a problem. It’s people who aren’t quite poor enough for whom the financing is a problem.

    Yep, we’re about to be there with a couple college applications completed already and a few more to do. It’s the worst year for us financially in a long time, for obvious reasons.

    Before I ask my niece about financial aid, I’d love to ask why she started using “they” as her pronoun. So maybe free college isn’t that much of a bargain after all…but no one else seems concerned. They all say she is flourishing at school.

    • #77
  18. Saint Augustine Member
    Saint Augustine
    @SaintAugustine

    Lilly B (View Comment):

    Before I ask my niece about financial aid, I’d love to ask why she started using “they” as her pronoun. So maybe free college isn’t that much of a bargain after all…but no one else seems concerned. They all say she is flourishing at school.

    Sorry, but I think she’s not flourishing.

    • #78
  19. kedavis Coolidge
    kedavis
    @kedavis

    Saint Augustine (View Comment):

    Lilly B (View Comment):

    Before I ask my niece about financial aid, I’d love to ask why she started using “they” as her pronoun. So maybe free college isn’t that much of a bargain after all…but no one else seems concerned. They all say she is flourishing at school.

    Sorry, but I think she’s not flourishing.

    Not if someone has convinced her that she needs to be called “they.”

    • #79
  20. genferei Member
    genferei
    @genferei

    I sometimes think the middle class ‘needs’ the highly-stratified college system because otherwise there wouldn’t be sufficient class distinctions to know where everyone fitted in. (Like Drew, for example…)

    • #80
  21. Lilly B Coolidge
    Lilly B
    @LillyB

    Saint Augustine (View Comment):

    Lilly B (View Comment):

    Before I ask my niece about financial aid, I’d love to ask why she started using “they” as her pronoun. So maybe free college isn’t that much of a bargain after all…but no one else seems concerned. They all say she is flourishing at school.

    Sorry, but I think she’s not flourishing.

    Yeah, but it’s not just her school’s fault. The reason she can get so much financial aid plays a role. Divorce, among other things, that she has no control over. She’s a perfect target for gender ideologues. 

    • #81
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