Oh, well. What does an American get for sticking with the system to Ninth Grade, Twelfth Grade, Sixteenth Grade, and beyond? Is he more “educated”? Not obviously so. But he is indisputably credentialed, and in the credential-fetishizing America of the early twenty-first century, that’s what counts. So American families plunge themselves into debt and take huge amounts of money out of the productive economy in order to feed the ravenous diploma mill. It’s not too demanding, and getting less so every year: by 2010, only 23 percent of courses offered at Harvard required a final exam.36 For most of its “scholars,” college is a leisurely half-decade immersion in the manners and mores of American conformism. Other than that, it doesn’t matter what, if anything, you learn there, just so long as you emerge with the diploma. It used to be made of sheepskin. But these days the students are the sheep and the ones getting fleeced are their parents.
By the turn of the twenty-first century, America had per capita two-and-a-half times as many college students as Britain and Spain. Its college population was significantly larger than its high school population, mainly due to the fact that such fields of scholarship as “Jiggle in My Walk: The Iconic Power of the ‘Big Butt’ in American Pop Culture”37 are so rigorous that to complete a bachelor’s degree can take twice as long as it once would have. Say what you like about half a decade of “Peace Studies” but, while light on the studies, it’s certainly peaceful. To acquire the ersatz sheepskin, Americans not only forego what might have been six years of profitable and career-advancing work, they also rack up a six-figure debt in order to access a job that is increasingly unlikely to justify that outlay. But then taking that first step on the debt ladder is as important an initiation into contemporary adulthood as the magic credential.
In fairness, there remain certain exceptions to these leisurely frauds.
America retains world-class academic institutions in science and engineering.
But half the graduate students in these fields are foreigners, and more and more return home at the end of their studies.38 Perhaps we could retrain a few Diversity Officers to replace retiring physicists. Beyond that, has universal credentialism created a golden age of American scholarship? Not so’s you’d notice. Michelle Obama was born in 1964, so, unlike Condi Rice, she has no vivid childhood memories of racial segregation. She was among the first generation to benefit from “affirmative action,” which was supposed to ameliorate the lingering grievances of racism but seems, in Mrs. Obama’s case, merely to have transformed them into post-modern pseudo-grievance.
“All my life I have confronted people who had a certain expectation of me,” she told an audience in Madison. “Every step of the way, there was somebody there telling me what I couldn’t do. Applied to Princeton. ‘You can’t go there, your test scores aren’t high enough.’ I went. I graduated with departmental honors. And then I wanted to go to Harvard. And that was probably a little too tough for me. I didn’t even know why they said that.”39
But hang on. Her test scores weren’t “high enough” for Princeton? Yet, rather than telling her “You can’t go there,” they took her anyway. And all the thanks they get is that her test scores are now a recurring point of resentment: “The stuff that we’re seeing in these polls,” she told another audience, “has played out my whole life. You know, always being told by somebody that I’m not ready, that I can’t do something, my scores weren’t high enough.”40 If she had been Elizabeth Edwards and her scores weren’t high enough, that’d be that (Teresa Heinz Kerry could probably leverage the whole Mozambican thing). Yet Mrs. Obama regards contemporary state-mandated compensation for institutional racism from before she was born as merely another burden to bear. In testament to an age of boundless self-infatuation, she arrived as a black woman at Princeton and wrote her undergraduate thesis on the difficulties of being a black woman at Princeton. “Princeton-Educated Blacks and the Black Community”41 is a self-meditation by the then Miss Robinson on the question of whether an Ivy League black student drawn into the white world is betraying lower-class blacks. Or as she put it:
A separationist is more likely to have a realistic impression of the plight of the Black lower class because of the likelihood that a separationist is more closely associated with the Black lower class than are integrationist [sic]. By actually working with the Black lower class or within their communities as a result of their ideologies, a separationist may better understand the desparation [sic] of their situation and feel more hopeless about a resolution as opposed to an integrationist who is ignorant to their plight.
Ah, the benefits of an elite education. Suppose Michelle Obama had not suffered the crippling burden of being American but had instead been born in France or Switzerland, India or China. In less enlightened lands, when you’re told “Your test scores aren’t high enough,” that’s it, you can’t go. To get into other countries’ elite institutions, you have to be objectively excellent. To get into America’s best schools and join its elite, you need mediocre grades and approved social points. Harvard’s defense of “affirmative action” rests on the benefits of “diversity”: “A farm boy from Idaho can bring something to Harvard College that a Bostonian cannot offer. Similarly, a black student can usually bring something that a white person cannot offer.”
That’s the argument, such as it is: “Affirmative action” discriminates positively—in favor of certain groups that add an unspecified richness to campus life. As we know, Michelle Obama fell into the latter category of “black student.” But what about the “farm boy from Idaho”? In 2010, the Princeton sociologist Thomas Espenshade and his colleague Alexandria Radford produced an analysis of applications for eight highly competitive colleges and universities.42 What was most revealing was the way “affirmative action” has progressed from mere race bias to ideological apartheid.
Espenshade and Radford found that participating in “red state” activities such as 4-H, ROTC, or the Future Farmers of America substantially reduced a student’s chances of being accepted by these colleges. “Being an officer or winning awards” with such groups had an even more severe impact, reducing your chances of admission by 60 to 65 percent.
So, if you’re a white farm boy from Idaho, you’re already at a disadvantage compared with the Michelle Obamas and Sonia Sotormayors of your generation. And, if you participate in 4-H or JROTC, you’re only making things worse. And, if you hold a leadership position in 4-H, you’re pretty much doomed. Over time “affirmative action” and “diversity” have so corrupted the integrity of American education that it now affirmatively acts in favor of ideological and cultural homogeneity. Or as the blogger Kate McMillan likes to say: What’s the opposite of “diversity”? University.43
This is why the massive expansion of American education is evidence not of progress but of its exact opposite—its decay into ideological factory farms. It’s a progressive 4-H: Hogwash, Hypersensitivity, Habituation, Homogeneity—for the price of which you wind up in Hock. “Our ruling class recruits and renews itself not through meritocracy but rather by taking into itself people whose most prominent feature is their commitment to fit in,” wrote Angelo Codevilla of Boston University, noting the unprecedented uniformity of the new American elite. “Until our own time America’s upper crust was a mixture of people who had gained prominence in a variety of ways, who drew their money and status from different sources and were not predictably of one mind on any given matter. The Boston Brahmins, the New York financiers, the land barons of California, Texas, and Florida, the industrialists of Pittsburgh, the Southern aristocracy, and the hardscrabble politicians who made it big in Chicago or Memphis had little contact with one another.”44 The social engineers changed all that, imposing a single orthodoxy on their pupils. For the most part, “diversity” is merely a sentimental cover for mediocrity. As Codevilla pointed out: Since the 1970s, it has been virtually impossible to flunk out of American colleges. And it is an open secret that “the best” colleges require the least work and give out the highest grade point averages…. The most successful neither write books and papers that stand up to criticism nor release their academic records. Thus does our ruling class stunt itself through negative selection. But the more it has dumbed itself down, the more it has defined itself by the presumption of intellectual superiority.
It was interesting to listen to Candidate Obama lecture Americans on their failure to learn another language.45 The son of a Ph.D. and a Harvard-educated economist, young Barack went to a fancy Hawaiian prep school, and then to Occidental, Columbia, and Harvard. And he’s hectoring a guy who graduated high school in Nowheresville and shingles roofs all day about not speaking French or German? Well, what’s Barack’s excuse? The Obamas are the beneficiaries of the most expensive and luxuriant education on the planet. Where’s their French?
Well, they were too busy cranking out sludge about the “desparation” [sic] of separationists, or whatever Michelle was droning on about at Princeton in unreadable maunderings all too typical of what passes for “education.” Is the credentialing mill up to the job of producing an American leadership class capable of competing with those of China, India, and other emerging societies? Aw, we’re rich enough that we can afford to be stupid.
