When everybody’s elite
College admissions officers often made quite an impression on Doug Lemov’s children when, as prospective matriculants, they visited campuses. Lemov writes that often the first thing admissions staff said was: “[Fill in the name of elite college here] is not a school for people who want to spend their time in the library.” One admissions representative urged prospective enrollees not to worry about the requirement to take a “quantitative” class. “Really, it’s easy to get around. Almost anything can count as a quantitative class.”
The evidence abounds: Supposedly elite institutions—like most of today’s so-called elites—are nothing of the sort (see above). Lemov explains why.
An educator and writer about schooling, Lemov has published in Education Next a scalding essay (“Your Neighborhood School Is a National Security Risk”) about the crisis in the nation’s most important supply chain. It supplies knowledge, understanding and shared principles, such as the merits of meritocracy.
High schools, Lemov writes, are discouraging students like a young woman (now a biochemistry major in college) of his acquaintance. She took seven advanced placement courses, including calculus and college-level linear algebra. Her grade average was 96. But given rampant grade inflation, 93 was about average at her school, where the top of the bottom half of students reached—let’s not say earned—90.
Her school considered “competition” a source of “stress” (which occurs when something important is at stake), so the “honor roll” included more than half the students. The school embraced what Lemov calls “inscrutable grading.” As and Bs were replaced with jargon concerning about 30 skills (“student can write sentences to create meaning”), and students show “mastery,” “partial mastery” or “emerging mastery” about this or that.
“Making everyone equally successful,” Lemov writes dryly, “makes a lot of people happy.” Teachers get few complaints about grades from pupils or parents. The only losers are ambitious students who are deprived of the signals of merit, and the nation, which is deprived of excellence.
As high school transcripts become deliberately uninformative and colleges abandon standardized tests for applicants, happy admissions offices have no inhibitions on their policies of “equity” and “social justice”—meaning discrimination for favored and against disfavored racial groups.
Unexacting secondary schools seed college campuses with students spoiled by unearned flattery. They bring to college a complacent sense of entitlement. Writing in National Review, Frederick M. Hess of the American Enterprise Institute explains “the political consequences of campus sloth.” Idleness breeds extremism and “performative rebellion” among students who, “basting in a progressive hothouse,” are “increasingly exempted from meaningful expectations of rigor.”
This is partly because campuses have burgeoning therapeutic bureaucracies that manufacture fragility by fretting about students’ serenity.
Performative bullying and wokeness flourish when, Hess says, “students view admission to elite universities as the finish line instead of the starting gate. We’ve normalized a college culture in which students believe that 20 or 25 hours of class and study time combined constitutes a full week.” Besides, why study when grade inflation makes ersatz excellence so abundant? Harvard’s average GPA was 3.0 in 1967, and 3.8 in 2022.
Lemov and Hess clarify why high schools and colleges are producing a national security crisis: The domestic supply of college graduates with advanced scientific skills—which are acquired in “quantitative” courses, not “studies”—cannot begin to meet the nation’s need for economic vitality and military preparedness.
Lemov cites the Economist’s estimate that by 2030 the U.S. high-tech sector will face a shortage of 1.4 million qualified workers, while each year only 70,000 students on U.S. campuses complete undergraduate engineering degrees. America depends on other nations’ high schools and colleges for the foreign students who in 2016-2017 earned 54 percent of U.S. master’s degrees and 44 percent of U.S. doctoral degrees in STEM fields.
The politics of 2024 will feature strident denunciations of something that is increasingly scarce: actual elitism, cultivated and rewarded by a meritocratic society. The political class doing the denouncing will illustrate the scarcity of people worthy of the designation elite.