When quality control goes out the window, an opportunity is created for someone

Universities are among the few institutions allowed to select based on merit post-Griggs vs. Duke.  If IQ tests are out for commerce, and IQ tests being among the most reliable forecasters of performance, particularly if combined with selective other criteria), then the only way for commerce to recruit based on IQ is to recruit via universities. 

Back a few years ago, it was easy to calculate the average IQ for a student at most of the top universities.  If you wanted bright candidates you recruited at bright universities.

For inexplicable, but probably ideological, reasons, universities have been both admitting less and less well performing students under the flag of DEI and moving away from objective measured performance (SATs, ACTs, etc.).  They have given up one of their few genuine competitive advantages.  

There has been another trend going on which has been less obvious - the pervasiveness of cheating.  This has been around and trending upwards for the past twenty years but with relatively weak means of measuring the trend.  I hear horror stories of how rampant, pervasive and how brazen cheating is but have no ready way to distinguish the horrifying anecdote from the empirically sound observation.

From Dishonor Code: What Happens When Cheating Becomes the Norm? by Suzy Weiss.  The subheading is: Students say they are getting ‘screwed over’ for sticking to the rules. Professors say students are acting like ‘tyrants.’ Then came ChatGPT . . .

She provides additional evidence that universities may be further diluting not just their brand but the quality of their product.  

When it was time for Sam Beyda, then a freshman at Columbia University, to take his Calculus I midterm, the professor told students they had 90 minutes. 

But the exam would be administered online. And even though every student was expected to take it alone, in their dorms or apartments or at the library, it wouldn’t be proctored. And they had 24 hours to turn it in.

“Anyone who hears that knows it’s a free-for-all,” Beyda told me. 

Beyda, an economics major, said students texted each other answers; looked up solutions on Chegg, a crowdsourced website with answers to exam questions; and used calculators, which were technically verboten. 

He finished the exam in under an hour, he said. Other students spent two or three hours on it. Some classmates paid older students who had already taken the course to do it for them. 

“Professors just don’t care,” he told me.

For decades, campus standards have been plummeting. The hallowed, ivy-draped buildings, the stately quads, the timeless Latin mottos—all that tradition and honor have been slipping away. That’s an old story. Then Covid struck and all bets were off. With college kids doing college from their bedrooms and smartphones, and with the explosion of new technology, cheating became not just easy but practically unavoidable. “Cheating is rampant,” a Princeton senior told me. “Since Covid there’s been an increasing trend toward grade inflation, cheating, and ultimately, academic mediocrity.” 

Now that students are back on campus, colleges are having a hard time putting the genie back in the bottle. Remote testing combined with an array of tech tools—exam helpers like Chegg, Course Hero, Quizlet, and Coursera; messaging apps like GroupMe and WhatsApp; Dropbox folders containing course material from years past; and most recently, ChatGPT, the AI that can write essays—have permanently transformed the student experience.

“It’s the Wild West when it comes to using emerging technologies and new forms of access to knowledge,” Gregory Keating, who has a joint appointment at USC’s Department of Philosophy and Gould School of Law, told me. “Faculties and administrations are scrambling to keep up.” 

If commerce was hiring talent from universities based on confidence that the universities were recruiting the cognitive cream and that they were winnowing them for performance, what happens when universities deliberately recruit lower performance students, cease to measure performance, and provide an environment where cheating disadvantages high cognitive performers?  

If it is like any other industry, demand for product declines.  I wonder how long their endowments will sustain them?

There is also a theoretical opportunity for the striving university outside the big leagues.  Recruit the best, select for the best, prepare student the best and reliably and likely you will both raise demand in a declining market and start advancing up the prestige leagues.  A pretty radical notion but perhaps among the 4,000 or so universities, a notion that might take hold.