The Admission Scam Is Another Reason To Destroy Academia As We Know It

By Kurt Schlichter

Town Hall, April 4, 2019: American college is terrible and, as a society, we should stop doing it – at least how it is being currently done. The greatest benefit of a system where most citizens are pushed to get college educations, whether they truly need and want one or not, would be a society of really smart, informed, and engaged citizens. Do you see that happening?

No, you do not.

Instead, we have a bunch of people who are dragged down by crushing debt after wasting years of their youth chasing a piece of paper that often has no relationship to these graduates’ futures. Compounding the failure is how these grads march off campus infatuated with ridiculous commie notions abhorrent to a free people. The college system is a disaster – an expensive disaster that picks our pockets as well as those of the suckers who matriculate – and we should stop tolerating it. Time for conservatives to reform academia the hard way, and by “reform” I mean, “Destroy it, sow the campuses with salt, and rebuild academia into something that isn’t useless.”

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Is a College Education Worth Less Than Nothing?

Writing in the Wall St. Journal, Richard Vedder and Christopher Denhard discuss the value of a university degree.

A key measure of the benefits of a degree is the college graduate’s earning potential—and on this score, their advantage over high-school graduates is deteriorating. Since 2006, the gap between what the median college graduate earned compared with the median high-school graduate has narrowed by $1,387 for men over 25 working full time, a 5% fall. Women in the same category have fared worse, losing 7% of their income advantage ($1,496).

A college degree’s declining value is even more pronounced for younger Americans. According to data collected by the College Board, for those in the 25-34 age range the differential between college graduate and high school graduate earnings fell 11% for men, to $18,303 from $20,623. The decline for women was an extraordinary 19.7%, to $14,868 from $18,525.

But a moment’s reflection will confirm that the method these authors use to value a college degree is absurd. For a start, a college degree requires a certain, if rather low, scholastic aptitude. By definition, all college graduates meet this requirement, but many of those without a college degree do not. Which means that, intellectually, the college graduates are not directly comparable with non-graduates.

Specifically, notwithstanding a leavening by people such as Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, the class of non-graduates will likely be less smart in ways both academic and otherwise than the class of graduates.

To put some crude if fairly meaningless numbers on that difference, graduates will mostly have an average or above average IQ, whereas the class of non-graduates will be intellectually more heterogeneous, but will include the majority of those of a less than average IQ.

And the effect of a college degree on earnings is confounded by factors other than the intellectual. University education is marker of social class, which is sought more keenly by those of middle and elite class than those of lower socio-economic rank. Moreover, socio-economic background is likely itself a powerful determinant of income, affecting aspiration, socialization, connections, and the quality of K to 12 education.

It seems, therefore, that we really have no useful information on the economic value of a college degree, although it seems that in the case of those well paid professions, medicine, the law, rocket science, etc., which require specific higher educational qualifications, college education pay dividends. But even this is not certain for at least a few of those individuals of high ability who are channeled through higher education into the professions might otherwise have ended up as billionaire real estate  developers or Silicon Valley entrepreneurs.

But in any case those with degrees leading to professional careers account for only a small proportion of all college graduates. Thus, exclusion of those with professional qualifications would greatly diminish the apparent effect of a college degree on earnings.

And, if anything, for the majority of students, the impact on life-time earnings of a college degree may be negative. Not only does it cost four to six or more years potential earnings, but it imposes a substantial cost for tuition. Net of these factors, many of America’s 18-year-olds of average ability will earn more in their lifetime by launching their career at Starbucks or MacDonalds immediately, rather than incurring the cost of a degree in linguistics or womens’ studies.

But economics are not everything. To the true lovers of knowledge, the rewards of learning are great.

First posted at Canspeccy.wordpress.com January 10, 2014.

IQism, Racism and the Decay of the Great American University

To many psychologists, genius is simply a number that falls a certain number of standard deviations to the right of the mean on a bell curve. One of the longest running experiments on intelligence, however, suggests that true giftedness may depend as much on other factors like creativity and motivation. Since 1921, psychologists have studied a group of approximately 1500 children with an average IQ score of about 150 that were originally selected by Lewis Terman. The members of this group, known as the Termites, all grew up to be highly successful and productive, but not one of them achieved genius-level contributions. Genius seems to elude the best efforts of psychologists to capture its essence in a standardized test.
A Case Study of Genius, Ryan McPherson

The joy of racism is the sense it provides of innate superiority and, like being born into the aristocracy or inheriting a fortune, it provides an elevated status requiring no effort to maintain.

But being white no longer provides that advantage. If you're black or Jewish, OK, enjoy the psychic benefits of racism if you wish, but today white is rubbish and targeted for elimination as the dominant group within a generation, not only in America as proclaimed to applause by US President Bill Clinton during his 1998 commencement address at Portland State University, but across Europe.

So what is the alternative for those of idle disposition in need of a prop to their self-esteem? The answer, today, is IQism. By definition, half of us can beat an average score, and with a bit of test sophistication almost anyone can be above average. And if test preparation is not enough, a spoonful of glutamate before the test may give you an extra five to 25 points.

The American school system has done much to promote IQism. If SAT scores are all that really matters, a teacher's life is greatly simplified: preparing a class of restive adolescents for an IQ test is easier than inspiring them to high attainment in Greek or analytical algebra. What's more, the tests are scored by machine, which sure beats reading a stack of hand-written essays.

With the rise of IQism in America, top universities now select applicants for admission chiefly not on what they know, or on how effectively they apply what they know, but on a machine-scored test of facility in certain mental operations that measures neither judgment, nor passion, nor imagination.

But who cares if students, all of them fully adult, entering America's elite institutions of higher learning know virtually nothing: they're all really, really bright. No wonder so many students at Harvard cheat. Why bother with the books? If you're too poor to follow Ted Kennedy's example and pay someone else to sit the exam, by all means cheat in any other way you can. As a person of high IQ, your superiority is assured: the sweat of hard work, intellectual or otherwise, is for the lower grades of mankind.

Bizarrely, the SAT test was promoted by James Bryant Conant, president of Harvard University, to reduce the number of rich kids privileged by attendance at expensive private prep schools from being privileged by attendance at Harvard, an expensive private school. But as Charles Murray relates here the SAT test fails to predict academic performance of university entrants from poor schools any better than traditional subject-based entrance tests and thus is an expensive waste of time.