The higher education racket is being exposed in America as diminishing standards, collapsing public trust, and a cult-like, often unlawful devotion to DEI ideology pushes its mid-20th century model past the point of breaking.
For several generations, going to a premier public or private university provided a smooth path to success for most Americans.
Sure, plenty of people made money by starting businesses—and a handful of entrepreneurs became monumentally wealthy—but for most Americans looking to get going on a good, high-paying, rewarding career, going to college was the path to success.
Now that path isn’t guaranteed and hasn’t been for decades. Employers have begun to view degrees from once-prestigious schools, even advanced degrees, as irrelevant or a marginal advantage at best.
These overproduced pseudo-elites—many of whom are high on self-esteem but short on what they see as an equivalent paycheck—constitute the foot soldiers of the angry, fanatical DSA class.
The hordes of frustrated college grads will undoubtedly shape American politics in coming years. But what of the colleges and universities that produced them?
TRENDING ARTICLES
They could be in for a massive shake-up.
That’s what I concluded after reading a report in the New York Post Tuesday that highlighted how even after the Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard Supreme Court decision prohibited using race in college admissions, many elite universities are gaming the system to ensure that they continue to meet stealth diversity quotas.
They’ve done so by flushing virtually all measures of academic excellence down the toilet for the sake of DEI.
The New York Post reported that Mission High School in San Francisco has a staggering 45% acceptance rate to the prestigious University of California, Berkeley, even though only a tiny number of students at the school rated as proficient in math and English, according to statewide tests.
“Only 17% of Mission High’s 11th graders scored proficient or above in English, along with a shocking 6% in math on the 2025 state assessment exam, the lowest of any school in the San Francisco Unified School District—which averaged 59% and 43%, respectively,” the Post reported.
Those numbers would be concerning for any school, let alone one that is sending nearly half its students to the state’s premier public university.
Funny enough, the San Francisco Chronicle ran a story on Mission High School in 2024, praising it as some kind of model for how an institution with mostly black and Hispanic students became a one-way ticket to some of the nation’s top universities.
Without ever digging into exactly what magic formula for success the school had discovered, the Chronicle reported that the “vast majority of 12th graders at the school” send out multiple applications to colleges and universities across California and just wait “for the hundreds of acceptances to flood their email inboxes.”
Then the Chronicle, without a hint of irony or suspicion, claimed that the school “is proof that with the resources, focus and determination to make the students believe in themselves, and a lot of hard work, the odds against these kids shift.”
The reality is that the odds were ever in their favor. That was especially the case following the state’s 2020 decision to drop standardized testing in admissions to promote “access and equity,” as some called it.
Now standardized testing—especially the SAT—has its flaws, no doubt. But it’s hard to pull off mass-scale “meritocratic” admissions without any kind of objective metric to evaluate students.
So, what happens to the Mission High School students when they arrive at Cal and other schools?
They fail at a shockingly high frequency and wash out. But not before dragging down the overall quality of the student body.
What the University of California is doing is essentially picking names out of a statistically diverse phonebook, dumping them into the school, and hoping everything will work out.
The fact that they are even attempting to pull off this watering down of already watered-down student quality says a lot.
Many prestigious schools rely on their reputation as much as their current high-quality faculty. They owe their power as elite institutional sorting factories to the accomplishments of past luminaries—more than a few of whom they’ve recently, ruthlessly canceled—and the fact that they are expected to have a student body of the best and brightest.
They know that for quite some time a college education has been a sorting mechanism for intelligence and competence. If you got in, you had met some kind of standard. If you got out with a degree, you had a ticket to an upper-middle-class job or better.
But what Americans are catching on to is that the reputation of many colleges now often comes before excellence. Legitimate research and innovation are being crowded out by the ideological nonsense and patronage blob. DEI comes first, excellence is an afterthought.
The legacy media have spun a narrative that higher education is suffering because the mean Trump administration is threatening them. But they have it backward. President Donald Trump has threatened them with lawsuits and defunding because they’ve already lost the confidence of the American people.
What’s remarkable is that it took so long to pull the plug.
And it does seem like the higher ed bubble is truly bursting, even if it doesn’t want to admit it. It is paying the price for its arrogance and commitment to DEI, which it thought would sustain it amid the changing racial landscape of America.
But even in blue, racially diverse California, the people hate affirmative action. And by pushing out talented students in favor of “diverse” ones who can’t hack it, they are killing what made them appealing to begin with.
Many able, ambitious young Americans will increasingly find their way without attending “elite” universities that may have pre-screened them by the color of their skin.
That’s eventually going to grow into a serious long-term problem for schools reliant on reputation, alumni, and public support.
What it means is that higher education may look radically different in the coming decade, as there is a great re-sorting. Elite universities aren’t going away. They will continue to feed into the vast array of institutions that rely on them, much to their detriment.
Yet, under the pressure of increasing failure, new institutions could certainly rise to replace them as they capitalize on the natural flow of talent. Old, lagging ones may, under great external pressure and a fair amount of intervention, be put on a better path.
One way or another, change is coming. The current path is unsustainable.
Read the first chapter of The Woketopus right now for FREE
Today, even with President Trump’s victory, leftist elites have their tentacles in every aspect of our government.
The Daily Signal’s own Tyler O’Neil exposes this leftist cabal in his new book, The Woketopus: The Dark Money Cabal Manipulating the Federal Government.
In this book, O’Neil reveals how the Left’s NGO apparatus pursues its woke agenda, maneuvering like an octopus by circumventing Congress and entrenching its interests in the federal government.
You can read the first chapter of this new book for FREE in this eBook, The Woketopus: Chapter One using the secure link below.
TRENDING ARTICLES
The Daily Signal depends on the support of readers like you.
RELATED ARTICLES
Don’t miss the
Don’t miss the signal
