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.”

Unfortunately, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez and her ilk are merely emblematic of the current negative trend in higher education, which appears to have reached the downhill side of the inverted U-curve. You’re probably familiar with the concept. The basic premise is that something can get better as it climbs toward the top of the curve, but once it reaches and passes that point, it begins to get worse. For example, some research shows that in elementary education, student performance improves as class size increases—but only up to about 24 students. Beyond that point, outcomes begin to decline.

I’m afraid higher education is on a similar trajectory. For years, the value of a degree rose as education also improved people’s lives. Now I’m not so sure. These days, it appears that for many people, having a degree—or multiple degrees—is counterproductive: they literally become stupider as a result, or at least more ignorant. Perhaps that is because, to paraphrase Ronald Reagan, they “know” so much that isn’t true.

Consider the COVID-19 “pandemic,” when tens of thousands of college students were convinced that the virus was a deadly threat to them, that wearing a cloth mask could protect them from it, and that the mRNA “vaccines” would end the pandemic. None of those things turned out to be true, and at least the first two were known to be false as early as the spring of 2020. But college kids believed the lies they were told not just by the media but by faculty and administrators at their institutions.

Of course, they weren’t the only ones. Millions of Americans were fooled. But you would think people with college degrees, or at least pursuing degrees, would be better at finding information, thinking critically, and reaching logical conclusions. Apparently not. If anything, the more “education” a person had, the more likely they were to buy into the nonsense.

Then there were the pro-Palestinian “protests” that erupted on campuses across the nation during the spring and summer of 2024. Numerous “man-on-the-street” interviews, like this one, revealed that many of the students chanting “from the river to the sea” could not identify either the river or the sea in question. Nor did they realize they were calling for the eradication of the Jewish state. They didn’t know that there was no such country called Palestine or that Jews had lived in that region for thousands of years. They also had no idea how the modern nation of Israel was formed.

And keep in mind, these protests took place mostly on “elite” campuses, supposedly reserved for the best and brightest among us.

Finally, we have the current anti-ICE protests on campuses. Again, you would think college students might have at least a basic grasp of American civics. But these kids seem not to understand that Immigration and Customs Enforcement is a federal law enforcement agency tasked with enforcing laws passed by duly elected members of Congress and upheld by the judiciary. Protesters act as though this is some sort of strong-arm tactic on the part of the Trump administration, “authoritarianism,” utterly ignorant not only of civics but of recent history—the fact that millions of illegal aliens were deported under Clinton and Obama, too. (Read Peter Wood’s and Jared Gould’s “Universities Push Sanctuary Campus Agenda for Illegal Immigrants.”)

I recognize that some young people need to go to college to pursue their chosen profession. I also believe a solid liberal arts education, if you can find one, has great intrinsic value. But for too many, a college education seems to have devolved into a net negative. They come out with a degree that signifies few if any real skills, believing absurd things like men can become women and collectivism is the path to freedom.

Sadly, they couldn’t get any stupider even if they did somehow make it to Jupiter. 

Rob Jenkins is an associate professor of English at Georgia State University – Perimeter College and a Higher Education Fellow at Campus Reform. 

https://mindingthecampus.org/2026/02/25/is-college-making-people-stupider/