Affirmative action in higher education is set to face the judgment of the Supreme Court. The moment is quietly exhilarating. This is an injustice that has been hoisted upon so many, for so long, and with the patronage of so many powerful institutions that it seemed perhaps too big and too heavy to ever remove. Yet the same was true of Roe v. Wade, and now Roe v. Wade is gone. 

Some of the details of the case, which was argued on October 31, 2022, are comical. Harvard University claims to take “personality” into account when reviewing applicants. This is understandable, as it takes more than book smarts to excel in life. But Harvard admissions officers, in their great wisdom, apparently concluded that blacks on average have the most interesting personalities, Hispanics are significantly less interesting, whites are less interesting still, and Asians are the least interesting of all — coincidentally an exact inversion of test score averages. It will be a fine day when this sort of barely hidden racial discrimination is gone.

But much like the repeal of Roe, a ruling against affirmative action would only begin a much more difficult fight. The proliferation of liberal policies at universities is, after all, not some historical accident: it is the product of an increasingly large and powerful administrative class in academia. Regardless of the Supreme Court’s decision, these people will remain, as will the diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) agenda that they uphold. 

Linda Helton/The American Spectator

Affirmative action is merely the bluntest instrument in the woke administrator’s tool kit, and there exist other ways of effecting racial discrimination. Take diversity statements, which have now become standard practice for faculty-position applications at top institutions like the University of California, Berkeley. If you are a white applicant, these provide an opportunity to lie prostrate, condemn the fact that there are too many people who look like you in your field, and beg to be the last white person who the hiring committee ever considers. 

A conservative who swallows his distaste may be able to pen a sufficiently orthodox diversity statement. Unfortunately, a progressive statement is no match for a progressive résumé. Academics are more than happy to discriminate against would-be colleagues on whom they detect a single whiff of conservatism, according to surveys. Consequently, only 6 percent of American university faculty self-identify as conservative. 

These same rotten institutions are currently dismantling their own credibility with their obsessive pursuit of diversity over ability. A meritocratic hiring process is a sign of a competent organization. Putting aside questions of fairness, it may be worth asking: How much would it actually benefit Americans to improve the competence of such a hostile institution as the liberal arts university system? Would America actually be better off if more of its most intelligent young people spent their twenties in adjunct cubicles at Harvard?

Higher Education Is a Prisoner’s Dilemma

For most of early American history, universities served as finishing schools for the upper class. Fewer than 2 percent of Americans were college educated. Latin and Greek were entry requirements; these subjects were of little use in professional life but provided efficient filters for status.

It was not until the turn of the twentieth century that our modern vocational view of college education began to take shape. The US had just become the world’s largest economy and subsequently was in great need of engineers, foremen, clerks, and technicians. Out of this need sprang the first community colleges, which offered vocational courses. By 1950, college attendance rates had jumped fivefold to about 10 percent.

It was on the back of this newly educated middle class that America ascended to superpower status. But as college attendance continued to explode post World War II, the tertiary degree began to come unstuck from its original industrial purpose, and the modern progressive ideology of “college for all” was born.

It is currently unfashionable to take an instrumental view of college education. Notice that leftists stumping for free college will never discriminate between degrees or programs: the mathematician and the gender studies major are considered equally deserving of subsidies. We are so far removed from the vocational schools of the last century that the act of attending college has, in the popular imagination, taken on a sort of alchemical quality. In this view, a student is transmuted into a higher class of citizen merely through attending college — what he learns during that time is relatively inconsequential.

Defenders of the modern liberal arts education retort that colleges teach writing ability, curiosity, critical thinking, good citizenship, and a host of other humanist qualities, regardless of the degree or the major.

There are a few problems with this perspective. To point out the most obvious, knowledge is forgotten over time. Indeed, it is forgotten more quickly and more completely than most people realize. A 2006 study on retention tested the knowledge of students previously enrolled in a course against randomly selected baseline individuals who had never taken that course. The authors found that students of every caliber experienced a similar rate of knowledge decay. Within a year, C-grade students performed worse on the test than the uneducated baseline; within two years, even B-grade students were performing barely above the baseline.

Knowledge decay was not much of an issue in the early days of higher education because college was merely a networking opportunity for the wealthy. Nor was it an issue during the vocational period, when a college-educated technician could expect a job upon graduation that required immediate application of his newly gained technical knowledge. The current chapter of higher education history is not nearly so sensible. The average modern college attendee majors in art history or environmental science, finds a job working with Excel spreadsheets at an insurance company, and by his midtwenties has forgotten nearly everything that he went five figures into debt to learn.

At its essence, the twenty-first-century college degree is frequently an exercise in social signaling rather than education. Unfortunately, status is relative, and if the majority of society attains a particular status symbol, then it must necessarily become banal and unprestigious. The result is a prisoner’s dilemma: both everyone going to college and no one going to college produce the same relative social standing, all else being equal. But because your fellow spreadsheet wranglers go to college, so must you, lest you fall behind.

Your College Is a Temple 

The prestige of the elite college degree is a conduit through which many other forms of prestige are accessed, particularly those in law, government, and industry. This sort of monopoly on social power is not only increasingly undeserved but also dangerous.

It is tempting to imagine that the university system could be restored to some previously unblemished state. But it is probably more accurate to think of pure meritocracy and ideological agnosticism as the historical exception rather than the rule.

Consider England, whose universities have long been regarded as among the best in the world. When in the sixteenth century the country broke with the Roman Catholic Church and established Anglicanism as the state religion, popular adoption of the new religious tendency was piecemeal and gradual. But the most important step in the process was the endorsement of Anglican belief by the ruling and administrative elite.

In 1673 and 1678, the Test Acts were passed by the British Parliament, imposing religious tests as a precondition for holding public office. At the University of Oxford and the University of Cambridge, aspiring students and faculty were required to demonstrate their knowledge and fealty to the Church of England’s Thirty-nine Articles of Religion. This practice remained in place for nearly two centuries, by which point the Anglicanization of England was complete.

The university as a tool of ideological consolidation has taken on new forms today. Across the Islamic world, many universities still embrace the use of tests of religious faith as a requirement for entry. And, of course, in England, America, and elsewhere, the secular religion of social justice fills a similar role.

This is not to imply that the ideological capture of a university system makes it useless. Anglicanization helped to consolidate a unique identity among England’s elite. While the Test Acts were in place, England achieved the Industrial Revolution and laid the foundations for its later empire. But the nature of the ideology obviously matters: it is difficult to imagine a less impressive ruling class than the one currently being created by DEI policies.

As long as there is a culture war in America, higher education will be used as a weapon. The prestige and intellectual legitimacy conferred by universities made these institutions a tool irresistible to ideologues of the past, and today is no different. And as long as universities are weaponized, progressives will wield that power — because more progressives aspire to become academics and are demonstrably more willing to discriminate on the basis of belief. 

Degrees of Rent Seeking

If the concept of universal tertiary education were to disappear, what would supplant it? There is no need to strain the imagination, as the keys to its replacement already stand in place.

Universities no longer possess a monopoly on knowledge. Decades ago, a university might have possessed its city’s most extensive library. Centuries ago, it may have had the city’s only library, and maybe even its only literate people. The internet has made knowledge accessible to all.

Nor are universities now necessary for concentrating human capital. The most impressive reservoirs of genius are today found in Silicon Valley and at enterprises like OpenAI, SpaceX, and the many others that define American scientific prowess.

Nor are they necessary for hiring purposes. The prisoner’s dilemma of education indicates that college degrees are now so ubiquitous that companies use them as a screen for intelligence and conscientiousness; the actual job-related education transpires after the hiring. But this screening utility is easily replaced. For example, many tech companies now use coding challenges like LeetCode as the primary method of assessing applicant competence.

Of course, certain fields, like that of medicine, exist in which self-tutoring is much harder, if not impossible. But the dirty secret is that even in these cases, college is hardly relevant. Medical schools and law programs brag about all of the English, history, and drama students in their incoming classes. They make a point of reassuring applicants that their passion matters more than their major. In other words, they utilize the college degree in precisely the same way as most companies — to find smart and hardworking applicants — in lieu of developing better screening methods.

Despite their increasing pointlessness, universities carry on like giant parasitic amoebas, sucking up the time and money of entire generations of young people. Pointless habits do not always disappear easily, and sometimes they disappear not at all. (After all, the Japanese still love their fax machines.)

But there are at least a few steps that can be taken to cut colleges down to size. Offers of federal tuition subsidies and easy student loans should be withdrawn. The virtual guarantee of taxpayer money has all but eliminated competitive pressures at universities, leading to ballooning numbers of administrative staff, lazy rivers, and insultingly pointless grievance studies programs. These subsidies were introduced at a time when there existed a strong case for higher education as a public good, but that time has long passed.

Young people have a part to play in this as well. No one can be individually faulted for going to college — no virtue lies in being the sucker in a prisoner’s dilemma. But the trend of treating higher education as a backup plan for life, and the master’s degree, doctorate, and postdoc as means of delaying entry into working life, ought to stop. Do not give the university system any more time and money; four years and tens of thousands of dollars is more than enough.

As for the future scientists and CEOs who will now stand a chance of getting into Harvard if affirmative action is repealed? We can only hope that all of them take their smarts elsewhere afterward, rather than becoming barely paid adjunct fodder.

For now, the possible end of affirmative action is a victory to celebrate, even if it only gives a bloody nose to the ideologues who have taken over some of America’s most venerable institutions. The Supreme Court should do as it ought to and ensure that the Civil Rights Act is being applied fairly for all races of people. However, in the long run, it cannot be enough to simply improve the fairness of a system that, in its current form, should not exist.

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