Education Is More Expensive and Less Valuable than Ever

O n October 31, the Supreme Court heard arguments relating to affirmative-action cases at Harvard and the University of North Carolina, where Asian-American students allege being discriminated against in the college-admissions process. The arguments came just over a week after a federal court temporarily put the brakes on President Biden’s student-debt-forgiveness plans, and conservatives have reason to be optimistic that a change of direction is on the horizon.

Such a change is desperately needed. Progressive ideology has moved American schools and universities away from intellectual development and career preparation, which were traditionally their core functions. Meanwhile, a regime of subsidies to universities and students has caused education costs to rise faster than sectors in which there is little or no government involvement.

It’s not as if these rising costs are reaping benefits — quite the opposite. A recent release from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), for example, suggests that our schooling isn’t providing the skills young people need. Some states’ Covid-era pause on up to two years of in-person learning is partly to blame, but with schools making excuses to lower standards for students of all grades, it’s time to admit that out-of-control tuition costs — which have more than doubled since 2000 — aren’t the only way that our education systems aren’t delivering.

The NAEP showed drops in reading abilities for fourth- and eighth-grade students in most states, and all states but Utah saw meaningful drops in math abilities. Though reading results didn’t correlate well with how long state Covid policies kept schools closed, there was a clear relationship between lockdowns and math scores that suggested in-person learning was more effective.

School districts in blue jurisdictions seem to think that fixing this decline in standards should not be a priority. For example, some New York City middle schools have simply lowered their standards, disavowing their once-competitive admissions processes and reducing incentives for teachers to teach and for young people to work hard. These schools say that lowering the bar will eliminate the harmful class and racial disparities created by their previously high standards, but one suspects that they are prioritizing diversity over pushing students to reach their full potential, which will undoubtedly have negative compounding effects over time.

These trends would be disturbing even if they were limited to grade school, but higher education is witnessing the same phenomenon. Sometimes conservatives’ moans about mobs of “snowflake” progressive university students seem cherry-picked, but a recent example at New York University (NYU) is too on-the-nose to ignore. A famed organic-chemistry lecturer at NYU, with years of experience at elite institutions, was allegedly grading his students too harshly. Many of these students complained that their grades could prevent them from entering medical school, while others groused about the effects of the pandemic on their ability to work productively, despite fully reopened lecture halls and videos made especially by the professor as supplemental materials for the Covid era.

In response, NYU fired the lecturer, appeasing these students’ sense of entitlement at a time when the credibility of higher education is already at risk due to the decline in the quality of instruction, the hostility to free expression rampant on college campuses, and discrimination through affirmative action against qualified applicants.

In theory, education creates value by cultivating skills, which will benefit a student’s employment opportunities, and much more. Consequently, lower educational standards reduce the quality of the labor force. Indeed, high academic standards keep all but the most qualified from entering their respective fields — and that’s a good thing. As many have noted in the NYU case, organic chemistry is considered a weed-out class: It’s meant to show who is or isn’t cut out for the field. After all, not many patients would want to be looked after by a doctor who is not up to the job.

The debate over education used to be over its purpose — is the university supposed to be cultivating pre-professional skills or promoting the life of the mind? Lowering educational standards, however, represents a turn away from both goals (which are not, incidentally, mutually exclusive). The result will be the creation of an educational system that fosters neither skilled workers nor intellectually well-rounded citizens.

Many are familiar with grade inflation, but failing to provide the necessary academic support for students in their earliest years and then reducing what is expected of them at college could cause downstream career inflation, where people no longer have the hard skills or critical-thinking capacity to be productive in traditionally demanding job roles. Employers will get less than they once could expect from their employees, patients won’t get the same caliber of doctors as before, and customers will no longer get the quality services and products they could once rely on.

The trends of declining teaching standards and easier grading have the potential to limit our economy in the long run. Faced with such a dilemma, it falls on the gatekeepers of specialized fields to break this cycle and maintain a high standard of performance. This may often include requiring students and teachers who do not meet academic standards to improve or face real consequences. That system has been proven to succeed — the alternative, not so much.