Scientists warn: Declining academic standards mixed with DEI recipe for disaster

Physics, physical chemistry, and engineering (and most other scientific disciplines) require calculus!

Yup. My P-Chem prof insisted that we develop facility in partial differentials around nearly any measurable characteristic followed by re-integration into something that was "useful". At the time, the only way we could derive protein structures was by purifying, crystallizing, then doing X-ray crystallography. We had to work backwards from the X ray data to the protein structure. We also used nuclear magnetic resonance (NMI) to get a sense of how parts of the protein were assembled. Actual sequencing was so primitive that we had to assemble topological sorts of fragments derived from the application of different proteases known to cut specific types of amino acid intersections.

Roll forward to the present time where bioinformatics has merged automated sequencing, databases and specialized search algorithms using tools like BLAST.

In an earlier life I spent a good many years at both high quality state universities and “elite” private universities.

The primary difference was state institutions had wide mix of student intelligence and achievement whereas the elite schools have a very high percentage of top level intelligence and achievement students - typically over 80%.

The Profs are generally better at the elite schools but their main advantage is that they are teaching at private institutions and they have more freedom and autonomy in their curriculum.

And really outstanding graduate level research programs helps as well.

But the big advantage of the elite school is the dynamic that there is synergy in having the entire student body made up of very intelligent, high achieving and highly motivated students working at consistently top level standards led and educated with similarly like minded Profs. This allows the student body to focus like a laser beam on academic excellence .

DEI devastates this dynamic by first diluting the talent pool with lower intelligence, low achieving DEI admit students, and then dropping the academic standards to accommodate their less than stellar DEI admits. To put things in perspective, the Stanford University Class of 2027 consists of 1700 freshman admits so it does not take a lot of DEI admits to have a serious negative impact on the rest of the student body, especially when the school is obsessed with accommodating the DEI admits instead of trying to elevate them and hold them to high standards

Back in the day, about 80% of the class would be SELECTED from the top students in the country, about 15% would be legacy admits and 5% would be DEI admits. This mix was sustainable as an academically elite cohort

Now the Stanford mix is reputedly around 50% DEI and the "legacy" admits are running 25% which flips the demographic with 25% of the cream of the crop students as opposed to 80% 40 years ago.

Standards have to be dropped to accommodate the lower functioning students and the entire educational experience is destroyed because the smart people are no longer interacting with similarly outstanding and high achieving classmates. It's actually a worse mix than at state schools since the DEI obsession drags everything down with it.

This is death to academic excellence.

Similar dynamics are taking over the Ivy schools and even MIT.

And consider the numbers.

Stanford has a total of only 1700 entering freshman.

In my high school graduating class we had one student make it into Stanford. She was very smart but she was in no way the top student in her graduating class. We had a couple others go to Ivy schools and the likes of Notre Dame.

Out of the top 20 in our class, 10 of the best of the best , including the valedictorian, went of the local state college.

It had about 50,000 students and about 3-5000 at least of those students were of the same level of smarts and achievement cohort that Stanford, MIT and the Ivy selected from. So our local state school had 2 to 3 times the number of as good if not better students as the entire entering freshman class at Stanford.

Our elite schools are like the military special forces - they draw from the top level talent pool but that does not mean that they are all the best in the service.. They achieve their elite status by virtue of the fact that they are all uniformly outstanding, highly motivated and high achieving individuals focused on excellence.

DEI kills excellence because it destroys all of those signature features of institutional excellence and eventually kills the institution, whether it be an Elite University or an elite branch of our military service.

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