Conservative social media blew up last month in a heated debate between Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy on one side and die-hard MAGA loyalists on the other. The topic was the H-1B visa program, which Musk and Ramaswamy support but some on the right want to see eliminated.
The H-1B program is supposedly designed to allow U.S. companies to bring in talented foreign workers, especially for high-tech jobs. While few would dispute that the program has been sorely abused, with some companies exploiting it to import cheap, unskilled labor and undercutting American workers, others argue that it can benefit the economy.
I actually don’t think the two sides are as far apart as the fiery rhetoric suggests. Almost no one believes the program does not need to be reformed, yet most agree companies should have some mechanism for recruiting the best and brightest minds from around the world. The sticking point has to do with how much of this we allow and how we go about it.
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Many America-first types didn’t take kindly to Ramaswamy’s implication, in a post he made on X (embedded below), that America simply isn’t producing enough top-quality graduates to power our economy. And while I don’t know if he’s correct about that, I’m also not certain he’s wrong.
The reason top tech companies often hire foreign-born & first-generation engineers over “native” Americans isn’t because of an innate American IQ deficit (a lazy & wrong explanation). A key part of it comes down to the c-word: culture. Tough questions demand tough answers & if…
— Vivek Ramaswamy (@VivekGRamaswamy) December 26, 2024
Personally, I believe the top echelon of graduates from U.S. colleges and universities can compete with anyone in the world. But that’s not really the question. Those people are going to get jobs, anyway. The real question is, can the second tier of American-trained workers compete with the top tier from the rest of the world?
If they can’t, that’s a problem. And even if they can, the belief that they might not be able to, which both Musk and Ramaswamy clearly hold, is a problem all by itself.
It should not, however, come as any surprise. A June 2024 Gallup poll found that only about a third of Americans now have any confidence in our universities—down 20 points from just a decade ago.
This is a crisis, one that is clearly influencing the debate over legal immigration. If U.S. companies don’t think homegrown workers can cut it—if they perceive, as Ramaswamy wrote on X, that “our American culture has venerated mediocrity over excellence for way too long”—that perception must be based to some extent on experience with recent college grads. No wonder they’re looking to bring in talent from elsewhere.
The failure of our education system to create a culture of excellence is due, I believe, to four main factors. The first, as Loretta Breuning recently noted in Minding the Campus, is social promotion in the K-12 school system—advancing and even graduating students based on age rather than achievement. As Ramaswamy observed in his X post, embracing mediocrity “doesn’t start in college.”
For colleges, though, that translates to large numbers of students arriving on campus unprepared for college-level work. Institutions are then faced with a difficult choice: either lower standards and expectations, in essence perpetuating the social promotion tragedy or confront the professional stigma and PR nightmare associated with “low graduation rates.”
The second factor follows naturally from the first: a general “dumbing down” of the curriculum, specifically general education requirements. Many students these days can “earn” a bachelor’s degree without ever reading Shakespeare, taking a higher-level math course, learning American or European history, or passing a basic civics exam.
The third factor represents the culmination of the first two: Colleges do a terrible job of producing independent-minded critical thinkers. Arum and Roksa pointed this out more than a decade ago in their landmark book, Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on Campus, and things have evidently not improved since. In survey after survey, employers complain that the ability to think critically is the job skill most lacking in new hires.
[RELATED: Colleges and the Dumbing Down of America]
The fourth and most significant factor, however, is the decade-long dominance of campus “diversity, equity, and inclusion” programs, which routinely privilege “diversity” and “equity” over merit.
It’s not that people from “underrepresented groups” can’t be excellent. Of course, they can. The problem is that when you prioritize something else over merit—in admissions, graduation, or hiring—you generally get something other than merit. In other words, if entrepreneurs like Musk and Ramaswamy perceive that American colleges no longer consistently produce excellent graduates, perhaps it’s because they’re no longer even trying to do so.
So, while I might not entirely agree with those guys, I can certainly understand where they’re coming from. And that puts the onus directly on colleges to hold students to a higher standard and do a better job of preparing them for successful careers. It might also behoove recent graduates to get off their phones, stop kvetching about having to go into the office, and show American companies what American workers can do.
Image by cristianstorto — Adobe Stock — Asset ID#: 626847651
This article was originally published at www.mindingthecampus.org
