The following excerpt is taken from “Slacking: A Guide To Ivy League Miseducation,” by Adam Kissel, Rachel Alexander Cambre, and Madison Marino Doan (Encounter Books)

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Don’t trust the Ivy League to produce well-educated students.

The eight institutions that make up the Ivy League are among the most selective in the United States, and their graduates occupy the elite echelons of American life. Parents often spend $80,000 or more per year for their children to attend Princeton, Harvard, Yale, Penn, Columbia, Brown, Cornell, or Dartmouth and have an opportunity to punch a ticket to the top.

But what really happens there? Do graduates really join “the fellowship of educated men and women,” as Harvard used to assert each year at its commencement ceremony?

Some do. Many don’t.

Like most American colleges, most of the Ivies grant significant latitude in the undergraduate curriculum. (Columbia is the only exception.) Students not only choose a major — from as many as ninety options—but they also choose the content of their core curriculum. Core curricula historically guaranteed consistency for undergraduates, reflecting a wise faculty’s determination of the knowledge and academic skills most worth having. Today, however, most general education requirements in the Ivies are so general — some arts here, some sciences there—that they are simply another opportunity for undirected self-actualization. Hundreds of course options can fulfill each “requirement.”

These options, moreover, vary tremendously — from serious, rigorous, and open to challenge, to whimsical, activist, and tendentious. This variation is greatest in the humanities and social sciences. For every course seeking to develop a broader or deeper understanding of man, nature, and the cosmos, there are dozens preoccupied with pop culture, identity politics, progressive activism, or hyper-specialization.

Cover Credit: Encounter Books/ Cooley Design Lab. William Shakespeare associated with John Taylor circa 1610.

Writing requirements are even worse. Putatively about writing, such courses indulge the moral and political conceits of their instructors. At the other extreme, most courses that meet science requirements actually teach science, even though light courses are available for slackers. (At Cornell, the course discussing Disney films to learn about animals is an exception, and Columbia still offers Physics for Poets.)

A generation ago, the critique of Ivy League curricula was that a student could graduate without being required to take any Shakespeare, American history, or Western civilization. That complaint remains well-grounded. Today, the situation is worse: Can a serious student find even one core course on Shakespeare or America worth taking?

By not providing a content-rich core curriculum — a set of required courses in the arts and sciences — but instead allowing students to choose from a wide range of courses to fulfill vague distribution requirements, most of the Ivies risk having students graduate with what the American Council of Trustees and Alumni calls a “thin and patchy education, with no guarantee that they have mastered a core set of facts or skills.” Absent strong curricular requirements, universities cannot guarantee that students “learn what they need to know to be informed citizens, effective workers, and lifelong learners.”

Fortunately, a strong education remains available to Ivy students in most areas of general education. They will have to work for it and get wise advice. But by far, Ivy League students are offered, and thus receive, a truly substandard education by any reasonable measure. Dante or Cardi B? Every educated man and woman ought to know the difference.

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This excerpt from “Slacking” is published by permission from Encounter Books.

Adam Kissel is a visiting fellow for higher education reform in the Center for Education Policy at The Heritage Foundation. A graduate of the University of Chicago and Harvard, he served in the first Trump administration as deputy assistant secretary for higher education programs. 

Rachel Alexander Cambre teaches for Belmont Abbey College’s new Master of Arts in Classical and Liberal Education program. She holds degrees from Washington and Lee University and Baylor University and has held teaching and research postdoctoral fellowships at Princeton University and the University of Virginia.

Madison Marino Doan is a senior research associate in the Center for Education Policy at The Heritage Foundation. Her work focuses on affordability and accountability reform in higher education and K-12 education choice initiatives. She graduated summa cum laude from Lamar University in economics and finance.

The views expressed in this piece are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.

A decades-old court order that blocked the federal government from using tests to measure job applicants’ skills was terminated by a D.C. judge on Friday, setting the stage for an overhaul of the federal workforce that could be one of President Donald Trump’s most lasting achievements.

In 1981, Angel Luevano sued the federal government over the Professional and Administrative Career Examination, a test that helped identify the best and brightest out of the tens of thousands who apply for government jobs each year. Luevano argued that the test kept too many blacks and Hispanics out of government, and, in the waning days of President Jimmy Carter’s administration, OPM agreed to pause the test for five years.

Forty-four years later, the “Luevano Consent Decree” was somehow still intact. In January, the Trump administration filed a brief challenging the agreement — a feat which required reopening a decades-closed court case in which the original judge had died. The administration argued that it was doubtful the decree was ever appropriate, and that, with Supreme Court case law outlawing affirmative action, it was certainly not now.

Angel Luevano is still alive, and agreed to terminate the consent decree, court papers show. Luevano was represented by lawyers from Hispanic and black civil rights groups, two of whom did not return a request for comment.

For almost half a century, the federal government has operated like a college that didn’t look at SAT scores when admitting students. Rescinding the Luevano Consent Decree could take the government from safety-school status to Ivy League.

“We’re making civil service great again,” Office of Personnel Management Director Scott Kupor told The Daily Wire Friday.

The move opens the door to technocratic hiring assessments that allow the government to hire applicants who objectively demonstrate the most aptitude. Kupor told The Daily Wire in an interview that the move means Americans may start getting better service at government agencies, with government being more helpful and responsive.

“The lasting opportunity here is: can we change the culture of the workforce in the federal government? Can we make it a high-performance culture? That will definitely be the president’s legacy, if we can make that successful,” he said.

After the demise of the Professional and Administrative Career Examination and similar tests, the government began relying on “self-assessments” to sift through job applicants, as it was the only measure that saw a sufficient number of minorities enter government. Applicants simply declared how good they were at a task, with no attempt to verify it or compare them to other applicants. That led to a hiring process that rewarded boasting and fabrications as much as merit.

Kupor said the de facto prohibition on government checking people’s competency before hiring them — at which point they become difficult to remove — had become particularly crippling in the modern age, with people using artificial intelligence or simply copy-and-paste to take a job advertisement’s requirements and send an application asserting that they had all those skills.

The inability to use objective measures to sort the most qualified applicants from a large pool — as virtually all other large employers do — has profoundly impacted the caliber of government employees. The Luevano Consent Decree was perhaps one of the largest applications ever of the philosophy known as “disparate impact,” which holds that anything that produces racially unbalanced outcomes must inherently be racist. But the fallout went beyond just minorities, leaving little way to differentiate a brilliant white job applicant from an incompetent white applicant.

OPM General Counsel Andrew Kloster told The Daily Wire in an interview that the government did not make any concessions to reach the agreement.

“It was a very easy process,” he said. “They just flat out agreed. It would not have happened without the original named plaintiff agreeing to it and the judge agreeing to accept it.”

“This is really kind of an understanding that disparate impact as a way to measure things is not the law of the land anymore. You have to actually show real discrimination. The explicit argument was that the objective tests themselves were racially biased, and obviously that’s bogus.”

It is yet to be decided whether OPM will institute a general aptitude test across agencies. But many specific job categories are likely to have their own tests. If the government is hiring, say, computer programmers, it won’t simply ask them how good they are at a programming language. Instead, it will administer a coding test to rank applicants on a uniform scale.

The hiring process used by government agencies for decades resulted in hiring that was, at best, random, and at worst, allowed the sort of cronyism and favoritism that the consent decree was supposed to avoid, Kupor said.

“We’re going to be able to attract really, really good people, because they’re going to be fairly tested for their merit,” he said. “It also really does eliminate a lot of potential for a bias in the hiring process if you actually use objective standards.”

“This is a win for fairness, as well as a win for getting American people the ability to get people with the appropriate skills into the right jobs.”