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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   17765 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 17, 2025

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https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2025/11/math-decline-ucsd/684973/

At the same time, the UC system eliminated its best tool for assessing students’ academic preparedness. In 2020, system leaders voted to phase standardized-test scores out of admissions decisions. They argued that the tests worsened racial divides and unfairly privileged wealthy students.

Anyone remember the greatest hits of racialized education from the mid 2010s? Math is racist. Decolonize science. Genetically transmitted racial trauma. Social promotion for underperforming (especially "minorities") so that they won't feel bad.

Much of the above arguments were created by progressives and embraced by administrators seeking to avoid hard metric accountability to keep their funding alive. Real high impact success required tracibility and accountability, like Roland Fryers Promise program in Harlem that closed achievement gaps significantly. Naturally that all gets abandoned because it required work, which is apparently racist.

Well, its all coming home to roost. The first crop of pandemic + zero accountability + AI kids are coming into college, and the results aren't pretty. Fully 50% of entrants cannot write an essay or do high school math. Institutions that have self respect have pivoted back to some form of standardized testing, but it may be too late. The value signal of a bachelors was already diminished pre pandemic because too many incompetents were getting degree mill slop, saturating the job market with useless cultural studies slop churned out by universities soaking in those sweet Pell Grants. The 30% of the cohort getting bachelors is still unimportant compared to the top 5% in Ivies. The lack of critical mass of competence seems real this time.

So does education matter? Can you simply git gud with an Agile cert and a self built site with 1099 proof of taxable income from a successful venture, as opposed to educationmaxxing? If the value signal is degraded, can it be restored? Has the era of mandatory rectification of disparate outcome with forced racial redistribution ended? Is all this unimportant in an AI age where Scarjo can whisper ASMR opium?

Taking aside the insipid culture war aspect (which we all agree on and hence is just kind of boring to discuss), it's actually kind of interesting as an extremely effective example about the Generalized Lucas Critique.

  • Conditioned on some threshold SAT score, having a good GPA was fairly predictive of college success.
    • This makes sense -- the SAT was a good filter for aptitude. Beyond aptitude, GPA measured other components (diligence, focus) that contribute
  • Once you remove the SAT, having a good GPA is no longer predicative
  • You can not use correlations in the historical data to predict the effect of a change that modifies the structural rules by which the data are generated.

My favorite was some drone mission landing somewher and the google widget logo thing had a multicolored cast of "rocket scientists" celebrating on it, worse than the magic school bus. Smash cut to the mission room it's like 90%+ white middle and old aged dudes.

It's bad that I knew exactly what you were referring to.

I'm not even sure what you'd call this. Stolen valor? There's gotta be a more accurate term for it.

Roland Fryers Promise program in Harlem

Just want to have an addendum but from a cursory search: Promise Academy is a charter school under the Harlem's Children Zone (really an umbrella org for multiple programs/initiative) founded by Geoffrey Canada.

Roland Fryer is a Havard economics professor that did a study on HCZ and is still actively researching on education reform.

The value signal of a bachelors was already diminished pre pandemic because too many incompetents were getting degree mill slop, saturating the job market with useless cultural studies slop churned out by universities soaking in those sweet Pell Grants. The 30% of the cohort getting bachelors is still unimportant compared to the top 5% in Ivies. The lack of critical mass of competence seems real this time.

It'll shake out. Not cleanly, it's going to be painful for companies and universities, but it will. (BTW, Ivies are much smaller than 5%). In most of these cases, the students will not be able to complete a rigorous degree; they'll get their bachelors but in some lesser degree. This likely leads to smaller graduating STEM cohorts from the universities which degraded admissions standards. Since the better students probably went somewhere, it means companies looking for college hires will need to go down the university prestige chain to find as many as they used to, and probably be more selective about students from those higher up.

Some schools will likely pass these people through even in their supposedly rigorous programs. This will be very bad for the reputation of those schools a year after the first such class graduates. Also very bad for the overly trusting employers.

Can you simply git gud with an Agile cert and a self built site with 1099 proof of taxable income from a successful venture, as opposed to educationmaxxing?

I hope not; an Agile cert should be a red flag. And the skills it takes to succeed on your own (and make 1099 income) are very different than tech skills. Most techies couldn't run a business and most business owners couldn't do tech; the small overlap is where you get your founders, but it IS small.

Has the era of mandatory rectification of disparate outcome with forced racial redistribution ended?

No. Considering the results of the last US election, I expect the Democrats to come roaring back with a massive win in 2026 and a trifecta in 2028, and they'll bring wokism and all this with them. It seems a definite majority of the American people support this as long as its problems are not actually right in front of them in the immediate moment.

Is all this unimportant in an AI age where Scarjo can whisper ASMR opium?

I suppose the trades will still be there; data centers require a lot of electrical, HVAC, and plumbing.

...system leaders voted to phase standardized-test scores out of admissions decisions.

Institutions ... that have self respect have pivoted back to some form of standardized testing....

Standardised tests are the worst method of determining college admissions, except for all the others that have been tried.

As someone who wishes it was easier to use them as a part of my hiring process, I don't understand why people dislike them in the least (other than the race hustlers, etc). If I am hiring a paralegal who is going to be in the research division, I want to give that paralegal 10 cases to read about a topic and 1 hour (which is obviously unreasonable) and give them 10 questions to answer about those 10 cases. Then I can weed out lots of people who are too slow or too incompetent at reading.

The only real problems with American standardized testing right now is 1) It is way too easy. Most students should not be capable of finishing standardized tests. and 2) The special needs time accommodations make them even more useless in the middle section. A person who is slowly able to do the things a person did them on time is not the same.

Standardized tests are excellent for what they are: A first-pass filter to reduce the candidate set.

If you're planning to enroll 500 students, then use standardized testing to bring the 100,000 applicants down to a candidate set of 5000. After that, you can use affirmative action, holistic evaluation, essays or personalities to evaluate the remaining 5000. A student with a 1550 SAT won't be noticeably smarter than one with 1500. But going from a 1550 SAT student to one with a 4.0 GPA and 1200 SAT is worlds apart.

A student with a 1550 SAT won't be noticeably smarter than one with 1500. But going from a 1550 SAT student to one with a 4.0 GPA and 1200 SAT is worlds apart.

And "holistic evaluation" is doing the latter while pretending it's the former.

And "holistic evaluation" is doing the latter while pretending it's the former.

I generally agree with you on this. One of the big lies about affirmative action is that it's used only to choose between highly qualified candidates.

Education matters in the modern era if (and only if) it verifies the existence of actual skill. The issue with self-taught expertise is that it can be extremely hard to verify. I can simply claim to have studied English Literature, but what I really did was skim Shakespeare, then read the Daily Mail. You can’t really tell unless you’re willing to and able to test me for proof of skill. If I have the degree from UCLA, you can look at the curriculum and my transcripts and know what kinds of work I did.

College has the same problem that traditional martial arts have. You need the belts to determine where in the curriculum the student is, but it’s easy for the unscrupulous to simply allow people to buy their belts with little regard for whether or not anything is being learned.

But the point of a four year degree, for the ones people actually get, is proving you can answer emails, use grammarly, keep drama to a minimum, etc. Not showing mathematical literacy.

It’s possible that standards for a bachelor’s in English/psychology/communications/etc have been so reduced that it doesn’t even do that. But that is a different argument than ‘they don’t learn calculus’- that’s what ‘for non-math majors’ means, we already knew.

When I was in college, they added a universally-required undergraduate writing course (fortunately with a test-out option). I suppose "Graduates of $PRESTIGIOUS_INSTITUTION should be able to string two sentences together write persuasively" makes sense from the board's perspective, but at the time I remember thinking that requiring calculus would probably improve those outcomes more ("should be able to understand derivatives and complex statistics"). In some ways it felt more like an excuse to hire a lot of adjunct faculty and grad students to teach those classes, although it might have made sense targeting international (mostly graduate) students.

AI gets blamed for the lack of entry level jobs. While it might be partially correct, there is no denying that there are a lot of sub 100 Iq people graduating with low interest and low levels of skill. Previously people might have graduated with a history degree that didn't really teach them how to do their job but at least they were bright, could write well and were willing to work hard to establish their career.

Let's say a company wanted four blog posts a week on their website. In 2020, they would have a manager and four content writers, and the five of them would spend a lot of time in meetings. Today they would have one person with AI and make that person work 10 hours a day to create the content. The more employees a company has, the less efficient the organization becomes. Having lots of mediocre people is far less efficient than having a few highly dedicated high performers.

An alternative route is that employers start hiring people with irrelevant but difficult degrees as they are a better proxy for intelligence than college degrees in general. Physics can't be watered down to pass people who shouldn't be in college.

I remember two or three years ago, a friend of mine (then working on her physics PhD) was having to TA the intro physics sequence for majors at a highly prestigious undergraduate program. But the freshmen were wildly unprepared, struggling even with simple calculus. She and her fellow TAs brought it up with the professor: the team wanted to simply fail them. But that was impossible, because various administrators decided that teaching physics (again, to would-be physics majors) with calculus was too harsh and cruel to be allowed. So they had to dumb down the problem sets and class, and even solve upcoming exam problems for students who came to office hours.

Any class can be dumbed down if you try hard enough.

The sad thing about that is that failing the class would have ultimately been doing the students a favor. Having to retake a class in college shouldn’t be the end of the world and the ones who did it a second time would have left well prepared.

I agree somewhat, but that is too optimistic. The reason the intro sequence for physics majors was fast and rigorous is that later courses all built on it. If someone only completed the intro sequence their second year, it wouldn't be impossible to finish all the major requirements in four years, but it'd be much more difficult, leave no room for later error, and electives would be minimal.

I also somewhat doubt that the ~1/3 of people having the most trouble would have a good grasp of it after taking it a second time, though here I'm less sure. If it was purely because high schools failed at preparing students because of COVID etc., I can see how a retake could be successful.

We do need to get more comfortable at telling students "you don't have the aptitude for it, we encourage you to do something else you have better aptitude for."

But that was impossible, because various administrators decided that teaching physics (again, to would-be physics majors) with calculus was too harsh and cruel to be allowed. So they had to dumb down the problem sets and class, and even solve upcoming exam problems for students who came to office hours.

I wonder exactly how it was dumbed down, because I recall algebra-based physics being much harder than calculus-based. Algebra-based was a bunch of strange, disparate formulas that had to be memorized, whereas calculus-based had big concepts that were easier to understand and a few formulas that flowed from the concepts (for intro stuff, anyway; obviously the math in statics and dynamics got much hairier).

Memorization is trivialized by formula sheets, and is also a weaker skill that can be employed. My college, in ancient times now, wouldnt accept my perfect AP score on the non-calculus physics AP exam as credit. This was even more incredulous given my also perfect AP score on the calculus exam.

But the idea does sort of make sense. There is a reason that (at least in my day) companies would require splits on GPA between major-qualifying classes and overall GPA. If you have a 3.5 GPA, but a 3.0 in engineering related classes, you are pretty mediocre at engineering. If you have a 3.5 and a 3.5 in engineering related classes, you are a guy who is very talented, but cant be bothered to give a crap about the mandatory liberal arts classes every school imposes (it is odd, from a certain point of view, that there are no mandatory math classes for the LA people, but we all know why). These are old numbers that probably date me, even in engineering most crappy students now have a GPA similar to our old top 10%. Which just shows the problem with the current system.

You can also make exams open book or allow cheat sheets. It might be hard to believe but there are cases of open book exams where the questions were previously solved in class or recitation.

If you are dumb enough, memorizing the combinatorial explosion of something is much easier than mastering the small number of concepts that give rise to it. It's why most adults know their times tables but cannot for the life of them perform the multiplication algorithm. Humans are inherently good at memorization; it's the reason kids can easily learn languages, or all 151 Pokemon.

But the problem with memorization without understanding is that, if you vary the problem even slightly, it comes crashing down. Ask those same adults what 13 x 14 is and they will be lost; that's not on the table.

IIRC the dumbing down wasn't so much in removing calculus entirely, but setting aside time to review concepts like derivatives and integrals and generally setting a much slower pace for the class, with gratuitous handholding.

Comparatively, I took the same freshman physics sequence at the same university decades ago, and it included Hamiltonian mechanics the first quarter. When I mentioned this to her, she laughed: the students would absolutely not be reaching that same level.

The most troubling thing is that, in theory, the students all had passed the prereqs (a year of high school calculus, high school physics). But she had no idea how a solid third of them had managed to satisfy those prereqs.

I believe history, philosophy, classics etc are still reasonable IQ proxies- dummies get degrees in, like, English or something that wouldn’t have been recognized as a fit subject for academic study in 1900.

If you look at the stats, English majors aren't half bad. Their average SAT score of 1143 (in the 2023 data, latest I could find quickly) doesn't beat Engineering majors (1174) or Mathematics-and-statistics majors (1269, which includes beating the English majors' average on the English subtest) ... but it's nearly tied with Philosophy-and-religious-studies, it's consistently ahead of general History, and it's a step above many of the "or something" options. The "you're going to be working with your hands" majors tend to fall below the "you're going to be manipulating symbols" majors on the "how good are you at manipulating symbols" test, unsurprisingly, but among the symbol-manipulation majors there's also some sad showings from: Area, ethnic, cultural, and gender studies (991, and seemingly dropping fast over the preceding years!?), Family and consumer sciences/human sciences (971), and everyone's (least) favorite ironically low average score, Education (1023).

Hasn't enrollment in English programs actually dropped in the last few decades? Despite meme status (I assume from Avenue Q), the folks I know who are passionate about the English language specifically tend to be surprisingly focused --- one carries around a print copy of the complete works of Shakespeare wherever he goes. I think anyone looking for an "easy" major without concern for career prospects ends up in the ones you listed at the bottom. Sadly, that doesn't mean the employment prospects for English majors are actually much better.

Hasn't enrollment in English programs actually dropped in the last few decades?

Apparently so! From a peak of 55K Bachelors' degrees per year in the late 2000s down to 40K in 2017-2018 (the latest data I could quickly find).

Sadly, that doesn't mean the employment prospects for English majors are actually much better.

This was sadly less surprising to double-check. Among new graduates, they were looking at 4.9% unemployment, 48.6% underemployment in 2023.

Oxford has had an English department since 1894.

Yes, that’s why I said ‘or’. They didn’t have a psychology or communications department.

Ah, I was taking it idiomatically meaning English was included in the category

If only he'd taken English at Oxford...

(actually I'd use a dash there, but still)

I think hydro meant "English" or "something that wouldn't have been recognized pre-1900" as two distinct options.

I hope so, though "dummies get degrees in English" makes me go 😐 as a wordcel (granted, I have no degree in anything, so what do I know?)

I'm apparently wrong about that one; my assumption had been that smart wordcels took classics degrees(IIRC classics and philosophy have average IQ's on par with the physics department) but apparently English is as rigorous as history and most of the 'Mrs. degree' and 'what degree doesn't require math?' type switch to psychology or ethnic studies.

Physics can't be watered down to pass people who shouldn't be in college.

Sadly, I disagree with this. If enough employers started using the "physics degree" strategy (and were allowed to use this approach), you can bet that places like UCLA would find a way to water down their physics programs. Most schools already have a "physics for poets" type class. How hard would it be to start offering "advanced" physics classes which purport to teach Quantum Electrodynamics without requiring serious skill or work? Not that hard.

Would a high-ranking university really sacrifice the quality and rigor of a program in the name of Social Justice? History has already answered that question.

If enough employers started using the "physics degree" strategy (and were allowed to use this approach)

Why wouldn’t employers be allowed to use this approach?

If the concern is “disparate impact”, that could apply even now, for employers using “any bachelor’s degree” rather than specifically “physics degree”—though I grant that the impact gets more disparate, as it were, as the IQ filter gets stronger.

I suppose employers are caught between the Scylla of needing to hire high IQ candidates and the Charybdis of needing to keep the filter as plausibly-not-disparate-impact-causing enough to avoid the baleful Eye of Title VII

If the concern is “disparate impact”, that could apply even now, for employers using “any bachelor’s degree” rather than specifically “physics degree”—though I grant that the impact gets more disparate, as it were, as the IQ filter gets stronger.

You have kind of answered your own question here. Also, if an employer requires a physics major for a job that has nothing to do with physics, it's much easier to argue that the employer is using the requirement to camouflage unlawful discrimination.

Even if the employer chooses majors which are non-STEM but known for attracting smart diligent students (e.g. classics), I can pretty much guarantee that they will be open to a charge of cherry-picking majors so as to facilitate unlawful discrimination.

(As a side note, I feel pretty strongly that all this stuff will be moot pretty soon due to advances in AI.)

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