College education has been held out as a panacea. In order to boost enrollment colleges have had to lower standards. Smarter people were already going to college. To get more people to spend more years in college it was necessary to recruit from lower down on the IQ scale. At the same time, US immigration policies have increased the percentage of the populace that have lower intelligence levels. Sending those people off to college with racial preferences of course has lowered the quality of college graduates.
Fools argue that since people who get college degrees do better then the solution is to send more people to college. But a college education is just a proxy for a higher level of intelligence. The preference employers have for college graduates is a preference for higher intelligence employees. A repeal of the foolish US Supreme Court decision Griggs v. Duke Power would allow employers to use IQ tests instead and reduce what is effectively a big tax on the economy levied by educrats. This would save a lot of time and money now wasted on education that does not provide either marketable skills or real insights.
I wonder whether the decline has been greater for females than for males. Women are a higher percentage of college students than men. My guess is that at lower IQ levels women are a lot more likely to go to college than men of equal IQ and that the growth in the number of women going to college has lowered the average quality of those women who attend.
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The points about declining college scores and the lowering of admission standards are well taken. Obviously, diversity issues and affirmative action play a role here but I'm not sure if a lot of the problem doesn't have to do with universities selling the "college experience" over education.
I can't speak for other places in this country, but my experience in my community during my post-high school days (which weren't but a few years ago) was one where college was "just something you do" after high school. Kids who didn't plan to go to college were considered to be "lazy" or "unambitious" while those who did go to college usually didn't even know what it was they wanted to do with their careers. I often wondered if a lot of the kids who decided to hold off on college weren't making the wiser decision. After all, drifting through a couple of years of classes with no real career direction is a good way to waste ten thousand dollars or so.
But not a lot of kids do this, mostly because I think kids go off to college seeking the "college experience" rather than a real education for a specific career. They go off looking for the frat parties, sporting events, campus life and activism, all of which is commonly associated with higher education. What many of them don't understand is that while all of that stuff has its place it doesn't exactly translate into a lot of intellectual capital for the business market. I don't know how many acquaintances of mine have graduated from college with a "business" or "criminal justice" degree and absolutely no idea how to get a job with it. Most of them end up starting on the bottom rung of some company. About where they would have started with out a degree, only now with a degree and thousands of dollars in debt.
The quality of education kids receive has really gone down hill too, but again that might have something to do with the all-around lowering of academic standards. Anyway, one need look no further than the sort of classes college kids take (a class in pranks/social activism is the most ridiculous one I've seen of late) to see that this is true.
But don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that college is a bad idea. I just think that too many students and parents go into it with their eyes shut. Rather than focusing on the "college experience" more of these people need to focus on what skills higher education will give them for the job market.