College Fails America

Are there any stats that evaluate the quality of a BA degree vs 50 years ago. I’ve heard first hand stories of college freshman at a good state university not being able to conjugate a sentence. I’d hate to be 16 and trying to figure out what degreed skills businesses will need in 6 years. And just to increase the degree of difficulty for those kids, the administration decided areas like nursing, physicians assistant and physical therapy aren’t professional so they can’t get government loans. Does Trump think this shit up on his own or do Miller and Lutnick get to kibitz. When large swaths of the electorate are feeling beaten down I thought you were supposed to give them some hope lest they come looking for you with torches and pitchforks.

Frank Talk

November 24, 2025 at 9:14 ams Log in to Reply

If you haven’t come across it already, there’s an excellent article on more or less this subject: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/922346. In a test of English majors at regional Kansas universities, only 5% were capable of reading and understanding the first seven paragraphs of Bleak House. Admittedly a small sample size and a crude measure, but undoubtedly standards are much lower. If kicking out a student leads to tens of thousands of dollars in lost revenue, universities won’t kick out students. Financialisation of education is a huge disservice to society.

It’s not a policy failure from the perspective of employers. If you want a college-educated workforce, you’ll need to pay high wages to lure workers if nearly every single college-educated person has access to a job. Better to create conditions in which there is an oversupply of college-educated workers. By definition this requires having a significant percentage of unemployed people with college degrees.

Yes. But the failure is getting started at the 1st grade level. No more “participation trophies” in education, please. We need the return of standardized testing (no cell phones and extra time allowed only in extreme situations), along with the concept of “sorry, but you flunked and have to repeat this grade”. Maybe Advanced Placement wasn’t so bad, after all!
I have read that as many as 55% of students get “extra time”. My daughter is in law school (doesn’t get extra time) competing against the majority of her classmates (who get extra time). Kind of hilarious because many law schools have done away with grades. One either passes (everyone) or fails (no one). Fortunately, the CA state bar doesn’t allow “extra time” – at least yet.

I have a couple of thoughts to add. I was a professor for 40 years in a decent regional state university. My diploma was earned at what is now a top 2 boarding school and my BA with honors came from a small liberal arts college in the Ohio Conference, the largest and best group of 20 small liberal arts colleges in any state. There I majored in Econ and English. My Graduate degrees were both from Ohio State, where I majored in Finance, Economics, Real Estate and Systems Research. I was privileged to matriculate 12,500 students in my career and collaborated with my wife who taught 10,000 students of her own, and who with me, produced five books and 75 published business case studies. Our cases appeared in journals and textbooks read by over a million students. And here’s what I’ll tell you all. Seventy-seventy-five percent of all college students, regardless of their field of study are self-reported cheaters from every school in the country. They cheat on tests, term papers, essays, group projects (especially) and all other types of work. It’s relatively easy to cheat and fairly easy to catch the cheaters (not so easy to throw them out of school). It’s really hard to learn anything useful when you’re cheating so it’s no surprise that a great many students don’t succeed. Among the 22,500 students my wife and I taught around 5% (600 students) received a grade of A or A-, fewer than those who did not receive a passing grade or compete the courses in which they were enrolled.

There is a myth permeating our society that getting an education and earning a degree are essentially the same thing. Nothing is further from the truth. My experience tells me that 8-10 % off all those who matriculate in college actually finish with a true education. It’s not dumb majors that are chosen by our students, is the failure to learn anything. My daughter attended a fine (but poorly managed) highly reputed liberal arts where she majored in Anthropology and Psychology. She earned two other UG degrees in biology and pre-med a year later. She has had jobs in medicine, quality management, technology management, software architecture, project management, and data management. She is currently a senior director of a data development and management AI project with a growing Silicon Valley software house focused on pharma companies. My daughter is an educated woman who has been able to teach herself whatever she needed to know, whenever she needed to know it. She earned two patents for the improvement of blood platelet collection and processing machines. She and her husband have already amassed sufficient assets to retire at 50. Her husband is a software engineer. College isn’t a place to go to get a job or learn a trade, it is a place to learn the skill of educating oneself and building a career. Teachers are folks who teach some third graders to read and do a bit on arithmetic. College is a place where any one can find three or four profs who wish their students to become educated. Anyone can get a college degree with 124 hours of credit and 2.0 GPA. The idea that they are educated and ready to succeed in the world of today is folly. One of the most highly regarded professors at Ohio State was a full professor of Anthropology who had no doctorate, no masters, no bachelors, only an HSE. He taught himself to be one of the most gifted professors I ever got to hear. He’d get 300 students in his class and you could hear a pin drop in the room. He didn’t just read books, he published them. Education is what one earns for themselves. A career is the same. Find what you want to do and teach yourself how to be really good at it. John Stuart Mill taught himself classic Greek at four. He literally created the field of (Political) Economy in his teens. He was a professor when he was ready. My office mate taught himself finance in his doctoral program at age 19, never taught, wrote many books on financial derivatives and became a multi-millionaire on his own dime. He did all this in the 1960s before there were any public markets for derivatives. College is about education and not enough of that happens in most schools because most students go to get paper not knowledge. College isn’t failing us, our children are.