Is College Making People Stupider?

Recently, I overheard my granddaughter reciting this old rhyme:

Girls go to college
To get more knowledge
Boys go to Jupiter
To get more stupider.

The obvious anti-male bias aside, this is a clever little ditty, at least to a nine-year-old. But I fear she may have it wrong. From what I see on campus and in the country at large, too many people who go to college these days—boys and girls both—do not, in fact, acquire more useful knowledge; they just get stupider. And the worst part is, they don’t even know it.

The poster person for this phenomenon is Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who has a degree in economics and politics yet doesn’t know the first thing about either. Her monumental ignorance, which is exceeded only by her smug confidence in her own intellectual superiority, was on full display last week at the Munich Security Conference, where, among other things, she claimed that Venezuela is south of the Equator and disputed Marco Rubio’s observation that Spanish explorers introduced horses to the American Southwest.

As the great Thomas Sowell put it, “There have always been ignorant people, but they haven’t always had college degrees to make them unaware of their ignorance. Some people imagine that they are well-informed because they have memorized a whole galaxy of trendy dogmas and fashionable attitudes.”