What the College Decline Narrative Misses

I saw this going viral about the apparent lack of preparedness among today’s college students:

This has become a constant refrain in the established media, too. “Kids these days” are over-reliant on AI and lack basic skills, as the narrative goes. It’s easy to find many headlines from the past few years, such as:

My argument is that this analysis misses the other extreme. The laggards get all the media attention, but people overlook the “right” tail of the talent distribution. Today’s smart kids are way ahead of their counterparts from decades ago (e.g., kids who are learning calculus at 10 and taking graduate courses at 16). Large numbers of lower-achieving students weigh down the median and mean. More people attending college means poorer preparedness on average, due to a Simpson’s paradox-type effect. A recent Reddit thread below illustrates the stark contrast between today’s brilliant kids and the stragglers, even within the same classroom:

Taking calculus in high school used to be considered advanced or special, but now, at least among students aiming for top colleges, it’s more like “meh.” I recall being one of three students in my senior class who took calculus at a local community college. This was considered advanced at the time, but now it’s pretty much par for the course among mathematically inclined, motivated applicants. Only about 7% of high school graduates had completed calculus in 1990, compared to 16% in 2019, although it was slightly higher at 18% in 2009. The share of public high school graduates who took at least one AP exam went from 18.9% in 2003 to 37% in 2025.

Nowadays, standing out might mean doing well in math competitions or teaching yourself upper-level undergraduate or early graduate-level math. Or building GitHub projects that show what you can do. The bar seems much higher, with lower acceptance rates at top colleges and stiffer competition.

There is also the issue of confirmation and availability biases. Incessant, viral headlines claiming that college students are poorly prepared subconsciously implant the belief that young people overall are deficient in basic skills. Once people start looking for examples, they find them more easily while overlooking the high achievers. What would have been dismissed as a one-off occurrence becomes part of a broader trend or narrative. If you ask people about the quality of their healthcare, they may reach for examples of poor service. Just making people aware of something, such as news headlines and on social media, may make them more inclined to find examples of it. This is what it means when something becomes “a thing”–it means it has entered the public’s consciousness.

Overall, my opinion is that, on net, today’s incoming freshmen at elite/top-50 schools are better prepared than their counterparts from generations ago, not less. For example, a recent viral tweet featuring JFK’s Harvard application essay was shared in jest to illustrate this contrast:

In 1936, when the future 35th president enrolled at Harvard, this was considered a perfectly suitable essay. In the comments, many disparagingly likened it to something a sixth-grader could write, hardly befitting the hallowed halls of one of America’s most prestigious institutions of higher learning. Others attributed his admission to favoritism, pointing to his father, Joseph Patrick Kennedy Sr., the Kennedy patriarch who built his fortune during the Great Depression. But if you look closely, his essay filled the allotted space on the application form; applicants were not expected to write long essays.

The fact that the JFK tweet went viral shows how the supposed college crisis may be an invention of the media or a product of confirmation bias. I posit that today’s elite college enrollees are smarter and better prepared than their counterparts at any earlier time in history. “Gentile whites” had the equivalent of affirmative action back then. Now it’s much more competitive and implicitly filtered by IQ. As people noted in the comments, even sixth- and seventh-graders today write better than that.

To investigate a possible Simpson-like effect, one question is whether today’s incoming freshmen at elite, selective schools (e.g., MIT or Caltech) are less prepared than their counterparts from 30+ years ago. This is understandably hard to do: coursework and standards change, and a lot of the evidence is anecdotal. This makes the comparison susceptible to the various biases mentioned above.

But, on the other hand, there is also evidence that students at Princeton and other elite schools are less prepared, so the problem may be more widespread than just limited to low-ranking schools, although again, these assessments may be influenced by confirmation bias. Overall, it’s also easy to lose perspective on how far education has come despite everything that is also wrong with it. When sixth or seventh-graders today can write as well as a future president attending Harvard, I would call that progress.