Higher Education Failing Students, Society

 

Does anybody still believe in “higher” education, other than students foggily gazing at their Gender Studies textbook after smoking a couple of joints? (They do still have textbooks, don’t they? Or is absolutely everything online?)

What has happened—quickly—to Yale is sadly illustrative of the collapse of standards at colleges and universities across the fruited plane. The school’s own higher education report acknowledges that fact:

In 2016, departing from its traditional emphasis on the creation and dissemination of knowledge, Yale expanded its mission statement to include “improving the world today,” educating “aspiring leaders worldwide,” and fostering “an ethical, interdependent, and diverse community.”

Yet the Ivy League school’s own Faculty Handbook states: “Yale University’s mission is to create, disseminate, and preserve knowledge through research and teaching.” Imagine that. Radical.

A recent Front Page Magazine article notes that the average GPA at Yale is now 3.7…and that the school had to implement a cutoff to cap the number of honors graduates at 30%. Again, this is sadly indicative of erstwhile institutions of higher learning around the nation. They have strayed far from their earlier missions to educate, challenge-- and inculcate the values of discipline, hard work, and the ethics needed to be a proud and productive member of society.

Rapid grade inflation has gone hand-in-hand with the proliferation of woke courses. 82% of Black Studies students at the school now receive A grades… as do 85% of those in Education Studies and 92% of students in Women’s Studies. (“I am woman, hear me roar!”)

I myself attended college not long after the end of the Pleistocene Era, when the goal of universities was to make the course of study so difficult that, if one were to graduate, it meant something. It was a real accomplishment. And one would be prepared, academically and temperamentally, for whatever life threw at one.

What is truly shocking is how collegiate grading has “evolved” (“progressed?”) over the past several decades. In 1963, just ten percent of Yale students were given an A or A-. In the 2022–23 school year, seventy-nine percent of those attending Yale received those lofty marks. Today, the median student at Yale receives an A. How can that be? What happened to grading on a curve? Or do we really believe kids are just that much smarter today? Hmm?

This ridiculous sham is unlikely to be corrected because no professor or faculty member wants to be the bad guy or gal. (Especially in cases involving minorities and progressive courses. Intersectionality, you know.) So they all are. Because what they are doing is ultimately disastrous for the student and the country alike. Unprepared, misinformed, and fragile students make for unprepared, misinformed, and fragile adults. Which makes for a society that cannot compete with our geopolitical enemies…or even see to the continued existence of a functional and prosperous republic based on the equal application of the rule of law and our unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Yale’s motto is “Lux et Veritas,” meaning “light and truth.”

Ironically, like so many other institutions of higher learning, it now turns out students who know only darkness and fake news.