As I write this article, universities such as Dartmouth and Brown have wisely chosen to reinstate the SATs, But why? The really short answer is that without standards, the quality of most everything falls. An inconvenient fact that I suspect they could no longer hide. And when I say standards, I mean standards of quality. Until seemingly five minutes ago, when people mentioned standards it was always assumed that what was meant were standards of quality, not standards relating to arbitrary properties such as race, gender, or ethnicity. To put this into perspective, the original reason that the SATs were instituted was actually to allow African Americans to get into college in the first place. By placing one of the key criteria for getting into a college based on the SATs, which is essentially an intelligence test, it allowed qualified black students to get into elite colleges and universities irrespective of their race.
What was so brilliant about the SATs is that rather than setting a standard based on inalienable properties of specific groups, it made admissions tied to standards of quality relative to academic skills. Unfortunately, this idea fell out of favor when people decided that more people of a particular group needed to be admitted than had met the stringent standards of the Ivy League universities. First, the standard was lowered for black and other minority students with affirmative action. Affirmative action started creating quotas that had nothing to do with quality standards of the students they were letting in. And this lowering of the standards wasn’t just in elite universities.
This started happening all over K-12 schooling as well. Standards were lowered under the notion of inclusion. But what people failed to understand then, as they do now, is that students didn’t take the lowering of standards as a chance to get ahead. Instead, they took it as an excuse to drop even further behind. According to the article US Graduate Rate Continues To Decline by Christopher B. Swanson, In 1969 American High Schools hit their peak graduation rate of 77% nationwide. That number has since dipped to below 70% today. This has been happening, despite the obvious lowering of our standards that whole time. No matter which statistics one uses, nobody on either side of the political aisle thinks American students are better at reading today than we were in 1969. When we lower the standards, rather than including more people to get an education, it causes fewer people to care about the educational standards.
When it comes to standards, people tend to rise and/or fall to the level of standards that they are held to. As K-12 kept lowering the standards they used for graduation, the students did less and less. It’s gotten so bad that there are a fair number of inner city school districts today that have double digit percentages of middle school students that literally can’t read. There are high schools in this country that are handing out high school diplomas to students that literally cannot read them. And while I will admit that this doesn’t happen as much as many politicians would have us believe, the fact that it happens at all is truly disturbing. And it’s not just inner city schools that are lowering the bar. Nearly all K-12 schools are constantly lowering the bar on the students such that university professors are consistently noticing that their incoming undergraduate students know less and less. And if you think this is just an educational problem, think again.
More and more women are complaining that the quality of men they are finding on dating apps is falling. So, rather than abstaining from dating this lower quality of men, these women are lowering their standards. A growing number of people that study the world of dating, such as the podcast host and soon to be published author on this topic, Chris Williamson, have noticed that men will tend to meet whatever bar the women set for them. And if the women set a really low bar, then that will become the new standard for the men. Yet another real world example of how human beings will tend to meet the standard that’s set for them.
If companies stop demanding that their employees show up on time, then those same employees that were capable of showing up on time last year will rarely bother. If parents stop demanding that their children stop doing their homework when they get home from school before doing anything else their children will likely begin to procrastinate more and more, even to the point of possibly not doing their homework at all. While there always will be a small minority of people that maintain their own standards for a variety of reasons, they have always been a small minority.
This is true even of things as serious as crime. When police officers started allowing a police free zone in Seattle, the crime rate there started rising so fast that they had to reinstate traditional law and order just months later. Portland, OR has become infamous for how badly crime has shot up since they defunded the police in June 2020. We humans are fickle about many things but when it comes to standards, we tend to rise or fall to meet the standards that are set before us. So long as they aren’t unattainably high, most of us will strive for a better version of ourselves if that is what the standard demands. But when the standards get lowered beyond a certain point, we literally stop caring altogether.
Name the area of life and I will show you the negative effects of lowering standards well below the level of quality that we seek. What’s really telling here is not how many different examples I can give you of this phenomenon, but of the literal nonexistent examples of people maintaining standards in mass when there’s no longer any standard left to keep, be it cultural, legal, or professional. When the institutions, individuals, laws, cultures, or combinations therein that maintained the standards cease to do so, the average standard starts plummeting and humanity begins to perform far below its best. In fact, the people that bravely seek to maintain their high standards in the face of such a crisis are often derided and even attacked for doing so. This problem is particularly acute in black inner city environments today.
And the reason for this is well known, even if few people seem to know it. When we lower standards, it temporarily masks whatever the real problem is. If standards are adequately met one year but not the next, we need to figure out what happened. Why did this or that group fail to meet the standards? Is there anything we can do/change to help that group meet the standards the following year? These questions a thousand more never get asked if we just keep lowering our standards to the point of being pointless. When we lower the standards so much that they might as well not exist, then we no longer are getting a clear signal about what the problem is. And the further that we lower the signal, the more compounded and complex whatever the initial problem was will surely become. In this way, lowering the standard has a muting effect to the very feedback that would’ve otherwise told us there was a problem. Many have argued, rightly I fear, that is precisely why many people in many fields seek to lower the standards. It’s the easiest way to hide the problems they don’t want to face or even acknowledge.
Whether we are talking about our standards for parenting, education, morality, or the standards of food we are willing to eat from a fast food restaurant, our standards are what will elevate or lower the quality of person we are and/or will become. And while I would love to live in a world where everyone holds themselves up to the same high standard, I see no evidence that such an individualistic society has ever thrived using this approach. We’ve never found a single instance where all standards were purely maintained via the individual rather than at a tribe, community, state, or national level. We need the majority of people to agree to a sufficiently high bar in order to keep the average person to a high enough standard required to be a productive citizen. This is the only way we’ve ever found for communities of any size to thrive from one generation to the next. Historically, it’s quite literally the only model humanity has ever found that worked. While some civilizations appear to take longer for falling standards to destroy, they all meet the same fate in the end. Either we set the standards high enough that we begin to thrive, or we fall to the level of depravity that our lack of standards will bring about.