The Hidden Gems Have Already Been Mined

Make College for Rich Kids Again (Part 1)

College used to be for rich kids. Before the SAT and the accompanying cultural swerve toward meritocracy, admissions were doled out unhesitatingly to WASP-y guys with the ideal social background and impressive financial resources. The people going to Ivy League schools weren’t uniformly brilliant, and the admissions rates were way higher. Conversely, it wasn’t true that brainy people outside of those social circles were very likely to attend universities, nor was it the case that bright students were particularly likely to attend a select group of ultra-prestigious, only-nerds-allowed schools even if they did go.¹

Basically, how smart and/or hardworking someone was (as a teenager) had a much weaker correlation with their educational background than it does now. Mostly, this sea change is viewed as bettering society, and the acien régime (wherein college was for rich kids) is seen as patently retrograde and happily defunct. Moreover, everyone is itching to double down on this longtime meritocratic shift, and they view the journey towards an unalloyed meritocratic educational system as frustratingly incomplete—an unrealized ideal that we should use as a polestar for society to muscle towards.

Lefties complain that racism, bigotry, legacy admissions, and the uneven economic conditions among potential students currently prevent the realization of anything like true meritocracy. Right-wingers, in increasingly unhinged fits of paranoia, complain that affirmative action (people call this DEI, suddenly) constantly spoils would-be meritocratic hiring/admissions procedures at every turn and is lurking behind every mishap. But both sets of partisans presume from the outset that some kind of unerring meritocracy is the end goal for arranging civilization, primarily mediated via higher ed: everyone wants college to be even more efficient in parceling out peoples’ fates based on their skills and efforts alone, without any kind of boost or headwind from attributes like race, class, etc. But this fastidious society-wide effort to even further refine college admissions criteria is precisely backward: now is the time to jump ship. We should make college for rich kids again.

The original (and understandable) purpose of injecting some meritocracy into higher ed was merely to locate some hidden gems and redirect them into an unfamiliar arena that would better utilize their gifts.² Before, there was lots of talent scattered around the country, obscured from notice. This hidden-gems logic makes less sense nowadays, given how anyone with a shred of ability is urgently pressured to join the paper chase, and it’s unlikely that shifting college back toward focusing on rich kids would also reverse the social climate a hundred years into a drastic human capital shortfall with a bunch of undiscovered geniuses pursuing agricultural work or coal mining because of class prejudices or some fossilized anti-white-collar mentality. Folks no longer need universities to reinforce the worldview celebrating office work and cognitive elitism—a sufficient portion of that will survive.

A century ago, people undervalued education at a time when massive outstanding scientific and engineering windfalls were abundant; plus, whole categories of people were discouraged from trying their hand at it and also effectively disallowed from advancing much in the workplace. The modern situation is totally different. Back then, the social hierarchy needed to be reshuffled to circumvent the prejudices of the aristocratic, old-money boarding school crowds and unearth reserves of aptitude among untapped populations. But the wells have nearly run dry.

If anything, the university system has started concealing talent more than highlighting it. For example, if hidden gems are really gem-like because of innate abilities, then the university system is greatly interfering with their discovery by systematically underestimating men.³

Otherwise, if brainpower is merely one ingredient in a complex mélange of traits that constitute a labor market gem, it’s still unlikely that the pool of attributes useful for academic advancement corresponds to the challenges of varied white-collar jobs as flawlessly as everyone supposes or that the skill deficits of firms targeting college grads all perfectly overlap. More likely, colleges stretching career arcs to include a decades-long wind-up procedure shelves most young talent away from the more finely grained assessment of workforce participation and generates skewed baseline appraisals that the markets take years to correct.

More straightforwardly, with so many people attending college now, the true gems have been overwhelmed and re-hidden. Despite the fact that individual colleges are much trickier to get into these days, the median college student’s capabilities have plunged (mean undergrad IQ has declined to 102). The typical student shouldn’t even be there. The outgoing signal from universities is no longer that college grads are gems, but that non-grads are so un-gem-like that they’re basically worthless and should be treated dismissively by hiring managers moving forward, which both results in swelling attendance that encompasses people who aren’t academically inclined and also is a poisonous oversimplification of what’s valuable in a human worker.

So long as making college for rich kids produces some offsetting beneficial outcomes and rare mental gifts remain noticeable/appreciated, society could afford to be much less exacting in its analysis of academic mediocrity. We should reconsider the possibility that it’s okay for someone with a half-decent SAT to enjoy welding—maybe then people would be less judgmental of non-college workers and/or more proud of their non-college careers, and also then maybe people could more freely select careers based on a less concentrated array of faculties, rather than endlessly trying to leverage some degree they were pressured to get and that’s hardly reflective of their temperament and affinities. Maybe it’s okay if a few hidden gems remain hidden.

Sadly, it’s less crucial to discover these hidden gems now anyway, given the persistent slowdown in innovation and scientific progress from the removal of low-hanging fruit, and if AI takes over the research landscape, their utility could shrink further. Even then, the longstanding pattern of company founders dropping out from college suggests that formal education isn’t necessarily spurring entrepreneurship. Contrariwise, how much economic vitality has been drained from society because any misstep in the long ascent to professional-managerial class could be fatal nowadays? Civilization is currently overdosing on risk aversion, and affixing our meritocracy to the university systems is a major causal factor.

Also, making college for rich kids doesn't prevent freakishly gifted folks from showcasing enough promise to acquire educational opportunities through some kind of scholarship or tuition waiver or whatever. Veritable academic standouts can still be bankrolled to acquire human capital, but they’d be atypical students—the key is to avoid subsidizing signaling.

Moreover, so long as the hidden gems are reliably uncovered by firms and researchers—which is doable without universalizing post-secondary education—it shouldn’t be that costly for the bulk of workers (including some of these gems) to bypass post-secondary education, since the theory that university students are accruing economically valuable skills throughout their coursework is a fantasy. I’ve explained before that the primary mission of the modern higher ed rigmarole is signaling rather than conferring human capital that’s relevant in the workplace, and as I argued in my anti-STEM essay, the imagined usefulness of education is exaggerated even for pursuits like computer science and medicine:

The notion that STEM learning is regularly being deployed in the workplace by anything more than a pitiful fraction of the STEM workforce is an unduly romantic picture of the labor market. Truly cerebral work is a very recherché privilege that people are desperately competing for, and those with undergraduate degrees in biology, chemistry, or math are not often getting hired to make good money as any kind of biologist, chemist, or mathematician. Even something like computer science, which is supposed to be a paragon of marketable, skill-conferring education, is a richly ironic example, since there’s a sizable mismatch between CS coursework in universities and the job duties of most software devs.

Professional degree programs such as law or medicine are probably near the upper limit of how directly education can translate to workplace competency, and even those cases are surprisingly dubious. Ask your doctor friends about how competent the interns are when they show up for residency or how smoothly the teaching hospitals operate in July when the new cohort arrives; the bulk of a physician’s capabilities are acquired during their residency—on the job, in the hospital, focusing on their specialty—not in a classroom. Again, it’s not that all education is bogus, but if even these more tailored, professional-degree programs are really outputting malleable talent more often than plug-and-play workers, then presumptions about the utility of STEM education deserve heightened skepticism.

And even if a job does require knowledge that’s ordinarily obtained via university education, that material can now be readily absorbed outside the academy. Computer science became the degree du jour during the 2010s because of an anomalous influx of career opportunities, but it’s obviously learnable elsewhere—even the lectures from elite schools are available online, and the uncommon presence of genuine labor demand galvanized speedy fabrication of alternate pathways to developer competency through stuff like boot camps and online walkthroughs.

Students attending Harvard just to learn a bit of programming showcases just how misused and pointless the universities have become. Employers could design more bespoke syllabi than professors and form superior judgments about whether someone has ascertained the relevant material well enough to be salaried. My point here is simply that even in rare cases where colleges do impart some residue of usable knowledge, making college for rich kids again wouldn’t render that knowledge inaccessible.

At some point, colleges started suffocating opportunities for non-college-grads much more effectively than providing opportunities for hidden intellectual gems. Once we strip out all the wiring that was installed to retrofit universities for talent detection and signaling, we’re left with the skeleton of an aristocratic indulgence from an age long past, but the fear that reversion to this old system will funnel opportunities away from more deserving people misunderstands the other variables at play and supposes that businesses would still refuse to hire non-college workers even if college degrees were flattened into an unhelpful proxy for wealth.

It also presupposes that businesses would be incapable or unwilling to organize an alternative strategy for locating talent, but universities re-adopting their goals from the 1920s would not likewise entail a cultural setback to the mores of the 1920s. Social values, job market, hiring mentality, and valuation of talent all differ radically from back then. Remaking college for rich kids doesn’t mean reserving all the half-decent labor opportunities for the highest bidders; it means ditching the notion that college is an indispensable prerequisite for social esteem and anything surpassing the most humble career ambitions.

1. Herrnstein, R.J. & Murray, C., The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life, Simon and Schuster (2010) at 38-9.

2. See Chapter 6 of Michael Sandel’s The Tyranny of Merit: Can We Find The Common Good? Picador (2021) for the backstory here.

3. In my essay on the SAT, I mentioned that men score twice as many 800s on the math section, despite females outshining men grades-wise.