I woke up in the middle of the night and ended up watching the re-run of Sunday’s “Meet the Press,” which included someone doing a breakdown of the demographic groups that shifted toward Trump in the election. He kept emphasizing, however, that “college educated Americans” now strongly support Democrats. The implication was clear. Those are the smart voters, the educated and sophisticated voters. His analysis fed neatly into one of the most popular narratives the Axis is currently using to explain away last Tuesday’s wipeout. Trump voters are stupid. You know, in addition to being garbage.
College grads who voted for Harris naturally agree with that analysis: they think they are superior to those corrupt Trump voters and doubly superior to the large proportion of them who spent the years after high school earning a living and being exposed to the real world. After all, if they had sufficient IQs, they would have college degrees, right?
This kind of arrogance and delusions of superiority is embedded in the modern Left. It is a self-reinforcing delusion, one that has exacerbated class tensions but more importantly, become less true than it ever was, as much as the elite deceives itself otherwise. A big clue regarding how reliable a college degree is for indicating a well-functioning mind was the infantile reaction of so many students to the election results. Before that, it was the ignorant pro-Palestinian protests.
College degrees have increasingly become purchased credentials that, if they signify anything, tell us that the individual was subjected to four years of intense progressive indoctrination and groupthink. True, those who escape college with their principles intact are likely to be superior in character and critical thinking skills than the graduates who went along with the subtly and not-so subtly mandated mind-meld, but not necessarily any more intellectually adept than those who didn’t go to college at all.
Intelligent people are demonstrably more wise and equipped to make decisions than those around them their losing the heads and blaming it on you long before college. Good genes help, reading and exposure to culture helps, and attentive parents and teachers really help. The more smart and independent people you grow up with the sharper your mind is likely to be, and it is true that college probably enhances your chances of finding companions who will test and strengthen your intellect…but if the trade-off is that you get marinated in flawed ideas and failed ideologies in the process, the smart choice may be not to attend college at all.
That has been increasingly true year by year for decades, and at this point, paying the price of a college education has become itself an idiot test. College graduates to a depressing extent don’t know much about history, don’t know much biology, don’t know much about anything really except perhaps intersectionality, anti-Americanism and some other subjects that nobody knows whether they understand them or not because everyone gets the same grades.
I came from a smart family, but the three Harvard grads in it all agreed that the single member who didn’t attend college was the smartest one of all, my mother. With mass media, streaming and the internet, anyone with intellectual curiosity can learn about just about anything, and without the brain-washing feature. They can certainly learn enough to know when they are being conned, condescended to, insulted and and lied to, thus explaining last week’s election results.
As I have probably said too many times already, the 2024 Presidential campaign proved Lincoln’s observation about the innate wisdom of the people. Lincoln was probably our most perceptive President, but it’s close.
He didn’t go to college
Ethics Alarms 
The meteoric rise in the number of people attending college has had the consequence of lowering the average IQ of college graduates. After all, when you keep hoovering on a greater and greater fraction of the population, pretty quickly you reach the point where they can’t all be exceptional. In the past few generations, the average IQ for people with undergrad degrees has dropped from roughly 1 standard deviation above average, to virtually indistinguishable from the population average. PhDs went from about 2 standard deviations above average to just one – where undergraduates stood in my grandparents’ day.
I am noticing this. There was a debate in my group about a group of MENSA members going on Jeopardy. Would they be really smart, or dumber than the normal Jeopardy contestants? I said dumber, MENSA has modest requirements. So, we got together to watch it. Needless to say, we turned it off after 10 minutes and the “MENSA members are smart!” people were mocked for the rest of the party.
I am noticing the new faculty are not the equal of the old faculty, but they think they are better. I remember being a new faculty member. I definitely did NOT think I was the equal of a 1960 MIT Ph.D. Now, I have people trying to lecture me about things of which they have little understanding. When I try to explain why they are wrong, they aren’t able to understand the explanation. When trying to get through to them, I realize they never even understood the question to begin with. However, they walk away positive that they are the smarter and better educated person.
“Now, I have people trying to lecture me about things of which they have little understanding. When I try to explain why they are wrong, they aren’t able to understand the explanation. When trying to get through to them, I realize they never even understood the question to begin with.”
“We Will Take America Without Firing A Shot.” N. Khruschchev
PWS
I’m very grateful for the time I worked in a very blue collar environment, fresh from earning my master’s degree.
it was eye opening in many ways. I saw the raw intelligence, the ingenuity, the “get it done” mentality, and the humility that is much more common in that population than the college-bound, especially in any school outside of STEM.
Then I got to spend a good amount of time on a farm with my in-laws, who are farmers. The amount of knowledge they had about farming in all its varieties, from biology to husbandry to chemistry.
The other tell that will forever disillusion you about education being associated with intelligence is doing a close inspection of any work in the soft sciences, including up to PhDs.
It’s very annoying that so many (mostly on the left, yes) assume the two are the same or at least correlated, but it is becoming more and more obvious to anyone with eyes to see that education is becoming exactly what Jack describes, a gatekeeper to the “right” kind of society.
Well, I have a college degree and I voted for Trump.
I guess that makes mine a garbage degree.
Likewise. Of course, my college degree is 30 years old so it’s less corrupted than the ones being papermilled out now.
You probably got yours about the same time I was starting my second (and ultimately successful) try at finishing up.
The good news is that that college does not appear, insofar as I can tell, to have succumbed to the radical left wokism. It might help that they are a private Baptist university, but they reach out to nontraditional students like me and especially the military. Actually that probably has a lot to do with it — they actively recruit working class, non full time students and that may help keep them grounded.
In any case, them I’ve given money to. My nominal alma mater, where I spent four years — if I had a diploma from Michigan State it would have to be turned to the wall.
I am lucky enough that I don’t have my diplomas. They meant more to my parents, so I let them keep them and put them on the walls at their home. I would have to turn them to the wall for a wide variety of reasons.
I think my postdoc institution is the only one that hasn’t humiliated itself yet in spectacular fashion. Unfortunately, you don’t get a diploma for your postdoc.
I am college-educated and college-degreed as well. My smartness-level didn’t drop one iota when I filled the box for Trump/Vance, but it might have moved a bit farther up the apogee of the average given how many voted for Harris/Walz.
The proliferation of programs providing nearly worthless knowledge has considerably devalued merely having a degree as evidence of anything beyond being maybe slightly more learned or skilled than an average housecat . A “______ studies” degree and the ability to tie on an apron can still possibly get some grads jobs at Starbucks, though. They should be grateful cats don’t have thumbs.
My son is not going to college. My nephews are not going to college. Why would they? They are white males. Lets say they study and work and strive to be the best and graduate at the top of the class. The very jobs they are qualified for are the exact ones the feminists and the whatever-ists want. They are calling for affirmative action for all those jobs. They are actively calling on white males in those jobs to quit. What kind of future is that to be a well-qualified person in your field and spend you entire career being told you should be ashamed to taking the space of a woman or a ‘person of color’?
Better to go to a trade school and work in a field that is too difficult or too low-class for such people. Only then will they ‘allow’ you to be successful. Society has told white men that they don’t belong in college or in any field that requires a college education.
BTW, this is probably why we can’t train nearly enough engineers. We told all the people who actually wanted to be engineers that they had to make way for people who actually don’t want to do it. Female engineers have an average career of about 7 years before they leave the field. For white males, it is closer to 30.
I’m a college graduate and a law school graduate and I voted for Trump. I guess my education didn’t take. My niece is about to go off to college a year from now and I hope my brother and his wife tell her and no uncertain terms that she is going college to get an education, not to spend four years engaging in leftist activism.
We wonder why those kids we coddle and praise for finding a cause and being strong advocates for it come out of school and aren’t ready to face the working world and are demanding safe spaces and other ridiculous accommodations. We saw it ourselves last week, with classes canceled and students offered safe spaces with milk and cookies and videos of puppies playing to help them cope with the election.
I saw it myself in a much younger friend on fb who berated me for having voted for Trump and said she hopes everyone who voted for Trump is personally impacted by his bad decisions. Yes I hope I am impacted by his decisions, maybe by seeing the economy do better and benefiting from that and maybe being allowed to keep more of the money I make. She also accused me of hating Harris because she is a woman of color that does not have a strong religious background. I don’t know how anyone comes up with that. I wonder if my friend had been hitting the sauce.
The answer to problems will not be found by drinking cheap alcohol or smoking marijuana. It also won’t be found in lamenting the results of the last election and blaming others for choosing to vote to change the tape of this nation after four years of abject failure. I don’t want to hear about how the left is going to have a hard time forgiving those of us who made this last election what it was. If they would stop the self-righteousness and think for a moment, I think they would realize that they would be better off worrying about whether we will forgive them. The statute of limitations probably has not tapped out on a lot of offenses from the summer of 2020, and once the new Department of Justice senior staff and the new US attorneys are in place, it’s time to start giving them the same treatment they gave the January sixers. Let’s see how they like getting locked up for 20 years plus.
You’ve hit upon something here that goes beyond the pretense and snobbery of one political party. I believe we’re running headlong into an epistemological crisis is our society.
For literally thousands of years, astrology was considered guiding star, if not the pinnacle, of higher learning. The Enlightenment, and subsequently the Industrial Revolution, saw it relegated to the realm of superstition. The scientific method revealed it for an empty suit. For all the generations of highly intelligent men who devoted lifetimes of study to it, in the end there was nothing to it, in any case nothing real.
I think we’re rapidly approaching another such a realignment. There are large swaths of academic endeavor where one can legitimately question what knowledge has actually been gained in exchange for generations of effort. The “grievance studies” are certainly suspect, but also some fields like “education” and “social work” that have produced woefully underwhelming improvements the state of the art despite a century and a half of development. In a century and a half, electrical engineering has gone from the Edison Bulb to the smartphone. Medicine has gone from pushback against the Germ Theory of Disease to in-utero fetal surgery. Where are the marvels of education and social work, that people in the 19th century, or even the 1960s, could only wonder at?
The only thing I can think of in education would possibly be how we identify and educate people with learning disabilities.
Don’t look at the honors programs. In good Democratic Party fashion, they are being judged by how many students are in them, not what they do. I think the average honors student now has lower test scores than the average student. But they are very proud of being in the honors program. Much like vegans, you can know if they are an honors student because they will tell you. They also do all they can to get rid of science and engineering majors because they obviously aren’t the ‘right’ people.
Hey! Wait! Isn’t there a future United States Senator down in the front row of that Delta House photo? A guy about as smart as, oh say, John Kerry or Gary Hart? Or Ted Kennedy?
Best line from my college class of 1973 reminiscence speech: “We thought ‘Animal House’ was a documentary.”
Fat, drunk, and stupid is no way to go through life, son.
I’m from Illinois and that thought goes through my mind every time I see our governor on TV.
One of my favorite movie quotes ever.
::Gasp:: … Is the Democratic party supporting disenfranchising non-college graduates? Isn’t that racist?!?
Steve-O-in-NJ: ” I wonder if my friend had been hitting the sauce.”
I follow Scott Adams podcast as consistently as I follow Ethics Alarms. This results in rolled eyes occasionally, but on most days, he posts every single day too, he says something that makes me think, see something in a different light, or understand the world better. As does EA!
His standard response to hecklers, there and on X, is: “You shouldn’t post while your drunk”, or: “You’re drunk aren’t you?”
It’s a heckler kill shot!
Must be some truth in it.