The cross-campus coming-out party for the Osama Bin Laden generation this week was a splash of cold water on the face of the nation. Much as the COVID-19 pandemic alerted parents to the rot pervading K-12 education, scenes from Columbia University, UCLA, and other elite campuses have awakened the public to the perverse priorities of higher education. Political activism supplanted the pursuit of truth as the telos of our university system years ago, but the public was largely unaware of this development. It’s safe to say they are now.
And thanks to numerous “man on the street” interviews with student activists that have gone viral in recent days, the public is now also aware of the intellectual mediocrity roaming our most hallowed halls of education. The very individuals who participated in the idiotic demonstrations this week are destined to become the next generation of bosses in government and industry by virtue of the name on their degrees. The same people who waved banners that read “Divest From Queer Death Without Exception,” which is a statement of such ignorance that it momentarily stupifies the observer, are slated to be in charge of the economy as it attempts to fend off China for the remainder of the 21st century.
This is a sobering fact and one that should snap the nation into immediate attention. An economy led by people who don’t know how to do anything is destined to crash — or at least be overtaken by increasingly autonomous technology.
As such, barriers between Gen Zombie Ivy Leaguers and positions of authority must now be erected. Employers, in particular, need to adopt new hiring strategies that weed out no-nothing radicals who managed to acquire prestigious degrees.
One such economy-wide practice would be for a critical mass of employers to require a college exit exam, which would attempt to quantify not only the knowledge acquired by graduates but also their general aptitude. The exit exam would benefit graduates who worked hard during their university years as well as help employers sift through stacks of resumes that include scant work history.
The test could be taken numerous times, just like the SAT, and it could function as something akin to a GED for college students. In time, students might bypass the corrupt university system altogether and seek more affordable paths toward acquiring the knowledge needed to pass the exit exam. This would also level the playing field for students who attended less prestigious schools because they were not able to afford test preparation services or college counseling during the application process.
Professor Richard Vedder of Ohio State University, the founding director of the Center for College Affordability and Productivity in Washington, D.C., has long advocated the adoption of a third-party certified exit exam that would require graduates to demonstrate proficiency in core disciplines as well as critical reasoning. A persuasive writing portion would require graduates to analyze information and develop compelling arguments for a point of view, which is an increasingly rare skill due to pervasive student cheating with AI chatbots on school essays. A proctored writing exam would enable employers to discover which students can think for themselves and which cannot.
The idea of an exit exam has garnered plentiful criticism over the years. For one, critics argue that no single test could account for varied content areas of the many disciplines studied at universities. This challenge, in their view, reduces the exit exam to a test of general cognitive ability, which remains largely stable throughout life.
Developing a single exam for employers of varying industries will indeed be difficult, but far from impossible. Certain sections of the exam could be altered to fit the industry a graduate hopes to enter — the exit exam for the fashion industry could have its own 50-question section that would differ from the exam for the financial industry, for instance.
Further, a general aptitude test would be enormously valuable to employers, since tests of general cognitive ability, such as the IQ test, remain the best predictors of professional success. And though cognitive ability remains largely static, the test would benefit graduates who nurtured their aptitude through good study habits and the avoidance of overconsumption of alcohol, drugs, and technology. A long exit test (Prof. Vedder has proposed a 5.5-hour exit exam) would also measure the mental stamina of graduates and ability to remain focused for long stretches of time.
In a viral video from the demonstrations at NYU earlier in the week, a young woman with a hoop through her septum was approached and asked what the school had done wrong. “I honestly don’t know,” she replied. She then turned and asked a masked woman standing next to her in the throng if she knew. The latter simply shrugged and said, “I wish I was more educated.”
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We do too. We are frightened that college students at elite schools seem to know so little about anything these days, and we are horrified by the seemingly direct relationship between ignorance and self-esteem in this generation.
A college exit exam would at least allow us to put a number on the problem so we can begin to correct it.
Peter Laffin is a contributor at the Washington Examiner. His work has also appeared in RealClearPolitics, the Catholic Thing, and the National Catholic Register.
