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 ruling was not a blanket ban on IQ testing in employment, but corporations being risk-averse, stopped testing the IQ of prospective employees. Unfortunately, those same companies 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 and necessary screening tool: applications for college. 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), after 1971, 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 kind of discrimination is really useful in the job market, all a university has to do to be socially crucial is maintain its reputation as a reliable IQ discriminator. If it does that, the actual content of what it teaches is simply not relevant.

Overnight, SCOTUS had unwittingly used 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 bulging 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 rapidly dropping number of parents would eventually bring it all crashing down.

And that's where "wokeness" comes in. The number of future college students born to American parents has dropped steadily since the 1980s, when the total fertility rate returned to 1930s levels. Since that decade, there haven't been enough backsides to sit in college seats.

Colleges have 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.

Enter "woke." Wokeness lower standards while virtue-washing the real reason colleges encourage it - they need every warm body they can get, no matter how stupid that person may be, in order to fund the bloated administration and the perks that grew during the go-go years of the 1970s through the 1990s. 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. The real problem is, no one remembers Griggs.

You see, universities have forgotten that their degrees became valuable to businesses only because Griggs forbad American businesses testing the IQ of prospective employees. Before Griggs, universities were niche high-society clubs. They only became universally critical to economic advancement because SCOTUS unintentionally re-created them as an IQ-testing monopoly. But, as the incoming stream of students disappeared due to contraception and abortion, that IQ testing monopoly had to lower its IQ gatekeeper standards to keep its own income up. Ironically, by embracing wokeness (lowering IQ testing standards) in order to save their bottom line, those same universities are throwing away the only reason a business has to use them. 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 and certifications (IT certification, management certification, etc.) 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. At best, universities are destined to return, to niche high-society clubs.

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.