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https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2025/11/math-decline-ucsd/684973/
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?
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 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.
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).
This was sadly less surprising to double-check. Among new graduates, they were looking at 4.9% unemployment, 48.6% underemployment in 2023.
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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)
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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.
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