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). ...