A new report highlights a reality many have long suspected: a significant portion of today's university students are performing academically at levels that would embarrass a bright 10-year-old. According to data cited by ZeroHedge, some university attendees struggle with basic reading comprehension, simple maths, and logical reasoning tasks that earlier generations mastered well before high school. This isn't isolated incompetence or a few underprepared freshmen. It reflects a broader, systemic failure in Western education that has turned universities from rigorous institutions of higher learning into expensive extensions of remedial high school.
The causes are multifaceted but interconnected. Decades of lowered standards in high school education, driven by social promotion, equity ideology, and a retreat from core skills like phonics, memorisation, and rigorous testing, have produced waves of students unprepared for genuine university-level work. Western universities, eager for tuition revenue and fearful of "disparate impact" accusations, have responded by inflating grades, watering down curricula, and offering endless support services that mask rather than fix deficiencies. The result is a generation of students who can navigate TikTok algorithms and identity politics seminars, but falter on basic arithmetic, historical facts, or coherent written arguments.
This dumbing down carries steep costs. Employers complain that recent graduates lack basic competence, prompting companies to invest in remedial training or quietly lower hiring bars. Fields that once demanded excellence: engineering, nursing, finance, education, now grapple with practitioners who squeaked through on curves and affirmative action accommodations. The societal impact is even more profound: a citizenry less capable of critical thinking, self-reliance, or informed participation in democracy becomes easier to manipulate through slogans, media spin, and bureaucratic overreach. When university students reason like preteens, the entire knowledge economy and civic culture suffer.
The ideology fuelling this decline is clear. The obsession with "equity" over excellence has chosen equal outcomes over equal opportunity, leading to curriculum simplification, grade inflation, and a rejection of objective standards as somehow discriminatory. Elite universities, once gatekeepers of merit, now market themselves as engines of social justice. The consequences are predictable: declining international rankings for Western higher education in core subjects, rising mental health crises among students overwhelmed by material they're unprepared for, and a quiet erosion of trust in credentials that no longer signal real achievement.
Reversing this trend requires uncomfortable honesty. Schools must return to teaching foundational skills without apology. Universities should raise admissions standards, end the remedial charade, and refocus on rigorous, content-rich education rather than ideological indoctrination. Parents and students need to demand value for the enormous sums spent on degrees that increasingly deliver little more than debt and disappointment. Until then, the spectacle of university students testing like 10-year-olds will remain not just embarrassing, but a warning sign of civilisational decline.
https://www.zerohedge.com/personal-finance/some-college-students-are-testing-level-10-year-olds