The larger the share of the population attending universities, the clearer it becomes that we can no longer be talking about an elite. Still, one might expect these people to be at least slightly above average in intelligence and willingness to study systematically. Yet that does not appear to be the case. Several studies published in the United States over the past year suggest that, in these respects, university students are no different from the general population. Europe is somewhat behind, but it is moving in the same direction.
Is this a disaster? It is certainly a pity, because it suggests that the university—one of the key institutions of Western societies over the past two centuries—is heading toward extinction (see my recent piece on rigor). Other facts point in the same direction, such as declining interest in university education. We seem to be moving toward a situation in which university study attracts the very best (those aspiring to become top scientists) and the very poor (those aspiring to become mediocre bureaucrats, such as lawyers or managers). Those in the middle choose other career paths: they might learn a trade, for example, or simply acquire some practical expertise and start a business based on it.
For society as a whole, however, this need not be a catastrophe. But we will have to get used to the fact that:
- A university degree is no guarantee of ability, or even of theoretical knowledge.
- A degree from one of a handful of top institutions is a different matter. Yet identifying those genuinely outstanding institutions is almost impossible, because virtually every university and department invests heavily in marketing designed to convince the general public that it is a great center of knowledge. Unless you work in the field yourself, you have little chance of knowing.
- In the course of pointless university study, young people learn a great many pointless things. That in itself does not matter very much. What matters far more is what they do not learn, and the fact that every Western country lacks large numbers of people with the skills it actually needs, especially technical and skilled-trade expertise.
- An engineer in 2025 may quite easily have an IQ 15 points lower than an engineer in 1990, with a corresponding difference in knowledge and ability. Even that need not be a disaster, provided that managers can identify the handful of engineers who meet the standards of the old days and assign the others tasks corresponding to those once performed by graduates of technical secondary schools—allowing, of course, for the technological progress made since then.
Perhaps, in the end, this could be a step toward a world in which what matters is not what percentage of the population has a university degree, but what proportion of the population continues to learn new things, acquire new skills, and improve itself in other ways throughout life. I should perhaps emphasize that this should not be limited to purely vocational skills. It should also include cultivation, breadth of knowledge, and a greater capacity to think seriously about highly complex questions. In this respect, the traditional university was irreplaceable.
Who knows? Perhaps the age of the modern university was only a historical episode.