Two years ago I wrote the following:
Due to the logic of Goodhart's law, all signals are subject to deterioration over time: after something becomes a signal of a quality or desirable characteristic (e.g. intelligence, conscientiousness, persistence, etc.), actors appear who invest efforts in acquiring the signal even though they do not possess the quality or characteristics that justify that signal. To the extent that they succeed in this, the signal loses its original signaling value.
The losers of the devalued signal are all those people who deservedly acquired the signal (degree, doctorate, whatever): they have to share the same status with lower-quality players, and because they share it with them, that status itself is devalued.
(…) they now have to "jump" even more academic hurdles to distinguish themselves from lower-quality people with the same educational attainment.
Another trend is that they leave academia disillusioned with what the system has turned into.
And a related trend is that employers are putting less and less weight on the formal education of job candidates.
Many Western universities, on the other hand, increasingly treat students as consumers; universities should provide students with a pleasant stay experience, and in this sense they should be protected from controversial or unpleasant attitudes that could spoil that experience ("safe spaces").
Preserving the credibility of signals of quality is one of society's biggest tasks. The absence of a method of identifying quality and distinguishing it from non-quality carries with itself a huge social cost. Just as artificially formed prices lead to a misallocation of resources, signals that have lost their informational value lead to a misallocation of human resources.
(Check also this shorter version of the article)
Well, two years later, the results are in. This is from a new paper in Nature:
The authors write:
The Norwegian data indicates the opposite of the expected pattern: educational attainment is over time becoming weaker as a signal of the cognitive abilities. Although this can mean different things, it has implications for the interpretation and valuation of educational attainment as an expression of an underlying trait. As cognitive ability does not equate with merit, educational attainment could still potentially be a strongly meritocratic signal of some broader set of traits, but this bundle may have become increasingly weighted towards non-cognitive factors such as motivation, perseverance, and emotional intelligence, perhaps as a result of changing demands in the labor market15,16,17,18. Others nevertheless argue that the role of non-cognitive skills, such as personality, in predicting socio-economic success has been overstated and does not remotely match the predictive power or cognitive capability19,20.
An alternative, potentially more plausible explanation for our findings, is the nature of the changing educational and labor market. Education might have become substantially less selective, as educational expansions may have made it generally easier to attain longer education, regardless of cognitive ability. This was coupled with a diversification of educational fields, whereby occupations that previously did not require higher education, and that may require other abilities than cognitive skills, might increasingly require degrees. The increased decoupling of educational attainment and cognitive ability could also happen if new educational tracks emphasize practical skills and less abstract curriculums that make cognitive ability less important. This is especially relevant in Norway, where vocationally oriented tertiary institutions are offering a wide range of educational programs and are acquiring an important status next to universities21. They are nevertheless still mainly attended by students with lower average grades and they have lower rejection rates, which could make the achievement of high educational attainment less dependent on cognitive ability22. Drawing on signaling theory23, educational attainment may also have become a noisier signal over time if the cost required to complete higher education has fallen sufficiently. Employers will to a lesser degree be able to screen candidates by using their educational credentials, and demand for other signals will increase.
The increased decoupling of educational attainment and cognitive ability is, I think, one of the factors driving the loss of confidence in higher education.
As I’m fond of saying: trust reflects trustworthiness. The standard way of dealing with declining public trust in institutions is to lament it and attribute some kind of irrationality to the public. From there it follows that nothing special has to be changed in the education system. Maybe just hire some PR people and “communication experts” to change the public's perception of reality? Perception because nothing is wrong with “reality”, you see.
Anyway, the elites must find a better story to explain away the increase in institutional entropy.
UPDATE: A new meta-analysis indicating that the IQ of university students and university graduates dropped to the average of the general population.