OPINION:
A 2021 survey of Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) membership has been making the rounds recently for a finding that is baffling many on the political right and reinforcing the smugness of many on the left: 80% of members age 25 or older have college degrees.
Some 35% hold a master’s, doctorate or professional degree. And nearly half—42%—were unemployed when the survey was taken.
Socialism’s proponents point to these figures as proof of the widespread appeal of their ideology in the face of capitalism’s failure (It’s not just the working class that’s fed up!). Conservative pundits worry that they may be right (If these people are educated and still voting for leftists with horrible ideas, maybe socialism really is winning).
But there’s that word: Educated. What Gen Z and up consider educated may not, in fact, be what these DSA members are.
In the past few decades, higher education has taken a sharp nosedive in quality and rigor, beginning with admissions. Starting around 2005 — the year, ironically, that the SATs underwent a major overhaul to become ‘better aligned’ with what was being taught in schools — SAT scores began to decline.
Scores have generally stayed down since, despite another big exam change in 2016 to “level the playing field” among test takers.
No surprise, then, that colleges dropped their bars way down when deciding whom to let in. If they hadn’t, none of them would have had much of a student body.
In 2020, in response to the global pandemic, many schools — including the once-vaunted Ivies — suspended admissions testing requirements and left the suspensions in place long after the pandemic was over.
Now that many schools have restarted the requirements, applications are down. Imagine that.
But entrance exam taken or not, when accepted students have arrived at their four-year institutions, by and large, they’ve been met with the pale ghost of what once constituted higher ed.
Grade inflation now seems to be the rule, not the exception. From 1990 to 2020, the median college GPA rose by 21.5%, according to the Department of Education.
Most grades given in college now are As and Bs, according to Mark Horowitz in Psychology Today. Ds and Fs are “vanishingly rare,” he writes, and there’s talk of removing the practice of grade-giving entirely.
Course content is also much diminished from years past. Instead of being taught what really happened, students are indoctrinated into history as the anti-American, socialist contingent would have it.
Brown University, for example, offers “Race, Power and Privilege” courses, under the umbrella of which come such gems as “Myriad Mediterraneans: Archaeology, Representation, and Decolonization” and “Race and Gender in the Scientific Community.”
What would an A in either of those classes even mean?
At Georgetown, the 2026 fall menu of the Department of Arabic and Islamic Studies offers a course titled simply “the Qur’an.” It promises to “examine the Qur’an as a text and as a revelation that has a history of reception among communities of believers,” among other gibberish.
You can bet your hijab it won’t “examine” Quran Surah 8:12, which urges Muslims to “terrorize and behead those who believe in scriptures other than Quran” or 9:5, which tells Muslims to “slay the idolaters wherever you find them, and take them captive, and besiege them.”
And no surprise here: Georgetown also offers an entire class on the reality-free “fact” that Israel is an apartheid state. It’s called “Challenging Israel’s Apartheid.”
Then there’s the always-fertile-for-disinformation women’s studies, a department at which, at the University of California, Berkeley, students can enroll in “Queer Disability Studies” and “Gender and Capitalism.” The latter promises to go into “the historical coproduction of male domination and capitalism; and the way gender operates in the constitution of selves.” What?
While that’s just what a few of the ‘elite’ schools have been peddling, things seem just as bad at some of the nation’s public institutions. In recent years, students at the University of Kansas could take “Angry White Male Studies,” a class that looked at the “rise” of the “angry white male” in America.
So take with a blood-pressure-raising dose of salt the “educated” label now affixed to so many young-adult DSA members. Most of them took a watered-down entrance exam if they took one at all, then spent four years being coddled, catered to and brainwashed. It’s little wonder so many of them are now without paid work.
• Anath Hartmann is deputy commentary editor for The Washington Times.
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