Hey, Hey! Ho, Ho! Western Civ Has Got To GO!

Higher education in contemporary America has declined in quality and value over the past few decades due to several contributing factors. One of these factors is the push to make higher education accessible to many, resulting in expanded and federally backed education loans that have made every potential student a potential mark. This has led to an explosion in higher education costs as institutions adapted to capture the available funds. As the pool of students grew, the academic standards declined. Additionally, the rise of political correctness, leftist ideology, and the ascension of meritocratic crushing DEI brigades played a role.

Not every change has been detrimental, though. Increased access to higher education resulted from civil rights improvements regarding race, ethnicity, and gender, abetting the United States' evolution towards an egalitarian society. However, whatever gains were made in egalitarianism were soon threatened by other contemporary developments that restricted free expression and cultivation of critical thought - both once thought to be part of higher education's mission, but no more.

The concept of being "politically correct" has played a role in this decline. 'PC' became part of social consciousness in the late 1970s or early 1980s, ostensibly to rid the common language of demeaning terms to help elevate marginalized peoples. Still, it soon came to be seen by many as overly censorious. Whoever controls language controls thought, and the former bastions of free speech, the universities, have often enacted speech codes restricting what students can say.

Campuses had long been safe havens for the outliers of thought; thus, whence came revelations and innovations that often pushed the envelope of human knowledge. But gradually, particularly in the social sciences, leftist thinking came to predominate, and debate withered. While students had always needed to weigh what their instructors believed with what they could deduce, alternative thought diminished as humanities academia became increasingly homogenized.

Add in the widespread acceptance of Critical Race Theory, which asks society to revert to the old broad brush categorization of racial categories, and with its complimenting upsurge in "Diversity Equity and Inclusion" (DEI) practices, seeks to institutionalize discrimination by racial classification, and you have a university atmosphere hostile to free thought. Conformity is demanded.

And DEI specifically devalues merit resulting in the recent kerfuffle leading to the resignation of the apparently plagiaristic and thinly qualified President of what had been to leading North American university, Harvard, with an accompanying bloody nose to not just that institution’s reputation, but to other institutions generally.

Along with the above, a recent meta-analysis produced On average, undergraduate students' intelligence is merely average which included these observations:

According to a widespread belief, the average IQ of university students is 115 to 130 IQ points, that is, substantially higher than the average IQ of the general population (M = 100, SD =15)…The decline in students' IQ is a necessary consequence of increasing educational attainment over the last 80 years… The results show that the average IQ of undergraduate students today is a mere 102 IQ points and declined by approximately 0.2 IQ points per year.

That article also includes a half dozen findings, including:

First, universities and professors need to realize that students are no longer extraordinary but merely average, and have to adjust curricula and academic standards.

That adjustment to the market is already underway.

Presuming the adage, "What can't go on, won't go on," still holds, and with the perception that standards are evaporating and that the burgeoning cost of a college degree is not necessarily commensurate with the value of the education received, it does seem likely that society will soon find it untenable for young people to cripple themselves with debt that has a very doubtful positive return on investment.

Unless, of course, the debts incurred are forgiven. Classical conditioning does still hold.