I can tell you from my personal experience, a college education isn’t what it used to be. In fact a high school education isn’t what it once was.
You can call it educational inflation. And it has distinct reasons for being:
One: When it becomes too easy to enter college you are bound to get a diminution of educational principles. Educators dumb down courses to appeal to the lowest common student's innate ability.
Two: Affirmative action is the order of the day and not just for conventional minorities. It is there for any group that is not equally represented on school attendance roles.
Three: Schools must market themselves by appealing to the baser instincts of their students. The idea is to fill the attendance charts by making it easier to attend.
Students therefore tend to wind up in the easiest courses, That’s why so many graduates are unable to find real, practical jobs. Or why we have so many with easy-to-get law degrees and so few who are doctors and scientists.
And if truth be told, students go to Ivy League schools because of the auras about them, and the contacts they afford. The vaunted Ivies are not tough once you are admitted.
At the College of the City of New York during World War II, students getting deferments because they were science and engineering majors had many of their classes “marked on a curve.” This was comparable to making the cut in PGA professional golf. The lowest 10% to 15% of each class flunked, no matter what mark they got. Classmates competed against each other.
In the toughest college in the city, open only to the top high school graduates. A student with one class failure immediately lost that army deferment.
Compare that to the Ivy League standards of today!
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