Higher Education

There is a comment that was made by Senator Kerry back in 2006, which applies to the column I’m writing today. What he said in part is, “If you go to college and study hard, and make an effort to be smart, you’ll do well.” He was criticized for his remark, but only because he followed it up with a slight to American military personnel, “If you don’t, you get stuck in Iraq.” I wrote a column that focused on the first part of those remarks.

Perhaps Senator Kerry’s thinking is the reason that so many students fail in their first year of college, and why so many more get their degree but are incompetent in their chosen field. I refer to the idea that you can be smart if you try hard. That is totally false!

You cannot improve your intelligence by any effort. Intelligence is not acquired; it is innate. You are either smart or you are not. And if you are not smart, you will not be likely to do well in higher education. Unfortunately, not everyone is smart enough to go to college. Moreover, too many of the students who do go to college either crowd out the more deserving, smarter applicants, or waste time and resources in an unsuccessful effort, eventually dropping out with the stigma of failure.

We changed our attitude about education after World War II, when the GI Bill was first offered as an incentive for military veterans to get a college degree. Prior to that time, only those with above average intelligence qualified for and earned college degrees.

When the GI Bill cane into existence, the bar had to be lowered to enable more people to go to college. Never mind that a huge number of vets weren’t smart enough to compete in the academic world. They had earned the right to go to college. It followed that they also deserved their degree if they exercised that right.

The civil rights movement that blossomed in the late 1950's and continued for the next two decades brought more people to college, those poor and disadvantaged souls entitled to the benefits of higher education.

Soon it became everyone’s “right” to have a degree. Colleges and universities sprang up and became industries, cranking out legions of graduates. And just to make it fair, those with learning disabilities—in this case that meant not smart enough—were even given a handicap to enable them to enter and compete in college.

The resultant increase in graduate degrees did produce a huge number of excellent doctors, lawyers, entrepreneurs and scientists, many of who would not have been able to pay for their education otherwise. It also produced a larger number of mediocre and substandard practitioners. Books like The Peter Principle addressed the growing number of incompetent people in the business world, people whose position in the hierarchy of management far exceeded their expertise and ability to perform.

Through the years there has been a further decline in the quality of education offered at colleges and universities, fueled by the greater numbers of unqualified people allowed to attend. It has also lead to the inclusion of some really ridiculous courses, some of the most inane that end with the word “Studies.”

Thank God there are still some great people coming out of our institutions of higher learning, but I contend that those people would have done well anyway. They are mostly the ones with superior intelligence to begin with. And to put the lie to what Senator Kerry espoused and seems to believe, there are a lot of people like Bill Gates who did not stay in school and did well in spite of it. They just have the brains to excel.

As you can surmise, I don’t point to John Kerry as the sole promoter of false expectations for the youth of today. He is instead just one of a whole crowd who believe intelligence can be gained through exercise of the brain.

My view is that knowledge and intelligence are mutually exclusive. If you don’t possess the latter, the former will not increase or improve it. It will only make you more confused, unhappy and depressed.

With the cost of higher education approaching and surpassing $50,000 per year at some of our colleges and universities, it would make good sense to get back to the basics of enrolling only those with the intelligence to earn their degree.

A report came out earlier this week that the total amount of student debt is approaching one trillion dollars. That figure doesn’t even count the amount of money that has been given in grants and scholarships, which surely equals or surpasses that one trillion dollar mark. With that much money invested in higher education, isn’t it only fair to the students that only the cream of the crop be admitted to those institutions? After all, the lesser students always tend to hold back the class and lower the curve for learning.

It is also time to make all those courses that end with the word “Studies” non-credit electives. They are totally useless in the business world. One of my favorite columnists, Mike Adams, a professor at UNC-Wilmington, has proposed that African-American Studies, Gay and Lesbian Studies and Women’s Studies all be lumped into one elective called Resentment Studies, since that is what they all teach in one form or another. I agree with his assessment that none of these Studies courses have any value in any degree program.