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