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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.
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.
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
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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