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Monday, January 16, 2023

Why Universities Chose Wokeness, and Why it Won't Work

It has been predicted that half of all American colleges and universities will close in the next ten years, thus fulfilling the ancient prophecy, "Get woke, go broke." But why is wokeness such a problem for universities?

The answer: Griggs v. Duke Power Company, 1971. In that decision, the US Supreme Court found that a particular use of IQ tests in hiring practices caused a disproportionate impact on African American employees. "Disproportionate impact" can make a facially neutral policy illegal under various US civil rights laws.

This is not a blanket ban on IQ testing in employment, but corporations being risk-averse, stopped doing it. Unfortunately, they still needed a proxy for IQ tests. Whether we like it or not, an IQ score does correlate pretty well with how easily an individual can perform a specific job. So, what to do about that proxy? Well, there was one area where IQ tests were considered a useful screening tool: college students. While college in the late 19th and early 20th century was mostly about who your parents were, colleges kept the fig leaf of meritocracy bound firmly about their ivory towers. Since colleges screened applicants for parentage (a proxy for power) and for IQ (a proxy for ability to learn a job), businesses began using college degrees as their job screening tool.

The GI Bill was signed in 1944 by FDR. While roughly half of WW II's returning veterans made use of it, the funding rate dropped precipitously from 1955 into the 1960s, because college wasn't really an important item on anyone's radar. However, after 1971's pivotal Griggs decision, businesses made a college degree central. Businesses wanted employees who were hooked into either power and privilege or tour de force intellect, preferably both. The college degree guaranteed that.

This gave universities a virtual monopoly on discriminating on the basis of intelligence. Since that is really useful to do, all a university has to do is maintain its reputation as being a mostly reliable discriminator, and the actual contents of what it teaches are virtually irrelevant.

SCOTUS had unwittingly caused Griggs to rig the employment playing field. Vietnam vets were the first group to see which way the wind blew. They became the first generation to inflate their GI Bill life rafts and float into higher paying jobs. The civilian world followed suit. Universities made out like bandits.

Unfortunately for everyone, the Pill was released a decade before Griggs, just in time to start decimating the baby boom. The US total fertility rate (TFR) has been dropping steadily since 1800, with the only significant baby boom taking place after WW II. By 1963, that boom was over. But during the 1970s and early 80s, the Boomer population was still traveling through the anaconda of higher learning. Nobody realized the good times could only roll for about twenty years. It wasn't apparent that the dropping number of parents would eventually bring it all crashing down.

And that's where "wokeness" comes in. The number of available students born to American parents has steadily dropped since the 1980s. Today, there aren't enough backsides to sit in the seats. There are three ways to handle this declining enrollment: (1) raise tuition (2) import students from other countries and (3) lower standards. The first two have been tried. Tuition is as high as it can afford to be. Every industrialized country in the world has a declining TFR (and a similar problem with their own colleges), so there's a limit to the number of students that can be imported. That just leaves lowered standards.

And that's the beauty of wokeness. Wokeness lower standards while virtue-washing the real reason colleges encourage it - they need every warm body they can get, no matter how stupid, in order to fund administration perks. In fact, stupid people make better students because they will sign for larger federal loans.

So, the entire wokeness movement, which found its footing at the universities, did so because of the Pill and Griggs. But wokeness is just gasoline on the bonfire of university vanities. Remember Griggs?

You see, universities have forgotten that their degrees became valuable to businesses only because Griggs required American businesses to use an IQ proxy. Ironically, by embracing wokeness in order to save their bottom line, those same universities are throwing away the only reason a business has to use them - due to their refusal to test candidates and grade on ability, university degrees are now worthless as an IQ proxy.

How are businesses responding to this new state of affairs? They are dispensing with the need for university degrees. Instead, businesses have begun using certifying agencies (IT certification, management certification, etc.) and certifications as a proxy for IQ.

By and large, certifying agencies are a better work-around to Griggs than university degrees. They are more on-point for specific job categories, harder to litigate against, and they now do a better job of screening out stupid people. Which is all that businesses ever wanted to do in the first place.

UPDATE: Yep, my suspicions are confirmed:

But grades may not be the real problem, said Michael Poliakoff, president of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni. He pointed out that only 25 percent of high school students who took the ACT test last year met all four college-readiness benchmarks, which gauge the likelihood that they'll succeed in first-year college courses; 38 percent met none. The composite score was the lowest in more than a decade.

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