The Value of Higher Education

Beauty was, is, and always will be

“Who is Elizabeth Taylor?” asked C.S. Lewis. He and I were talking about the difference between “prettiness” and “beauty”, and I suggested that Miss Taylor was a great beauty. “If you read the newspapers,” I said to Lewis, “you would know who she is.” “Ah-h-h!” said Lewis playfully, “but that is how I keep myself ‘unspotted from the world’.”  He recommended that if I absolutely “must” read newspapers, I have a frequent “mouthwash” with The Lord of the Rings or some other great book. - C.S. Lewis Present Concerns, A Compelling Collection of Timely, Journalistic Essays (Introduction by Walter Hooper 8 January 1986)

I recently read Nate Hochman’s National Review article, Stanford’s Class of 2026 Doesn’t ‘Look Like America’. Stanford’s affirmative action “holistic admission mission” produced a freshman class that is only 22% white even though people who identify as “white” make up more than 50% of the US population. The Class of ’26 added 1736 new students to the Stanford roster. That means that out of 55,000 undergrad applications, the university could only find 382 white applications that met the rigorous academic standards of that elite school. Overall chances of acceptance were just over 3.1%. However, if an applicant was white (+50% of population,) the chances of selection into the Class of ’26 dropped to a paltry .7%. That assumes the 382 white student acceptances did not contain any legacy or some other “pay to play” applicants. Those types of diversity results are surely a pretty sight to the academic eugenicists chasing the holy grail of equity. But is it a thing of Beauty?

Higher education in the US is no longer a pursuit learning, it is merely an expensive credentialing racket. The only difference between credentialing institutions is the cost of the accreditation (investment) and the value of the degree (return on investment.) Elite schools with ivy covered towers, are simply selling a prettier picture of ROI. I once read that American Express spent 100% of its annual membership fees to advertise “that membership has its privileges.” Is that not what our modern universities are doing now? How much of the 70k per year tuition goes towards marketing the ROI of their institution? For I can assure you, though the administrations, faculties, and board of directors lay fresh laurels upon the bust of Karl Marx before every meeting, the admissions and alumni offices are paying homage to Adam Smith as they are peddling pure capitalism ROI, with a homey twist on diversity, sustainability, and activism to obscure the university’s financial intent. Excited coeds and nervous parents are being sold BS statistics of graduation rates and post-degree employment rates as a softening agent by the capitalist wing of the universities. As if any top preforming student motivated enough to make it to the “ivies” would not be motivated to do something significant with their life post graduation.

Walk onto any private four-year university these days and see impressive student union buildings, state of the art fitness centers, and posh dormitories equipped with hyper-speed internet connections. In fact, the wi-fi internet services splash over the entire campus, thus enabling students to access YouTube tutorials to fill it the gaps of knowledge missed by tenured professors unbothered by their lack of substantive teaching. For a clearer picture of what is truly going on in our nation’s academic credentialing centers, check out Suzy Weiss’s recent Free Press post, Dishonor Code: What Happens When Cheating Becomes the Norm?

As Ms. Wiess sadly points out, the value of a year-year degree is no longer the measurement of learning nor the beauty of uncovering knowledge. Students are simply taking the easiest route between their freshmen to senior year credentialing experience and since they are racking up real debt in the process, they suffer no guilt gaming the system along the way. In our current academic environment, professors, especially of the adjunct variety, overlook students’ “creativity” in test taking methods out of fear of receiving job-eliminating poor student reviews.

So, if learning is no longer a thing of beauty in itself (an end in itself,) who determines the value of Harvard, Yale, Dartmouth or any other of America’s elite universities? Alumni mostly. Alumni in all our nation’s post-college institutions who hire graduates from their alma maters determine the value of a degrees. Elite school alumni hiring alma matter graduates is a veritable self-licking ice cream cone of high-income earners hiring high-earning graduates. Knowing that this is the reality of how a credential selling university really works, let us check on how this system serves society:

• Penn and Columbia Alumni fill the ranks of Wall Street banking houses, yet these top graduates failed to see the housing crisis of ’08.

• Stanford technology graduates flood Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and Twitter but instead of “doing no evil” as was once Googles motto, used their knowledge to create a surveillance state that nearly toppled free speech in the US.

• Top law school graduates of Yale, Harvard and University of Chicago fill the ranks of our nation’s law firms and judicial positions yet cannot interpret the simple words, “shall not be infringe.”

• Theology schools send their best secular graduates into the world, not to build churches and bridges to God, but to systematical dismantle them. It was, after all, stellar theistic elites that gave us the one hundred-million-dollar ad campaign, “He gets us” instead of preaching how to get Him.

• Georgetown, George Washington University and University of Maryland feed the offices at Langley, yet the CIA could not find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and have determined that spending hundreds of billions of tax-payer dollars on the Ukraine is the best course of action for that conflict.

• Recruits from all major universities feed the FBI but as our nation’s top law enforcement agency they have developed an extreme case of disinterest for solving any crimes that do not fit a liberal political narrative.

• The research medical institutions of Johns Hopkins, Duke, and Mayo Clinic School of Medicine produced top doctors that, when faced with a world-wide pandemic, quickly and uniformly jettisoned the intellectual practice of medicine in favor of politically approved mask mandates, economy crushing lockdowns and sheltering in place.

Vibrant societies need an educated population, not only because truly educated people make the good times better through quality pursuits of Beauty in times of leisure, but because societies need true thinkers to solve critical problems when times are tough. In all of my above examples, how did society’s accredited elite handle the crises at hand? To put it bluntly, if today’s elite university professors were stranded on Gilligan’s Island it would be they who continually foiled Gilligan’s attempts at rescue.

Accessing the true value of an academic degree now is more akin to accessing the value of a painting in the world of art. Which is to say the value of an ivy league degree is what wealthy elite people perceive it to be. Can a Stanford create a Rembrandt? Maybe, but true genius is just as likely to come from the local community college or in the form of an autodidact. No, the value of an elite education is like the art world, it is worth precisely what someone is willing to pay for it. Just like this Cy Twombly jr. panting that sold for 70 million dollars at Sotheby's, New York Auction house in 2015, The ivy league degree is worth what wealthy person is willing to pay for it.

Untitled. New York City 1968
172x228cm oil based house paint and wax crayon on canvas

As I, and other business leaders, access the value of graduated candidates that come our way, the best course is leave the elite school graduates to their own kind. Non-elite institutions need employees that can think, react, and fear no danger. When dealing with ivy-league applicants, I tend to fall on detective McCann’s side regarding the candidates. He said in The Thomas Crown Affair (1999 remake) after being duped a second time of an art theft from the cleaver Mr. Crown, “So, if some Houdini wants to snatch a couple swirls of paint that are really only important to some very silly rich people l don't really give a damn." With ivy league graduates, leave them to the silly rich people and look for graduates who have experience education’s Beautiful lessons.

The academic eugenicists may make academic admission equity look pretty at Stanford as well as other elite schools of “higher” learning, but no hand short of the heavens above can make equity Beautiful. Trying to usurp God’s authority in that matter only hurts the precious minds our universities are charged to glorify. The cynic may say that that is the entire point of higher education, to give young minds over to the behaviorist for the molding of obedient and productive citizens. But there is no honor in teaching compliant behavior and no joy in instruction if one cannot experience the “eureka” moments of students’ genuine discovery. And, as I have pointed out, graduates from my nation’s top universities have done more disservice to society in their leadership roles over the past quarter century then investments of that magnitude should ever allow.

Having forayed into the morass of institutional education, I have failed to heed C.S. Lewis’s advice. I have not remained free of a moral stain upon my conscience and now require some form of purification. Now, where did I leave that copy of mouthwash?