The San Francisco Bay Area is one of the most competitive places in the world. Singapore, Seoul, Shanghai, Delhi-NCR, and other regions also rank highly, but the Bay Area is unique in that American higher education applies holistic evaluation that goes beyond standardized testing with defined material to study. Across these regions, the average high school (or equivalent) student gets fewer than 6 hours of sleep per night. Students in these areas are competing to be in the top 0.1% of scorers for institutions to pick from. Private education industries have popped up around these areas. I’ve seen families pay over 100/hr.
So it’s quite surprising to me, having grown up in the SF Bay Area, how utterly stupid many of these students are.
Academic vs Intellectual
Let’s get some basic terminology out of the way. Something being “academic” does not mean anything other than affiliation with an institution that claims to train and educate people. In an institution designed to train people to perform icepick lobotomies, a successful academic is one who passes an exam about the history of icepicks to obtain a paper that says the institution vouches for their ability to recite knowledge about icepick lobotomies.
In this sense, academic institutions function like localized oral storytelling traditions. Ostensibly, attaching education and training to research can inject patterns of discovering new knowledge into the traditions, but these researchers first have to pass through standardized evaluation methods. Much like politicians, academics are not in the habit of questioning the system that vouches for their authority or legitimacy. If you were to look for intellectualism, academia is a reasonable starting point, but only that - a starting point.
Institutions, by definition, are finite constructs that have borders and traditions of patterns. An institution that says “our members can do whatever they want” quickly runs into the problem of its members questioning the institution’s legitimacy and existence. A school cannot grade students if they pursue subjects or projects that its evaluators cannot place a rubric on. One student may want to dedicate themselves entirely to the history of the economics of rope, one student might want to become an expert on the process of caramelizing foods, and another student might want to hyperoptimize video game engines. If evaluating students on their capacity to develop expertise and demonstrate resilience, this is tenable. If evaluating the specific information internalized by each student upon graduation, this is intractable.
Or take a more grounded example: if a prompt asks the student to compare Eastern and Western cultures, and the student argues that the terms Eastern and Western are too generally reductive to be coherent, how could the institution actually accept this paper? If it grants an A, the institution is admitting that rejecting its ability to ascertain truth is a valid option in the course of its training. It might pass the student, but the student’s takeaway is that the institution has unrectifiable incoherence. If the institution fails the student, the student learns that questioning is futile and compliance is the only option for advancement; this learned helplessness works just fine for an institution looking to generate proof of its efficacy in getting students to meet standards.
As such, institutions require some standards or culture of norms that are maintained internally in order to justify their existence through utility. A school that allowed students to learn anything they wanted could not reliably calculate and report progress to satisfy demands for a return-on-investment. A school that uses standardized evaluation methods, such as the SAT or a GPA system, can at least present metrics that map something like budget increases to score increases or college acceptance rates. For the managers of these institution, this is a godsend. It doesn’t even take someone with any subject matter expertise to examine a list of manualized best practices and choose the ones that time and budget constraints allow for.
If they fail, well, they were best practices right? How could anyone hope to do better than the best practices? The problem must of course lie outside management, as usual. Either the kids these days require more discipline or research simply hasn’t come out that allows for the problem to be solved.
The consequences of generating homogeneity are, predictably, a loss of heterogeneity. In other words, standardization and specialization operate on tradeoffs. Time spent conforming to a standard is time lost for developing unique talents. Even worse, time spent marketing conformity to a standard is time spent atrophying compliance to it. None of this is a novel perspective either. You can go back to Adam Smith and Alexis de Tocqueville to find this exact tension described in more eloquent terms than I could.
Smith posited that specialization in factories drives massive production of wealth by allowing one process to be distributed among individuals who focus on one component of a widget rather than a master who designs and creates the widget end-to-end. When broken into simple and standard tasks, the work can be done by individuals who are interchangeable without much friction. Smith also said that a human bound to repetitive standardized tasks would suffer from a much narrower mental state as well, struggling to exercise their creative capacities in novel and unstructured ways. Consequently, Smith argued for universal state-sponsored education systems for the purpose of providing a broad humanist education that instilled a general sense of literacy and civic awareness, so that individuals could meaningfully participate in the world around them outside of the factory floor. It was taken for granted that a workplace that wanted someone to do job would actually train a worker to do that job in the way that workplace asks.
Modern academic institutions have completely abandoned these aspirations, and I use “aspirations” here deliberately, as it would be too generous to imply we abandoned a tradition that we never cultivated.
Harvard University, founded in 1636, was designed to train the sons of Puritan ministers and landed nobility to manage the institutions of colonial society. MIT, founded in 1861, was the product of Harvard gatekeeping educational and financial resources for classical studies at a time when there was a shortage of experts who could work on industrializing sectors like railroads and textile factories. Harvard Business School, founded in 1908, was in part a response to fears that wealthy families would prefer polytechnic universities like MIT to an outdated classical education; a business school enabled students to choose corporate law and finance to retain relevance in managerial positions.
The centralized public school system as we know it today emerged out of the early 1800s to instill a factory or military work ethic in students. Wealthy families funded the Lancasterian System that placed a single educator in front of several hundred children who were expected to sit silently in rows until given repetitive tasks to complete. It was considered effective at building the stamina needed to work long shifts in a factory’s assembly line. Horace Mann, who pushed for a state-sponsored version of this system, explicitly argued to wealthy families that raising their taxes for working-class education would be profitable in the long run. Specifically, he argued that education would make workers more obedient, curbing labor strikes, radical political movements, and property crimes. It also shifted the burden of basic education and training from their private corporations to public taxpayers, though they were against education past what we would consider elementary or grade school now. They actually launched lawsuits against initiatives to establish high schools, and they were not shy about stating that they didn’t want workers who might reject the manual labor their factories demanded.
By 1910, child labor laws suddenly led to millions of students entering school systems that were never built with the intention of educating or evaluating the general public. Enter standardized testing. American psychologists like James McKeen Cattell, the first psychology professor in America and fourth President of the American Psychological Association, were leaning heavily into eugenics to justify their own success in the face of demographic and cultural shifts that provoked anxiety about their social status. Cattell clashed with his German doctoral supervisor Wilhelm Wundt over intelligence as a hereditary trait that could be used to compare individuals or ethnicities, and in fact, he argued that the purpose of education in a democracy was not to grow the capacity of its citizens but to slot them into roles suited to their natural capacities. Sir Francis Galton, Darwin’s half-cousin who was eager to apply the concepts of evolution to human talent, collaborated with and inspired Cattell into a fixation on ranking humans.
Cattell’s victory was paved through ownership of academic infrastructure more than research. His own graduate student found no correlation between Cattell’s “mental tests” and college grades, or even between the performance on one “mental test” and another. The Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale that established IQ testing displaced Cattell’s mental tests pretty quickly. Following his dismissal from Columbia for his protest against the WWI draft, he founded The Psychological Corporation to advocate for his ideas through corporate and government clients and publishing psychological assessment materials rather than continuing to do research.
Cattell had become something of a powerful if controversial giant by this point, and his solutions to the sorting and ranking of people were in high demand from White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) elites who feared losing control of their institutions to immigrants and minorities. Pre-packaged assessments gave a pseudoscientific justification to sort children by their pedigrees, since children whose parents weren’t educated were likely to do worse on these assessments than the parents who had greater capital. Following WWII, Harvard President James Bryant Conant was among many calling for the national adoption of the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT), which was derived from early military IQ tests that were used to quickly sort millions of soldiers. Even though elite families could afford to live in the best neighborhoods with the best schooling and afford better resources for their children, the testing apparatus provided an illusion of meritocracy and equal opportunity.
Until the 1980s, the computers required to analyze the massive influx of student assessments were not accessible to organizations outside of governments, corporations, and the testing agencies. There was no legal requirement to disclose test questions, score distributions, or demographic breakdowns under the argument that these were trade secrets. Then, microcomputers and statistical software packages made their way into university labs during this decade. Governments began enforcing transparency requirements against these agencies, allowing researchers to finally examine the outcomes and mechanics of mass standardized testing.
It is at this point that we can begin to see how academic institutions had a momentum divorced from the direction of research and truth. Studies began to show that when we control for family income status and other socioeconomic conditions, the predictive power of the SAT collapses dramatically, with some studies suggesting essentially no predictive power. In fact, one-third of high-income students achieve over a 1300 while less than 5% of middle-class students do so.
In Washington v. David (1976), the Supreme Court had ruled that so long as the tests weren’t intentionally discriminatory, the disparity across protected classes or socioeconomic groups was legally valid. Testing agencies, no longer able to claim they measured intelligence any more than cigarette companies could claim their product didn’t cause cancer or addiction, rebranded into claiming they measured “college readiness” or “achievement.” Rather than acknowledging the biases of the test, they argued that their tests reflected disparities that should be used as a basis to improve schools.
Yet, pivoting to holistic admissions without standardized testing also just changes the nature of the problem. Affluent families can just as easily apply their capital to boosting extracurricular achievements or application essays as they applied to elite tutors and bootcamps. They still live in wealthier neighborhoods with more opportunities and support for their success.
But remember, this doesn’t mean empowering students to develop their intellectual capacity independently. This means conditioning students towards academic achievements that adhere to the ideals of a knowledge economy rather than a factory floor. Everything discussed so far is about the way academic achievements have derived their legitimacy from claiming to be built on some combination of work ethic, attitude, upbringing, and innate cognitive abilities referred to with “intelligence.” In reality, academic institutions have been as susceptible to the power dynamics, personal career ambitions, and outdated American management philosophy as any other institution suffering from a trust crisis today. Is it hard to see why?
Ignore academic achievements for a brief moment. Consider mental health. Affluent suburban high school students in these competitive districts have a two to three times higher chance, over 20%, of meeting the criteria for Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) and clinically significant anxiety than the national average. This include physiological symptoms like nausea, hyperventilation, migraines, chest pains and difficulty breathing, etc. 1 in 5 “high-achieving students” show escalating substance use between sophomore year of high school and turning 18. Biological studies that examine cortisol levels show that hyper-competitive students operate with stress hormone profiles comparable to children growing up in war zones. From 2003-2015, Palo Alto had a teen suicide rate rate that was four times the national average. Over 80% report constant exhaustion or burnout.
So, to recap, this is a system that fails to measure intelligence, fails to produce healthy childhoods, and fails to preserve financial security when that remains contingent on the loyalty of for-profit corporations.
Then, who is this for? What kind of person would continue to participate in this system?
I have found that the answer is prodigiously stupid people.
Well, that’s harsh. It’s not as if I have any metric of my own to propose that measures intelligence. I use “stupid” as a shorthand, but I’ll elaborate on what I mean.
Studies have shown that GPA has negative to zero correlation with high-level divergent thinking. Big Five Personality metrics show that Conscientiousness (measuring compliance and sense of duty) correlates positivity with GPA, but Openness to Experience (measuring autonomy and curious questioning) correlates weakly and sometimes negatively with GPA. An analysis of over 270,000 Americans from 1990 to 2008 showed that metrics for “Creative Fluency” dropped by 0.6 standard deviations and “Elaboration” dropped by an entire standard deviation. In other words, the average student in the 2000s performed worse than 84% of students in the pre-1990 era.
William Deresiewics, a former associate English professor at Yale, coined the term “Excellent Sheep” in reference to the ideal student shaped by academic institutions: absolutely brilliant at performing tasks with a sense of perfectionism, but terrified of establishing their own direction away from the hurdles designed by authority figures. If there were a train running off a cliff, the Excellent Sheep will having the engineering and design skills to ensure it drives at optimal speed off that cliff.
Robert Sternberg, a former President of the American Psychological Association just like Cattell once was, has published decades of literature detailing the evidence behind standardized evaluation systems, like the SAT and GPA scores, measuring a very narrow band of analytical compliance and memory retrieval. Rather than “Excellent Sheep,” he uses the term “analytical bureaucrats.”
I use the term “prodigiously stupid”, a phrase found in Jane Austen when Maria and Julia Bertram mock their poorer cousin Fanny Price for failing to regurgitate the information they memorized rotely:
“Fanny could read, work, and write, but she had been taught nothing more; and as her cousins found her ignorant of many things with which they had been long familiar, they thought her prodigiously stupid, and for the first two or three weeks were continually bringing some fresh report of it into the drawing-room. ‘Dear mama, only think, my cousin cannot put the map of Europe together— or my cousin cannot tell the principal rivers in Russia— or, she never heard of Asia Minor—or she does not know the difference between water-colours and crayons!— How strange!—Did you ever hear anything so stupid?’
“…it is not very wonderful that, with all their promising talents and early information, they should be entirely deficient in the less common acquirements of self-knowledge, generosity and humility. In everything but disposition they were admirably taught. Sir Thomas did not know what was wanting, because, though a truly anxious father, he was not outwardly affectionate, and the reserve of his manner repressed all the flow of their spirits before him.”
The irony being, of course, that the sisters are prodigiously stupid. Their social etiquette and memorized knowledge only indicate that they’ve conformed to the expectations of their position as upper-class women. They fail to develop the independent reflective capacity that allows them to navigate the world or self-actualize.
So, where do the truly prodigious end up in institutions that are designed to be managed and operated by the prodigiously stupid? They leave.
Studies show that those between 1.5-2 standard deviations above average in g-score assessments leave traditional jobs at 1.5-2 times higher as well. Those with the highest scores in Openness to Experience and Fluid Intelligence are heavily concentrated in entry-level roles rather than corporate leadership. Top-scorers are far more likely to cite a lack of autonomy or excessive bureaucracy as a reason for leaving roles too. Data from platforms like Toptal and Upwork show that the fastest-growing section of independent contractors are hyper-specialized technical workers and strategists who left FAANG and consulting companies; 85% of them report being significantly happier despite the instability of their income.
East Asian countries are further along than America in achieving this burnout. Japan’s Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare tracks over 1 million individuals out of its 74 million working-age population who classify as “Hikikomori”, referring to a lifestyle that rejects consumerism, status symbols, and external social validation in favor of part-time jobs with lower stress. The “Satori Generation” refers specifically to highly-educated young adults following in these footsteps. China reported a youth unemployment spike crossing 20%, with a large proportion being voluntary from credentialed university graduates opting for minimalist gig work (Tangping, or “Lying Flat”) rather than a 996 schedule for a corporation.
There are many who are all too aware of this game, but they play anyways with a sense of detachment since it’s preferable to the volatility of an independent practice. The very worst outcomes don’t come from this group, but the elitists who are unable to accept that their success has been highly contingent on their compatibility with institutions that fail to reward merit or talent. In fact, the more evidence comes out about the role of social and other factors that are out of our control, the stronger elitist attitudes can become entrenched as a defense mechanism for the legitimacy of the hierarchy in which they are embedded. All the flaws about institutions as limited, standardized, and hierarchical are celebrated instead with the aesthetics of intellectualism, even when using psuedoscience and relying on managerial marketing to ascertain truth.
Taken to extremes, we arrive at eugenics, in which elites throw a Hail Mary through the fog of biological complexity to hope some metric arises to justify their socioeconomic outcomes and political influence. In the worst case scenario, if they do lose their status, they can rationalize the change as the result of dirty tricks or a decaying world that throws the rightful rulers out of their thrones. H.P. Lovecraft is a testament to how powerful these anxieties can be, as his whole pantheon and theory of horror is built on his fears of being part of a degenerating world where superior “Aryan” families like his lost wealth and power to unknown arrivals with unfamiliar practices.
Intellectualism in the sense of creative, critical thinking that can both design and adapt to new systems, that develops problem-solving skills as a result of facing problems, that challenges the paradigms of existing institutions, is simply not something that can be mass produced or commodified.
Institutions are only capable of moving around external sources of motivation, not instilling intrinstic motivation that segues curiosity into learning. They can design rubrics, but not teach the habit of rejecting a rubric’s premises to build something new. They can fund training and research projects, but not the humility it takes to be prepared for blowback if they admit something went wrong. They can ask their members to follow a code of ethics, but not engender moral responsibility or courage through manuals or training. As Edward Said said in 1993, the duty of the intellectual is “speaking truth to power,” and institutions are necessarily defined in part by their power dynamics. To speak truth to power requires not having the power stifle your ability to speak, which necessarily puts the intellectual’s duty outside the compliance and comfort of institutional validation.