When Mr. Fauxi tells you that he is The ScienceTM and he isn't run out of town on a rail, he's telling you that science is a fraud.
DIE is just a con game within another con game.
As long as our companies that hire engineers lowered their standards at the same rate as schools, it shouldn’t be a problem, right?
“The continued embrace of diversity, equity and inclusion in STEM combined with a broad decline in academic standards is producing a generation of scientists who are less capable than their predecessors, warned some scientists in recent interviews with The College Fix.”
In my day (~ 50 years ago) it generally took 6 years of hard work to earn a Ph.D. in a STEM field. Class work, independent research, preparing research proposals, long hours in the lab at night, weekends, time spent in the library reviewing the literature etc. After 2 or 3 years you took preliminary examinations, which were multiple difficult written exams in 3-4 different fields of study. It took months to prepare for these. In addition, you had to prepare a written, detailed research proposal (different from your actual research project) that had to be defended in front of a committee of hostile professors determined to find fault with it. The outcome of these exams determined if you were allowed to continue to a Ph.D. or had to stop at a Masters degree. Those who survived Prelims then had to do several more years of long nights and weekends to complete their research to the satisfaction of their major Professor and the Professors on your advisory committee. You then had to write your thesis, a document usually over two hundred pages describing the rationale for the work done, complete with experimental methods, charts, graphs, conclusions, references, etc. This also had to be approved by your advisory committee. Finally you had to give a public presentation attended by members of the faculty and students of your department along with anyone else that wanted to attend. It was quite an ordeal back then especially since it was before the internet and personal computers. I have no idea what the current Ph.D. process is like but in this era of reduced standards, I can’t imagine Gen Z types would consider the above process anything less than cruel and unusual punishment.
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.
no sh## sherlock
Does ANYONE want do drive over a bridge designed or constructed by one of these DEI hires?