Dumbing Down Universities

If you want to understand why the universities have become stupid, you have to understand that the universities have literally become stupid.

The average undergraduate IQ has fallen by nearly 20 points in 80 years--massive.

This drop has happened at every level of education. pic.twitter.com/cCLjzvogTt

— Kevin Bass PhD MS (@kevinnbass) July 27, 2025

I ran intio this post on X the other day, and all I could think of was David Brooks. In his 2000 Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There, he argued that James B Conant created a true meritocracy via the SATs, which the selective universities used to identify the most promising applicants, when previously they'd tended to favor the scions of the existing upper class. This allowed Jews like Brooks himself to rise in social status, which was altogether a good thing.

By 2024, Btrooks had contradicted these views entirely in an Atlantic essay, How the Ivy league Broke America (this link is not behind a paywall).

Conant and others set out to get rid of admissions criteria based on bloodlines and breeding and replace them with criteria centered on brainpower. His system was predicated on the idea that the highest human trait is intelligence, and that intelligence is revealed through academic achievement.

By shifting admissions criteria in this way, he hoped to realize Thomas Jefferson’s dream of a natural aristocracy of talent, culling the smartest people from all ranks of society. Conant wanted to create a nation with more social mobility and less class conflict.

But this seems to be contradicted by the empirical data in Kevin Bass's post. The 80 years Bass refers to is the time since 1945, when the GI Bill made college financially accessible and the SATs identified those who would benefit most from higher education. But the result is that everyone is dumber, not smarter. Brooks's bobos are dummies! But he summarizes what were at least the good intentions

Universities should serve as society’s primary sorting system, segregating the smart from the not smart. Intelligence is randomly distributed across the population, so sorting by intelligence will yield a broad-based leadership class. Intelligence is innate, so rich families won’t be able to buy their kids higher grades. As Conant put it, “At least half of higher education, I believe, is a matter of selecting, sorting, and classifying students.” By reimagining college-admissions criteria, Conant hoped to spark a social and cultural revolution. The age of the Well-Bred Man was vanishing. The age of the Cognitive Elite was here.

But Bass's empirical data tells an entirely different story. The whole system of Ivy admissions, if we're to believe it, has been making students dumber, and indeed, it's been dumbing down the professions the universities supply. In a follow-up post, Bass says,

Undergraduates have become much dumber. Graduates have become much dumber. Graduate students have become much dumber. Lawyers have become much dumber. Doctors have become much dumber. PhDs have become much dumber.

But Brooks is trying to understand how, "under the leadership of our current meritocratic class, trust in institutions has plummeted to the point where, three times since 2016, a large mass of voters has shoved a big middle finger in the elites’ faces by voting for Donald Trump." He finds the chief fault in the first of "six sins of the meritocracy":

1. The system overrates intelligence. Conant’s sorting mechanism was based primarily on intelligence, a quality that can ostensibly be measured by IQ tests or other standardized metrics.

But if intelligence is what it's looking for, it isn't getting intelligence, if Bass's data is to be believed. Brooks's assumpions about intelligence are also mirrored more generally in elite conventional wisdom, such as the arguments in Richard Herrnstein's and Charles Murray's 1994 The Bell Curve as summarized in Wikipedia:

In the first part of the book Herrnstein and Murray chart how American society was transformed in the 20th century. They argue that America evolved from a society where social origin largely determined one's social status to one where cognitive ability is the leading determinant of status. The growth in college attendance, a more efficient recruitment of cognitive ability, and the sorting of cognitive ability by selective colleges are identified as important drivers of this evolution. Herrnstein and Murray propose that the cognitive elite has been produced by a more technological society which offers enough high skill jobs for those with a higher intelligence to fill.

But it seems to be turning out that the cognitive elite isn't actually very cognitive, if Bass's data are to be believed. The replies to his post on that thread offer various theories, but lately I've been coming back to a remark by John Sloan Dickey, who was President of Dartmouth when I was an undergraduate there: "I keep trying to understand why I'm told that our smartest students have grades in the B and C range." I woud guess that one answer is that the admissions offices don't actually screen for intelligence, contra the claims of Brooks, Herrnstein, and Murray. Nor, it would seem, do the professors recognize it when they see it.

Let's go back t one of my favorite topics, the actual screening process of elite universities. As documented in books like Jerome Karabel's The Chosen, applicants are routed into "baskets" that include legacies, recruited athletes, preppies, children of celebrities and major donors, applicants from the plains and Rocky Mountain states, applicants from Northeastern public schools, DEI, and so forth. Many of these "baskets" are intended to limit the numbers of Jews and Asians or to ensure selection for scions of generational wealth.

At various times here, I've looked at available statistics on the makeup of entering classes, and the best I can surmise is that the percentage of Ivy students who are admitted purely on the basis of traditional SATs and high school grades is probably only about 20-30%. I'm sure there are many other explanations, some of which are convincingly argued in the replies to Bass's post, but a key one in my mind continues to be that the Ivies never actually walked the talk -- they never actually selected based on intelligence, or at least, not that anyone could notice.