That’s the cold, hard assessment of Charles Murray, a scholar at the conservative think tank the American Enterprise Institute, who wrote a three-part series about the state of American education for The Wall Street Journal‘s OpinionJournal website. (If you’ve got about 16 minutes, I’d encourage you to read all three installments, which I link to below.)
“Today’s simple truth,” Murray writes in the first installment, is that “[h]alf of all children are below average in intelligence. We do not live in Lake Wobegon.”
As for the half who are above average, “far too many of them are going to four-year colleges,” Murray writes in part two (“What’s wrong with vocational school?”).
Combine those who are unqualified with those who are qualified but not interested, and some large proportion of students on today’s college campuses–probably a majority of them–are looking for something that the four-year college was not designed to provide. Once there, they create a demand for practical courses, taught at an intellectual level that can be handled by someone with a mildly above-average IQ and/or mild motivation. The nation’s colleges try to accommodate these new demands. But most of the practical specialties do not really require four years of training, and the best way to teach those specialties is not through a residential institution with the staff and infrastructure of a college. It amounts to a system that tries to turn out televisions on an assembly line that also makes pottery. It can be done, but it’s ridiculously inefficient.
“[R]ightly understood,” Murray concludes in part two, “college is appropriate for a small minority of young adults–perhaps even a minority of the people who have IQs high enough that they could do college-level work if they wished. People who go to college are not better or worse people than anyone else; they are merely different in certain interests and abilities.”
In the third and final installment — “Aztecs vs. Greeks” — Murray argues for:
A revival of the classical definition of a liberal education, serving its classic purpose: to prepare an elite to do its duty. If that sounds too much like Plato’s Guardians, consider this distinction. As William F. Buckley rightly instructs us, it is better to be governed by the first 2,000 names in the Boston phone book than by the faculty of Harvard University. But we have that option only in the choice of our elected officials. In all other respects, the government, economy and culture are run by a cognitive elite that we do not choose. That is the reality, and we are powerless to change it. All we can do is try to educate the elite to be conscious of, and prepared to meet, its obligations. For years, we have not even thought about the nature of that task. It is time we did.
I’m not sure I agree with Murray’s assessment. Coming from a land-grant educational background, and working at a land-grant university, I’m schooled in the philosophy that the more access people have to higher education, the better off society will be. Still, Murray offers some compelling arguments.
Hat tip to Arts & Letters Daily for the link.
Andy writes! 
This reminds me of the book by John Fischer, former editor of Harper’s, titled “The Stupidity Problem.” Worth a red. It also captures the reason for the devaluation of the college/university degree. The reason there are so many scammers flogging fake degrees today is that the plethora of people with a dumbed-down pseudo-education makes it necessary for people with equally fraudulent qualifications to get an equally-valuable piece of paper.