The universities have become stupid, literally
Mass college attendance has destroyed our universities' culture of excellence
If you want to understand why the universities have become stupid, you have to understand that the universities have literally become stupid.
The average undergraduate IQ has fallen by nearly 20 points in 80 years--massive.
This drop has happened at every level of education.
Undergraduates have become much dumber. Graduates have become much dumber. Graduate students have become much dumber. Lawyers have become much dumber. Doctors have become much dumber. PhDs have become much dumber. And the steady increase in dumbness continues to the present day.
And while we do not have the data showing it directly, it is extremely likely that professors have also become much dumber--and keep getting dumber.
What has caused this?
Well, it's not rocket science (something that fewer and fewer people in universities can do).
University graduation has increased from 5% of the population to 40% of the population.
So universities are now much less selective, that is to say, dumber.
Apart from the increasing incompetence of people with university educations, this explains a lot of things happening today.
With too many university graduates competing for jobs, the dumb ones know that they cannot compete on an even playing field, so they invoke politics.
When people fail, they either say, "I was discriminated against," or if they have really lofty aspirations, "you were discriminated against".
Both stances help people get promotions in overly competitive job markets filled with overcredentialed dumb people.
The point of all of this is the following:
You cannot change the ideology of the universities to get rid of the rot.
The rot has happened because the universities have become stupid.
The rot has not happened because they have become ideological.
It's the other way around.
They have become ideological because they are rotten.
The lowest common denominator has destroyed university culture.
If we want the universities not to be stupid--if we want them to be respectable institutions with actual scientific legitimacy--we have to make them literally not stupid again.
That means making them more exclusive, more selective, fewer in number again.
It is not enough to simply say: "stop being rotten and stupid."
University funding has to be dramatically cut, universities need to be downsized, and they have to become hallowed institutions where only the country's best and brightest can go again.
If this sounds elitist, well, it is elitist.
Do you want universities to be bastions of high levels of competence? Where competence has the highest value, because excellence is everywhere?
Or do you want them to be places filled with stupid people who say, "trust the science", followed by unspeakably stupid things that they call science?
If we want to be able to trust the universities again, if we want to make science great again, then we have to make them smart again.
References
https://sciety.org/articles/activity/10.31234/osf.io/2munr
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289623000156
Side note: when the first of these two papers was submitted as a preprint and began going viral, there was an uproar among academics who emailed the editors and had it pulled, without explanation, before it could be published.
They didn't like being called stupid.
You can read about that debacle here: https://bobuttl.org/when-chief-editors-reviews-go-off-the-rails-frontiers-dr-eddy-davelaars-criticism-of-our-accepted-meta-analysis-and-our-detailed-response/
It happened last year.
For skeptics, it should be noted that dozens of papers in the scientific literature all point to the same conclusion. The paper mentioned above whose publication was canceled without explanation was simply re-analyzing this literature collectively.
I will write more about this in upcoming posts and my book.
One reason so many people go to college when they aren’t suited to it (and probably don’t want to go) is that, these days, you are expected to have a college degree to become a receptionist. My grandfather was a successful accountant and he never went to college — he went to accounting school. We need to have more schools focused on specific careers which do not require 4 years of dubious general education classes or leave students tens of thousands of dollars in debt.
The phenomenon is similar to inflation of the currency. Turning out an oversupply of college graduates debased the currency of the degree.
When only 5% of Americans had degrees, the progressive fallacy was that if everybody had a degree everybody would get a great job like the 5%.
The reality is that there are only so many great jobs. When only the best and brightest have degrees, the fallacy is that their success is due to the degree. When nearly half the country is degreed, but the vast majority are midwit mediocrities, the fallacy becomes apparent.
Higher education has turned into an indoctrination factory, given a fertile field by overeducated average intellects at best who are disgruntled because their degrees mire them in debt and don't deliver on the promise of a lucrative career.
Bottom line: the push to college educate the masses was a false promise for many and has resulted in an electorate brainwashed in communist propaganda. We should scale back and emphasize trade school training for youth for jobs that can't be destroyed by AI or outsourcing.