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Why do parents still scrimp, save, borrow insane amounts of money to send their children to institutions that have become little more than woke madrassas?
Because, answers BRIGHT editor Inez Stepman, the “credentialing stamp of a four-year degree still marks a shocking divergence in life outcomes. A new study highlights just how rigid our class lines have become.”
In City Journal, Bari Weiss chronicles the descent of the nation’s elite prep schools into wokeism and racial essentialism. Ms. Stepman writes that what is horrifying about Weiss’s piece is the way that wokeness has been turned into a class club:
(I)t’s the signaling device the elite use to assure themselves they belong at the top, and a reason to snicker – and much worse – at the uninitiated. As for the substance of the classes themselves, I have to admit the same thing was taught at my high-performing public high school in Palo Alto even when I was a kid, but the social and academic sanctions for disagreement seem to have been turned up to 11.
From Bari Weiss:
Woe betide the working-class kid who arrives in college and uses Latino instead of ‘Latinx,’ or who stumbles conjugating verbs because a classmate prefers to use the pronouns they/them. Fluency in woke is an effective class marker and key for these princelings to retain status in university and beyond. The parents know this, and so woke is now the lingua franca of the nation’s best prep schools. As one mother in Los Angeles puts it: ‘This is what all the colleges are doing, so we have to do it. The thinking is: if Harvard does it, it must be good.’”
From the abstract of a study by Anne Case and Angus Deaton, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, an academic journal:
Without a 4-y college diploma, it is increasingly difficult to build a meaningful and successful life in the United States. We explore what the BA divide has done to longevity, focusing on a measure of expected years lived between ages 25 and 75.
In the richest large country in the world, with frontier medical technology, expected years lived between 25 and 75 declined for most of a decade for men and women without a 4-y degree, even prior to the arrival of COVID-19. For those with and without a BA, racial divides narrowed by 70% between 1990 and 2018, while educational divides more than doubled for both Black and White people…
Our measure excludes those over 75 who have done relatively well over the last three decades and focuses on the years when deaths rose rapidly through drug overdoses, suicides, and alcoholic liver disease and when the decline in mortality from cardiovascular disease slowed and reversed.
The BA/no-BA gap in our measure widened steadily from 1990 to 2018. Beyond 2010, as those with a BA continued to see increases in our period measure of expected life, those without saw declines… by our measure, those with a college diploma are more alike one another irrespective of race than they are like those of the same race who do not have a BA.
A long, healthy, productive life is contingent on getting a college degree, and today a college degree is contingent on pledging allegiance to wokeness.
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