For decades, colleges and universities have been letting their standards slide. For a long time, that was mostly because so many unprepared and indifferent students were flooding in and school leaders wanted them to stick around so the money would continue to flow. More recently, the leftist demands for “equity” have joined the fray. Too few students who received honors were from “underrepresented” groups and that was not tolerable. So more and more courses are pass/fail, honors are dropped, grades are inflated — prizes for everyone!
In today’s Martin Center article, Professor Richard Vedder comments on this lousy state of affairs:
A story in Inside Higher Ed last week revealed that two more Ivy League schools, Cornell and the University of Pennsylvania, have stopped publishing “dean’s lists” that recognize high levels of academic achievement. As one anonymous Penn alumnus put it, “The war against individual achievement continues unabated.” Other Ivies (e.g., Brown and Harvard) had already abandoned — or never really embraced — the concept of recognizing merit in this manner.
The spin put on this by the IHE writer was that the schools were adjusting to ameliorate the alleged problem of “perfectionism” that is too stressful for students these days.
Vedder doesn’t buy that baloney:
These latest moves are still another sign that much of higher education is contemptuous of the values that produced American exceptionalism, among them appropriately and generously rewarded hard work. To some, it is not enough for colleges to promote racism, anti-Semitism, and a war on men (as demonstrated by the underreported sharp decline in male enrollments). They also need to extol the virtues of mediocracy, of doing less for more rather than more for less.
Indeed. Many of our college “leaders” these days are far more concerned about using their positions to transform America than to provide students with the best education possible.
This will have bad consequences, Vedder observes. In medical education, for example, the war on merit will lead to decreased competence among practitioners.
Read the whole thing.