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US higher education is no meritocracy, and that doesn’t seem to be changing — 36 Comments

1. I’d agree with him that there is deep corruption in admissions and it is most manifest in the Ivy League. An obsession with the Ivy League is characteristic of all too much commentary on higher education. The Ivy League schools account for 2.5% of those enrolled in research universities; a degree from one of them is neither necessary nor sufficient to a handsome professional life.
   ==

2. I always liked Hayakawa’s saying when he was president of SF state college. Do unto the SDS what the SDS would do unto you, but do it first. He didn’t hesitate to expel students.

3. This reminds me of the discussion we had here, and particularly dealing with y81’s guilt tripping and claims that Trump and Neo had abandoned meritocracy. Ironic given how the left has I heading out meritocracy in the crosshairs explicitly, but it reminds me of the old habit of the guilty walking around claiming the mantle of principles and concepts they blatantly no longer believe in if they ever did. At least this is a step in the right direction.

   https://thenewneo.com/2025/04/16/some-good-news-on-the-education-front-from-christopher-rufo/

4. He got angry

   This tells you a lot. I’m pleased to say I made a few of my professors pretty angry. And as a young, shy, well-raised kid, I can assure you I asked them questions very deferentially, and with proper respect. When they became angry I knew something was wrong.

   Please read “The Closing of the American Mind” if you have not already done so. Brilliant.

5. And howard zinn took charles beards critique to the next level its striking how shallow a theory took hold and very few critics have really challenged it systematically mary grabar but no household names

6. For some the idea of competition and working hard is the problem in our society. Competition and grading lead to bad things in their minds. Things such as low self-esteem, cheating, taunting, and bullying are seen as the result of competitiveness and the will to win.

   Our competitive sports teach the values of hard work, teamwork, sportsmanship, following the rules (no cheating), and perseverance. Good coaches can prepare young people for a life of working in a meritocracy.

   My high school and college years were spent competng in ski races against another skier who was far more talented than me. I beat him only a few times over eight years and many races. It was years later, when I read “The Inner Game of Tennis,” that I came to understand that our competition had made both of us better. I had always tried to do my best and so had he. It was a heated competition, but we became good friends over the years. We had developed a mutual respect. That’s what good competition does. It raises everyone’s game.

   I run into people who are soft liberals. They aren’t hard core left, but they can’t seem to understand why people should strive to do their best and consider competitiveness to be anti-social or mean.

   I think a lot of post WWII liberal professors were aghast at what had happened in WWII. And some of them considered patriotism to be a form of jingoism that led to war.

   It’s all right to realize that the Founders weren’t perfect men. But to discount what they gave us as a form of government as anything but inspired is a real blind spot for too many people.

   Anyway, Bloom was right about academia, and we’re reaping the whirlwind now.

7. Yes and no. My father-in-law during WW2 became a physician, and had a “B” average from a public university. At that time not that many people went to college, or could afford to go to medical school, mainly the wealthy. Granted we have had a ton of grade inflation starting in the ‘70’s, but his scholastic effort at that time would not get him into any med school nor D.O. School these days. So meritocracy was not king either years ago

8. J.J. wrote, “I think a lot of post WWII liberal professors were aghast at what had happened in WWII. And some of them considered patriotism to be a form of jingoism that led to war.”

   Yes, and one can expand “patriotism” to “nationalism.” A great many fear that there is a tipping point when too many in a nation’s population are rooting too fervently for the home team which will lead to war, and possibly, as in the Third Reich, castigation or genocide of “the other.”

   This explains a lot of the fear of Trump and the MAGA movement.

9. no the left is only concerned about love of country, not love of the State, this seems true across the pond into Western Europe, Orban seems to aggravate them the most,

   If Western Culture has largely dissapated as a foundational aspect in Academia, this was something Jesse Jackson marched in support in Stanford in 1988, it was his faction of the party that was most pro palestinians and anti anti communist,
   this is who donna brazile started out with,

   then what would one fight for,well your ethnic, or racial class largely, I remember reading perhaps with david
   horowitz, or the newcriterion about rigoberto menchu, the mestizo jussie smollett (well she had a little more street cred, thats why her false parts of her bio, seemed unnecessary,

10. Art Deco, wrote: “a degree from one of them is neither necessary nor sufficient to a handsome professional life.”

    Thanks for the temptation. I’ll ask Claude to teach me more about probabilistic logic and, if relevant, modal logic.

11. How things have changed. I did my undergrad, believe it or not, at that now hotbed of lunacy, University of Colorado, Boulder. Back then, until the Gulf of Tonkin incident, most students were more concerned about beating Nebraska. Anyhow, there was still a GE requirement back then so I was obligated to take a humanities course. I opted for “God and Reason” taught by one Ed. L Miller. Wow…he was amazing. The course went through the arguments for and against God from the Greeks through the major Western thinkers. Miller could within a few minutes destroy any argument for God, and then a few minutes later argue persuasively for God based on who we were studying. One the last day of class he finally gave in to the class asking him what he REALLY believed. Turns out he was a devout Catholic.

    His book by the same title is still available…I’ve read it several times since my ug days:

    https://www.amazon.com/God-Reason-Invitation-Philosophical-Theology/dp/1498279546/ref=sr_1_1?crid=AD3OW46C9KV4&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.I09vMkrNs8ESiACk5h_otSiWq976Tkv2_TGOQf2crT1XeC4MIR_wYaTTPgzxHitrzyD_Vs__OSgHc7wc2uG66YyFAQ9MvtH73M8bL9lwHpepqP4M5lhSGyxDIOEidELBMSlA0SlTpSheXXdzuHE3RlAIFiI9Ir8zRMUgGJs-SR-2v0GSKRg98T4W_JnQNkhOmvApe0Q5VBnZIstNo9hH–6U9w8LcTbrVNmxyPkXR30.4QMotZZYRrZrhIhVyUNv17fBwiJ0vks9DD6k749uXIM&dib_tag=se&keywords=God+and+Reason+Miller&qid=1746885200&sprefix=god+and+reason+miller%2Caps%2C180&sr=8-1

12. Thanks for the temptation. I’ll ask Claude to teach me more about probabilistic logic and, if relevant, modal logic.
    ==
    Huh?

13. Please note that Republican state legislators could do a great deal to improve their state institutions and they do nothing.

14. well some states like texas and florida have taken baby steps, but yes its a long road to follow,

15. JJ…”I run into people who are soft liberals. They aren’t hard core left, but they can’t seem to understand why people should strive to do their best and consider competitiveness to be anti-social or mean. I think a lot of post WWII liberal professors were aghast at what had happened in WWII. And some of them considered patriotism to be a form of jingoism that led to war.”

    I’m currently reading ‘Return of the Strong Gods,’ by RR Reno. His thesis is that a reaction to the fanaticism of totalitarianism and the disaster of WWII was the idea that strong beliefs were to be avoiding.

    But Peter Drucker, who was born in Austria and lived in Germany before coming to the US in 1933, said that in his view, Naziism was very largely a nihilist movement,

16. Rufus T Firefly…”Yes, and one can expand “patriotism” to “nationalism.” A great many fear that there is a tipping point when too many in a nation’s population are rooting too fervently for the home team which will lead to war, and possibly, as in the Third Reich, castigation or genocide of “the other.”

    This explains a lot of the fear of Trump and the MAGA movement.”

    Yes, I think it does account for a lot of that fear. But I an impressed with Claire Lehmann’s assertion that Nationalism is a cure (she actually says *the* cure) for racism.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bpmoAnvnbTw

17. Seems to me we could endorse a happy medium where we obey the law; where our elected officials work assiduously to see to it that the law is not vicious, nonsensical, or an avenue of rent-seeking; wherein the law is diligently and impartially enforced, and where we are not importing millions of people to be a client base for a particularly corrupt political party or to please some attentive economic sectors (and are deporting people who sneak through). We might also see to it that our public services are recruited and promoted via best practices (i.e. through examinations), that our educational system makes liberal use of impersonally administered examinations, and that our educational system is not devoted to handing out indulgences for favored demographic segments or to trashing our ancestors.
    ==
    Please note that that is way too much patriotism for the Democratic Party or the educational apparat in our time.

18. While The Closing of The American Mind is a great snapshot of where universities were and how they got there, to understand universities today you probably want something a little more recent than 38 years ago. People just starting college the day that book came out have kids in college now. Buckley’s God and Man at Yale, from 1951, was closer in time to Bloom’s 1987 than Bloom is to today.

    The unintentionally hilarious rants in there about the Rolling Stones were dated at the time, and have not got any better since. Even then the Rolling Stones were for old people, from a college freshman perspective, and pretty nearly old people themselves.

19. Just realized it would have been more accurate to say that college professors in 1987, when Bloom wrote, have kids who are college professors today…

20. Does Nick have an author to recomend instead of Bloom?

    Nope.

    Thanks for sharing sonny.

21. Bloom coming from the prospective of a philosopher instead of say an investigator which is what rufo or james lindsay is,

    The rolling stones comes off like mozart although personally im more partial to the who less to pink floyd for reasons ive spelled out before

22. Miguel wrote “some states like texas and florida have taken baby steps, but yes its a long road to follow”
    True. I’m from FL, and now have 30 years in TX.
    In Texas, the elected state Republicans are mostly first politicians, and are conservative “lite”. Sadly.
    Not all, but many.
    It seems especially true of those with power — seniority & money.
    Also frustrating: our governor doesn’t have much clout. Which is purposely in our state constitution.
    Florida’s governor has more power.
    De Santis was able to get rid of some awful people, including a rogue elections official & a rogue DA.
    Texas is not so lucky. Especially wrt DA’s — Soros bought. Pro-criminal, anti-victim rights, anti-police.

23. I see academia as downstream from culture. In this particular case, avant-garde culture, i.e. modern art.

    The 20th Century artistic avant-garde despised the middle-class and all its values.

    Academia lagged but caught up.

    One notes that Modern Art is no longer a meritocracy either.

24. How do you keep “meritocracy” from being “credentialism”? I’m serious about that. I don’t see how one can actually determine someone’s ability before the fact. For instance, military history is full of officers who thrived, and seemed “meritorious” until actually in battle. As well as those who didn’t, and proved outstanding in real combat.

    And that’s just one example. Politics has them too, but it’s not so stark to recognize.

25. om
    Does Nick have an author to recomend instead of Bloom?Nope.

    Here is one book. 16 takeaways from Richard Corcoran’s new book, ‘Storming the Ivory Tower’

    Conservatives will find reason to rage and rejoice … while liberals just rage.
    Richard Corcoran has seen a lot throughout his career in politics — rising from a staffer to state Representative to House Speaker to Education Commissioner and, now, to President of New College of Florida.
    Corcoran uses his more than two decades of experience navigating Florida’s political process to support his latest endeavor, remaking the state’s tiniest university. He’s documenting that experience in a new book, “Storming the Ivory Tower: How a Florida College Became Ground Zero in the Struggle to Take Back Our Campuses.”
    The book also pays homage to conservative priorities pushed under Gov. Ron DeSantis’ administration, and defends what critics have decried as a hostile takeover of a beloved liberal arts institution.
    It’s a relatively quick read, broken into digestible chapters often broken further down into easy-to-follow themes. And for those who like to skim, it’s good for that too, with much of the book’s points occasionally repeated because they support a variety of counterpunches against a common villain within the book: “the radical left.”
    But for those who can’t find the time, or who are looking for a more detailed synopsis before diving in, here are 16 takeaways from the book.
    Corcoran had to be convinced to take the Education Commissioner job
    DeSantis announced in late 2018 that he was nominating Corcoran to be the state’s Education Commissioner. But before that, in talks with Corcoran about the job, Corcoran had to be sold. In fact, DeSantis had to ask him three times before Corcoran eventually decided it was worth looking into.
    Ultimately it was the Gaetz family — former Senate President Don Gaetz, who was one of Corcoran’s legislative colleagues, and Gaetz’s son, Matt Gaetz — who helped seal the deal. With their encouragement, Corcoran writes in his book that he eventually realized DeSantis was not hounding him about the job to be a day-to-day manager, as had been the norm, but rather to be a disrupter to the education blueprint overall.
    Much of the book highlights just how seriously Corcoran took that task, including a lengthy retelling of accomplishments reforming New College, but more on that later.
    Corcoran doesn’t support abolishing the U.S. Department of Education
    President-elect Donald Trump is expected to take steps to dismantle the U.S. Department of Education, a priority laid out in the controversial Project 2025. During his campaign, Trump claimed he had no involvement in that document but has since taken steps and made comments suggesting it will be, at least in part, a blueprint for his administration.
    Instead, Corcoran writes in his book that the agency could be used “to push back on the radical Left’s ideological stranglehold.”
    “Federal agencies can be utilized to legally, ethically, and honorably bring about rapid change. In addition, imagine the result of eliminating the U.S. Department of Education,” Corcoran writes, noting that funds “would go straight to Gavin Newson, Kathy Hochul, and Gretchen Whitmer,” Democratic Governors whom GOP officials frequently target with criticism.
    By contrast, Corcoran points to the Florida Department of Education, where “we brought about rapid change,” including opening schools quickly amid the COVID pandemic and stopping mandatory masking in schools, both through “the power of the purse.”
    It was not a hostile takeover, nor an effort to create a conservative university
    Throughout the book, Corcoran frequently reminds the reader that reforming New College of Florida was not a hostile takeover meant to reimagine the school as a Florida-based Hillsdale, the private Christian-based liberal arts college in Michigan for which New College is now frequently compared.
    Instead, it was about “free speech and civil discourse.” DeSantis’ goal, Corcoran wrote, was “not to create a conservative institution but to signal a renaissance of freedom of speech and respect for others’ viewpoints in public higher education.”
    New College, Corcoran wrote, is focusing on “academic excellence, free from radical liberal projects that are merely attempts to social engineer an entire generation.”
    In fact, the ‘takeover’ happened because of data and ongoing criticism
    “It was a campus where students had run the show, and few to no guardrails were placed on behavior,” Corcoran explained of campus life.
    He pointed to student surveys showing some within the student body felt isolated and unable to express opinions that differed from what Corcoran describes as “groupthink.” And he writes that “simple data” prompted DeSantis to appoint a new Board majority at New College, including numbers showing “plummeting retention rates, enrollment numbers, and test scores.” Corcoran wrote that without intervention, “it was likely New College would have been shut down in short order by the Florida legislature.”

    More at the link.

    One point about Bloom’s book is that it shows the rot in higher education has been a long time coming. It didn’t happen overnight.

    While college faculties have always trended left/liberal, back in the day left/liberals did not have the near-monopoly at universities they have today. Near-monopoly? 🙂 Following is an anecdote about diversity of faculty views back in the day.

    During the Vietnam War, a professor put a poster on his door that criticized the Vietnam War. Two doors down, a professor put an American flag on his door. The professor in the middle put a “Demilitarized Zone” sign on HIS door. BTW, all three were veterans.

26. The right has to continue to support the alternatives, such as Hillsdale and non woke religious schools, but you can no longer assume that the religious schools have not gone woke.
    Harvard was founded by Puritans in the 1600s to train Ministers. I saw a stat that in 2021 either the freshman class or the entire undergrad was almost 30% LGBTQ. The stats among the young people show that the LGBTQ crowd and supporters are recruiting. ” Normalizing ” among the younger generations starting in kindergarten and probably before. It’s not just a ” lifestyle”, this is a socio- political movement. They even have a flag. In case we wish to dismiss this as just a ” lifestyle.”
    Look up the ” Four Olds ” that the Chinese Cultural Revolution waged war on. You see it here.
    Contrary to what the libertarians think, borders and culture matter, not just free markets.
    Can you imagine if those old Puritans knew what changes were coming when they founded Harvard?

27. why do you think Cotton Mather was on about he and Jonathan Edwards, they both knew, (a little sarcasm) when did the rot set in, with Dewey, with Beard with Marcuse, a little Gramsci, a touch of Alinsky,

    the same pattern holds for Universities across the pond, Cambridge in particular, but Oxford same, the Old Gods enter the picture, yeats’turning gyre’ spins faster, as the ‘center cannot hold’ and the ‘worst are full ofpassionate insensity.interestingly I became aware to the wasteland because of a generally forgetable teen novel, the chocolate wars which featured a character somewhat like Holden
    Caulfield,

    Christianity was largely the tentpole in both the UK and the US, one descended into the mire faster than the others, they just hide it better,

28. Real Estate: Location, Location, Location
    Education: AI, AI, AI

    Higher education is crumbling already.
    AI is about to push it over the edge.

    Then we have a new problem.

29. yes what was the program, the operating system, has been deficient for two generations at least, bloom saw ‘the slouching beast’ rising out in the harbor, nearly 40 years ago, John Silber was another who was more prescient than most, he tried to vanquish Zinn for instance, but the semiotic plague was already loose,

    did it start in philosophy and spread to the English department, redolent of deconstruction, Houston Baker Skip Gates, Stanley Fish,
    Gates has become the respectable moderate in tone, but not in substance, mcwhorter tries to uphold certain standards, but only so far,

30. In Re Zinn. I don’t trust anything with ” People’s ” in it.

31. Harvard in 1835…observations from an English visitor

    https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/69580.html

32. Academia is upstream from culture, which in turn is upstream from politics. If you control the colleges, you control what their students come out thinking and also what teachers are telling the young in primary and secondary schools, as well as what journalists are writing and what artists are doing. I suppose one could make the case that if people aren’t reading that will have an effect on the culture and the colleges, but colleges will still have an effect on what people are thinking when they do think (or think they think).

    The post WWII years were a golden age for universities, for academic publishing, and for the humanities. Yes, that was when university education became a mass phenomenon, but there was also a feeling that young people were imbibing both a time-honored cultural tradition and an exciting modern way of understanding that tradition. Those days are gone. Universities will survive in one form or another, but the humanities are unlikely to match their earlier productiveness, quality, or effect on society.

33. Meritocracy seemed to fit more the postwar world, the world of our fathers’ or grandfathers’. Before that if your parents had money, you’d go to college, mix with other people whose parents had money, and you’d get a job that paid you big money. After the war, colleges were thrown open. First by the GI Bill, then by the SATs and financial aid. If you wanted to be an architect or engineer, you got the best grades and you’d get the job and it didn’t matter who your parents were or how much money they had.

    Today, at the top of the social pyramid are all the people who’ve gone to the best schools, had the best test prep, and did all the things necessary to get into the best schools. They network at those schools and get prestige jobs. What they actually learn and how well it corresponds to reality doesn’t matter. To be sure, the Ivy League and comparable schools are only a small part of the collegiate universe, but they’ve been held up as examples of American meritocracy and really aren’t.

34. @ Art Deco – in re “a degree from one of them is neither necessary nor sufficient to a handsome professional life.” and AppleBetty’s reply about its connection to probabilistic logic and modal logic.

    (AppleBetty can correct me if I’m wrong; it’s been 50 years since I took that college class in logic.)

    “Necessary and sufficient”, as well as “neither necessary nor sufficient,” are qualifiers that are frequently used in systems of logic to indicate the conditions in which a statement connecting two propositions, such as “a degree from one of them” and “to [have] a handsome professional life,” is true. You will also see “necessary but not sufficient” and “not necessary but sufficient.”

    The connections AppleBetty notes are because all logic systems use these qualifiers in some way or another.

    Wikipedia:
    In logic and mathematics, necessity and sufficiency are terms used to describe a conditional or implicational relationship between two statements. For example, in the conditional statement: “If P then Q”, Q is necessary for P, because the truth of Q is guaranteed by the truth of P. (Equivalently, it is impossible to have P without Q, or the falsity of Q ensures the falsity of P.)[1] Similarly, P is sufficient for Q, because P being true always implies that Q is true, but P not being true does not always imply that Q is not true.[2]

    In general, a necessary condition is one (possibly one of several conditions) that must be present in order for another condition to occur, while a sufficient condition is one that produces the said condition.[3] The assertion that a statement is a “necessary and sufficient” condition of another means that the former statement is true if and only if the latter is true. That is, the two statements must be either simultaneously true, or simultaneously false.[4][5][6]

    Wikipedia:
    In many modal logics, the necessity and possibility operators satisfy the following analogues of de Morgan’s laws from Boolean algebra:
    “It is not necessary that X” is logically equivalent to “It is possible that not X”.
    “It is not possible that X” is logically equivalent to “It is necessary that not X”.

    Wikipedia: Probabilistic logic (also probability logic and probabilistic reasoning) involves the use of probability and logic to deal with uncertain situations. Probabilistic logic extends traditional logic truth tables with probabilistic expressions.

    (IMO, AD’s statement is true these days, using a common-sense reading of “handsome professional life.”)

35. Gringo wins the thread!

36. Om:
    Gringo’s was great.
    Jon Baker’s, too.
    And Abraxas.
    Good crew.
    Including Huxley, Miguel, Scott badger, … :^}

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