Writes a friend:

I totally agree with you and I am a grad student in mathematics. As a TA who teaches lower level 100 and 200 courses, it seems as if every year the students get progressively worse. You would not believe half of the stories I could tell. Students are completely unable to critically assess certain situations and this virus even plagues my engineering students (which is not good). Mathematics is no longer taught as a means to learn critical thinking, but rather as an algorithm - there is no point in teaching mathematics this way. And most of the students I teach can't even figure out the algorithm, so it is pointless to attempt to teach them how to think.

All of this goes back to the thesis of that wonderfully written essay you posted by Murray the other day, i.e. that equality is the root of the problem. Today, college is about becoming educated in alternative lifestyles and is filled with sham academics and Marxist professors. After all, these people have no marketable skills - all they do is pontificate about equality and the victim-group-of-the-week. It seems as if every year, they add some new bullsh*t major to an increasingly long list of nonsense one can study. But, there is hope... Due to state budget cuts, many disciplines at my university are going to lose funding (I was ecstatic to see that the social work people are losing funding). Most people do not realize that the problem with the university is NOT the professors, per se. The problem is state funding and state involvement in higher education. State money, state curricula, and state "values" is what attracts these kinds of people to the university.

All I can say is that when I was an undergraduate, I could never understand why my own professors just wanted to work on their own research and teach higher level courses. But I now see why. Lower-level math (algebra, trig, calculus) is not terribly interesting to teach, but this is complicated further when the students are unprepared to take the class (some of my students can't even add) and when they all enter into the class with a preconceived notion of how they supposedly, a priori, deserve a passing grade even though they know squat. It is one thing to teach something routine to students who care, but quite another to teach it to a bunch of brats who don't care and believe that the world owes them. There is even another, smaller university in my city that has mandated that freshmen cannot receive a grade lower than a C in certain courses. I'll be damned before I give a D or F student a C.

Too many colleges + too many college students + egalitarian ideals = degree inflation. Today, we abound in educational institutions, in so-called experts in everything from underwater basket weaving to nerf-herding, and continue to pour billions of Federal Reserve Notes into education. But people continue to get stupider. It seems like inflation of currency is not our only problem.