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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 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.
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).
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.
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