elite universities are over

they just don't know it yet

elite universities in america just died. they do not know it yet, but they did. any dean or president there who sees this impending alteration of the old order and does not pucker is so un-self and situationally aware as to functionally exist as brainless brachiosaur lifting scaly snout from muck to gawp uncomprehending at that new and ever expanding light up in the sky.

they will likely wonder at it right up until the shockwave reaches them, and by then, it will be too late.

it’s always subtle at the beginning, the first stirrings, the new arrangements, the tiny initial doublings of exponential change that rise like tiny shoots poking unnoticed and unregarded through sidewalks they will one day implacably destroy. the confluences are masked and seem disparate, but necessity is the matriarch of invention and nature finds a way.

and it has begun.

the american “ivy league” (which i and many of my friends and my friends’ children attended and therefore of which i have a more than passing knowledge) has long stood as a pinnacle of educational attainment and opportunity. it now stands ripe for extinction and irrelevance because it has fallen into the manyfold the traps of decadence, dependence, ideological capture, and just plain rot.

the ivies have become an evolutionary dead end desperately seeking to maximize that which once worked and signaled fitness but now promises only demise, a runaway excursion of traits once used to positive signaling effect that ultimately proved maladaptive and yet still persisted in a ruinous arms race that will end in ignominious effacement. it elicits images of nothing so much as the irish elk orthogenesis story where the males with large antlers attracted more mates and so the size of antlers expanded until the males could not support them/got them stuck on things and went extinct.

for all that it makes a fine metaphor, the elk story is almost certainly false, but so too are great many of the stories told and mandated in the halls of academia these days and there, truly, lies the rub: the seats of inquiry have become seats of orthodoxy and the orthodoxy to which these schools cling will be fatal to them because it quite literally stands as antithesis of their supposed purpose.

these eight august universities have become a self-sucking, self-congratulatory quagmire from which i doubt very much they will be able to extricate themselves.

they have become dependencies, tepid bards accustomed only to singing saccharine songs for substantial suppers in a world that’s rapidly moving on.

harvard faculty photo: dean of diverse equity (not to be confused with the dean of equitable diversity)

their administrative bloat has become legendary to the point of turning meta as deans of diversity dean deaning are in turn overseen by diversity obersturmbannfuhrers on and on past madness and into farce.

at harvard, administrative staff grew from 1,222 in 1969 to 6,543 in 2021, a 435% increase over five decades. the deep hilarity of this figure is that their undergraduate student population was 6,700 in 1969 and 7,153 in 2021. the ratio of admin to students rose from 1 per 5.5 (already absurd) to 1 per 1.1. we’re basically at the point of each student having their own administrator despite having moved from paper records to the internet age.

the other ivies look much the same.

draw your own conclusions therefrom.

the staff and faculty have been chosen for ideological purity, race, gender, sexual identity, and “diversity statements” that have turned interviews and tenure tracks into struggle sessions.

their leaders have become unqualified, venal, corrupt, and outright fraudulent.

dissent is not brooked.

everywhere we see the elucidation of “an idea too sacred to be challenged is already dead” spackled over by partisan hacks defending orthodoxy and mediocrity.

all structures that are not actively and consciously organized as meritocracies become active anti-meritocracies.

nothing can fix this or change that.

humans are what they are.

A’s build around them and B’s burn the fields to avoid feeding their foes.

the mediocrity downspiral of B’s hiring only C’s and C’s hiring only D’s is emergent law and comes as surely as sunset and ushers in far deeper darkness.

pretty soon the students are unqualified to be there because the standards for their admission were lax.

they dropped standardized tests or sought to adulterate them in order to allow for the selection of students by race and class. they eschewed “content of character” for “complexity of pronouns.”

but reality is not optional and the tests are not “broken” they actually work quite well. they’re just being maligned because the scholastic virtue signaling team does not like the results.

“Standardized test scores predict academic outcomes with a normalized slope four times greater than that from high school GPA”

you can ignore this if you like, but then you land here.

The Harvard Math Department will pilot a new introductory course aimed at rectifying a lack of foundational algebra skills among students, according to Harvard’s Director of Introductory Math Brendan A. Kelly.

The course, titled Math MA5, will run alongside two established math courses — Math MA and MB — with an expanded five-day schedule.

Kelly said that students in MA5 will meet with “one of two instructors all five days” with “a variety of different activities” on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

stanford just did the same.

this is a glaringly obvious warning, an 800 pound canary dropping dead in the mines of meritocracy. this is basic competence one would demand at a solid, much less elite high school. it’s 9th grade math. (7th or 8th for many of us) if you cannot or have not mastered it, what on earth are you doing in the land of the 99th percentile intellects?

you’re breaking the system is what you are doing.

these “elite universities” are turning away the best and brightest, kids who could do the work for real because they have become besotted with ideas like “diversity” and their 1:1 dean ratio needs to justify its existence. they do this by becoming the keepers of increasingly desperate and overtly avowed anti-meritocracies and counting coup on competence.

and that’s a death spiral.

everything about it is.

i’m watching my friends’ kids apply to colleges. for those who are not top athletes, the process has become horrific to the point where i cannot even imagine participating in it. i wrote my college essays in single drafts (sometimes in ink, brown required it then) and went back to my life. these kids are already waging admissions campaigns as freshman. they have consultants, advisors, planners.

the whole “elite” admissions process has become insane, counter-productive, and increasingly looks like baroque kabuki dance signifying nothing so much as ability to comply with the overtly absurd. there’s no way i could have managed it even if i could have tolerated it and there’s zero percent chance of that. i’d have thrown my hands up in disgust and gone to state.

and i suspect many of them should as well.

the whole thing looks like hazing for sad circus bears selected for their uncomplaining endurance at riding in pointless circles.

and who in their right mind wants that?

the curriculum and research is dictated by utter dependence on federal grants and funding. the howls when it is threatened are at once disingenuous and telling.

“No government—regardless of which party is in power—should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue.” - Harvard President Alan Garber

lovely, you’d like academic freedom? fantastic. i would like that for you as well and wholeheartedly agree!

however, i find this a difficult position to view sincerely when espoused by an institution that has for decades had its views and admissions systematically shaped by dependence on eye wateringly huge amounts of federal money.

you have a $50bn endowment. that should hold you in fine fettle. how about a simple agreement?

yeah, thought not.

that’s how you know this is a sham. they do not want “freedom” they want “more money to keep doing the broken things they’re doing right now because the teetering anti-meritocracy they have created cannot sustain itself even with a gigantic tax free hedge fund attached.

harvard just had to borrow $1.2 billion in the last 2 months. this will not even make a dent in the $9bn of federal research grants and over $500mm a year in funding they stand to lose and if they need to become self-sustaining and start paying taxes on their investment income like a normal entity. this is going to get pretty interesting pretty quickly especially if they start running up interest on bond liabilities.

they’ll probably seek to remedy this by hiring 11 new deans of equitable self-sufficiency and sufficient self-equity.

really a very telling tale.

this is not a university seeking academic freedom, it’s a dependency seeking subsidy and sinecure to perpetuate a special kind of academic unfreedom that cannot stand alone.

they will keep doubling down because they have a structure of 6,000 deans, 90% of whom would have their positions eliminated in any sort of effectiveness or merit based system.

what was once a shark has become 90% remora by weight.

there’s nothing elite about this anymore. i hear this over an over from my friends’ kids. they know the game is stupid but they feel that they have to play, they have to game it, they repeat what they are told to repeat, regurgitate what the teacher and admissions office want to hear because it’s the only way.

they still crave the degree as signifier and they know:

one wiggle out of line or off dogma and you’re done for.

it’s as false and performative as it is grotesque and soviet.

it’s soul crushing.

and it cannot go on.

“compliance and contrition credentials” are not badges of elite intellect or attainment.

precisely what is the point of an educational system centered on such?

the discrimination and mal-selection has become overt, even ostentatious. schools that used to prioritize “legacies” (the children of those who had themselves attended) now penalize them, in many cases heavily to the point where if you are a straight white or asian student whose parents went here, basically don’t bother applying.

the “scholarship” system on offer is not funded by endowments, it’s funded by the “students who can pay” and this causes a tuition spiral where each kid who can foot the bill full freight is funding the attendance of 2 or even 3 students and the price spike means that in order to attend, you either need to be poor enough to get assistance, rich enough to pay 90 grand a year, or be willing to go into crushing, inerasable debt to the state. this barbells student populations among the poor and the very rich further breaking merit and excluding the middle class, especially many whose parents went there and would typically make up a backbone of strong capability and donor base who get excluded as matter of explicit policy.

and there is simply no way that the upper echelons of best and brightest are going to be selected by a system like that. they’ll be horrified and likely radicalized by it. so will their parents.

good.

this new axis of disaffection will drive change.

it’s a sifter for free thinkers and 3-5 sigma minds. these people never needed the ivies to thrive, the schools needed them. but the academies themselves have now become counterproductive anachronisms, old timey candle making factories in the age of incandescence. they demand much and offer little.

and so the deal will break.

the whole of it has become more cargo cult than trade goods.

and the world is going to route around this damage.

because nature and brilliance find a way.

and so the world must change.

several states (including just now texas) are starting to push for school choice, a funding of students, not systems. vouchers and free markets will ravage the rotten husk of US public schools and new sorts of entities will emerge, leapfrog entities able to educate the best and brightest rather than impede them.

the students of these schools are going to come out of HS looking very different than anything we have seen before, far more advanced in education and in thought because they will have choice and schools will face competition and will specialize.

some will cater only to those who can move fast and break grade curves.

for such students, it will be a glory like flight.

they can finally rise to potential.

no more “wait for the others.” once more, school can become an accelerant.

the “elite universities” will start to look pointless in comparison, antiquated DEI domains of dipshittery and drudgework. their sheepskins will become scarlet letters indicative of not being able to find a better way, of credentialism over substance, of weak minded compliance.

and this brings us back to palantir:

(and many others will fast follow because they all face the same problem)

there exist in the world a small number of hyper-competent, high intelligence, high agency people.

these are the people upon which technological progress depends and you cannot make them, teach them, or otherwise train them to be like this. it’s really about finding them and this used to the the role of the elite university: if you are here there’s a high chance you’re a person like that. the never created these people. they were a selector, a screen, a first pass interview to identify and collect them.

but now they select for sad tricycle bear obedience and oppose merit.

of what use is such a sorting hat to those who need “best and brightest” level results?

none at all.

it’s selecting against what you want and the last thing holding it up is the vestige of reputation that still draws some of the top minds to these factories of academic malpractice.

so you route around it.

how do you get a fresh apple when everything in the barrel has been rotting?

you go to the tree.

here comes the disintermediation of the university.

it’s the out of favor deep value trade of the century.

if you really want the key phrase there, it’s the one i think many gloss over:

“what happens when you treat 18 year olds like adults?”

i have friends who have send their kids to college abroad because they said “the US university is seen as an end of childhood, abroad, it’s seen as the start of adulthood.”

this is a powerful idea.

“Last week, the company announced a new “Meritocracy Fellowship,” a four-month internship for high school graduates. Candidates will be selected “based solely on merit and academic excellence” in contrast to the opaque standards that govern admission to prestigious universities. While modern American culture denies kids can be extremely competent change agents, Palantir — in keeping with its culture of betting on “aptitude over skill” — wants to give them a shot.”

many seem to be getting the vapors over “the kids will not be emotionally ready for this” but consider the source. are we really going to take the word of the sub-dean of diversity, equity, and infantilization on this topic?

instead, let’s get a take from margaret york, at palantir:

Q: I kind of want to know what you heard from Safe Haven and Semester at Palantir students about college as it stands today.

M: A couple of things really stood out as distinct from my own experiences in the early aughts. One, a very distinct shift toward psychological safety — toward really taking seriously the concept of safe spaces, trigger warnings, making sure students knew what they were getting into emotionally when they were going to be engaging with ideas.

And at the tail end of 2023, the thing that was surprising to a lot of the students was like: Wait, this sense of psychological safety does not go both ways. There are some ideas we were supposed to be protected from — ideas that are to be labeled and sequestered away — but not other ideas. And hey, isn’t that maybe hypocritical?

and there it is.

we’re not letting college students be mature. we’re actively preventing it, teaching and rewarding the cultivation of fragility and aggrievement, dependence on external authority and obeisance to baroque and increasingly insane and unmoored orthodoxy.

hey, i wonder why the kids are not maturing at pace?

they could be.

they should be.

they are supposed to be.

and this new confluence of school choice and “right from the tree picking of the finest fruits” is going to provide an incredibly powerful new form of fast tracking.

it’s going to become the new sorting hat for maturity and and capability, for merit and for brilliance.

the high agency high intelligence kids will find it because that’s what they do.

and this is going to pick up speed.

as this starts to obviously work, all the top tech cos and banks and funds and lifesci companies are going to enter the arms race to get the best people.

and all the best people will want to be found because it’s SO much better than the sad bear olympic games of ivy application.

everyone on both sides wants this.

only the schools do not, but they are going to quadruple down on the wrong wrong thing and make it inevitable.

and once they start to lose the 99th percentile, they’re dead. the 98th will follow. then the 97th.

why go do 4 years of bediapered diversity daycare when you can go learn the real stuff from the real people?

why learn from those who cannot do and therefore teach when you can learn from those who are doing and know where the game is at?

why stunt yourself in the same lost years of overpriced warehousing in failing, out of date indoctrination factories?

that which must happen will happen.

and a product this unsuited to task simply cannot long persist.

the reality here has become quite simple:

the intersection of interests between the best and brightest and those places most needful of putting them to good use and fullest potential has no place for the “elite” university as currently instantiated and those universities are too moribund to change.

their time is already over.

they just don’t know it yet.

school’s out forever…