Universities Are Making You Look Stupid
The doom and gloom has gone too far. We’re just as good as we’ve always been, no matter what the data on the average college graduate says about us.
There is a common viewpoint that the caliber of humanity is declining. While it is tempting to believe this when we look at the general ability of the population on standardized testing, I think this is a misdirection that obscures what is actually happening. Kitten Beloved recently posted an excellent article on the substandard literacy rates of universities, but I see a number of people confusing reduced entry requirements with a reduction in the capabilities of our species as a whole. The article does a great job of showing how the simple act of reading has always been significantly more g-loaded than many would assume, or maybe more than they would feel comfortable admitting in polite society. The difficult pill to swallow is that functional literacy is significantly harder to teach than many thought, if not outright impossible.
The good news is that we are not seeing a downward trend in ability across the board, but instead seeing more clearly that which was previously invisible. In the past, the threshold for your writing to be preserved was incredibly high (paper storage was expensive), so the result is that we only see great works or historic statements from our ancestors. Today, the worst take on any given topic can be widely disseminated on X dot com, and social media gives everyone’s words equal weight regardless of skill or intellect. Because of this, people compare discourse of the past to discourse of the present, not realizing the selection effects of a thought being safeguarded through time.
While it is interesting to discuss the evolution of trends in education, there is a problem in attempting any direct comparison. This is because, similar to how only the best writings were preserved from the past, we only have data on the best students from the past, too. The extremes of our historic data, combined with how much admissions have changed in our education system within the last century, confound our ability to connect the trends.
Despite tuition costs skyrocketing and interest rates soaring, the percentage of people pursuing a four year degree is higher than ever. There are a number of reasons why, but I believe the main causes are the assumption that “everyone goes to college,” the easy access to eye-watering debt (surely consequence free), and the fact that no one fails high school anymore. The internet, and the endless opportunities brought about via the Industrial Revolution and its consequences, have made the untouchables corporeal. Yes, I am saying that perhaps not everyone deserves to be pursuing a higher education, nor does everyone belong there. Endless confusion can be resolved by realizing that when you compare data from today to data from yesteryear, even if the names of the variables are the same, the populations are different.
Kitten addresses some of these points in this follow up post, but what I want to convey is that ability is less elastic than many people believe. Not everyone is innately intelligent enough to play in the big leagues, and too many people conflate the act of having the same degree as someone fifty years ago with being just as intelligent as the people who got that degree decades prior. As a higher percentage of the population obtains greater levels of education, those educational milestones become a worse signal of ability on the bell curve.
This article from last year shows how stark the difference has become. If the average college student today compares themselves to the average college student fifty years ago, they will be found wanting. While the state of modern universities admitting too many subpar students is a difficult concept to come to terms with, the greater tragedy is that because of this, the ones with actual promise are falling to the wayside.
This new dynamic in admissions can cause exceptional students today to assume they are worse performers than what is true in actuality. Since the data says that the quality of the modern college student is much poorer as compared to the historical average college student, a standout student may view these statistics and take them personally. Such data would prevent them from realizing that their own personal metrics would likely be in line with, if not higher than, those historical students, as they would merely evaluate themselves as part of the student body. We have a tendency to generously assume those around us are of roughly equal capability if we are all admitted to the same program, but due to modern admissions philosophy, this is not the case. The high performing student may suffer from a misguided loss of confidence when they see that their cohort performed poorly, and their future ambitions may be dragged down unnecessarily.
The 99th percentile aren’t getting any worse, nor is their competency decreasing. The real problem, which these exceptional students have been caught in the crossfire of, is a broader one shaped by modern culture and our obsession with celebrating mediocrity. Colleges in the present day are now admitting people who are less capable, and have lower reading comprehension, than most institutions of the past would allow. At the same time, schools refuse to admit that the degree is any less valuable, or that their graduates are any less competent. This leads to people talking past each other when they discuss the supposed decline in our species. It is a mistake to say that the bachelor’s degree holder is the same caliber as prior grads, but it is also a mistake to pretend that the best of the best are any worse now than they’ve ever been. Humanity is not declining in any new way, this perception is merely caused by a newfound exposure to the work of students that previously would have been excluded from academia. Humanity will march on, and I believe that the future will be better than ever.