If High Schoolers Are Getting Smarter, Why Are College Students So Dumb?
A data-driven investigation
1. Tens of Thousands of 17-Year-Old Supergeniuses
Elite college admissions are getting ridiculously competitive. Everybody agrees this is happening, some even think to the point that it might be harmful:
Tyler Austin Harper opines:
I spent years tutoring admissions; the ugly reality is that 4.0/1500+ SAT strivers are a dime a dozen. Elite admissions are like a nuclear arms race: a mindless fever to produce more and better products (whether bombs or elite students) knowing you can't possibly use them all.
Higher ed simultaneously stokes this sick arms race (more extracurriculars! another 10 points on the SAT! another sport!) while perpetuating the fantasy that if you work hard you'll earn a spot. Then they turn around and brag "we could fill 6 class sizes of 1500+ SAT applicants!"
…
As
and others are pointing out: something like 40k kids score 1500+ on their SATs per year. There's roughly 16K freshmen spots in the Ivy League, 20 - 25k if you include "Ivy Plus" schools. Even if all those schools only took 1500+ kids, 10,000+ won't make the cut.
Wow! High schoolers are getting really really smart—so smart that elite colleges can’t possibly admit everyone who deserves to get in.
This is driving everyone crazy—most of that crazy gets let out on Reddit, on forums like r/ApplyingToCollege (1.2 million members, so ubiquitous that any high-achieving teenager will recognize the shorthand “A2C”), r/ApplyingIvyLeague (13 thousand), and r/IntltoUSA (39 thousand). Posts with titles like Rejected by all ivies, here were my stats” (they’re good stats) or “Rejected From Everywhere” abound.
A father’s post on A2C sums it up: “My son has been rejected from all but 1 school. I'm shocked at how competitive college admissions have become.” His son “is the Valedictorian of 476 students, scored 5 on 18 AP exams, and scored 1580 on his SAT.” He also sports a list of extracurriculars that, when I read over them, made me—an Ivy League admit!—tear up out of shame and inadequacy.
The post has nearly three thousand upvotes.
It’s really hard to get into a top school these days.
2. What’s Going on at Those Top Schools?
Since competition is so fierce, all the kids who are getting in must be bona fide geniuses, right?
They’re probably breezing through advanced and accelerated classes from the get-go, excelling even in famously-difficult math courses at places like Harvard, and certainly ably reading and analyzing a few novels a year.
Right?
Oh!
Oh no.
My goodness.
What the hell is going on?
Or, as
puts it:Someone needs to reconcile the narratives (and they may be reconcilable!) about the impossibility of making yourself stand out in the elite-college applicant pool and the narratives about how Ivy League kids can't read novels and need remedial algebra.
The easier question to answer is about what isn’t going on. Because everyone’s got a theory, and they responded to Douthat’s tweet with it, and they’re wrong.
3. Blame the Legacies?
Let me tell you why I doubt this off the bat.
I applied to three Ivy League universities: Brown, Columbia, and Yale. I am a legacy for Brown.
Guess which schools admitted me?
Yeah, not Brown. Columbia and Yale have welcomed me with open arms, but I’m not allowed within fifty miles of Providence. Odd!
If 40% of Ivy League students were undeserving legacies, you would think my 4.0 GPA / 1600 SAT legacy application would’ve been plenty strong enough for Brown, right?
Well, it wasn’t, because, as it turns out, Daniel Friedman is completely full of shit!
First of all, legacies make up just 10-15% of an Ivy League class, not 40%. And even that number’s from around twenty years ago—for some reason, since the early 2000s, public opinion has turned a bit negative toward elite institutions and their wealthy legacy applicants, so I’d wager that legacies are an even smaller share of the Ivy League today.
Further, an extremely cursory Google search on the legacy admissions advantage turns up articles like this one from The New York Times which helpfully explains that
the children of alumni, known as legacies, are in fact slightly more qualified than typical applicants, as judged by admissions offices. Even if their legacy status weren’t considered, they would still be about 33 percent more likely to be admitted than applicants with the same test scores, based on all their other qualifications, demographic characteristics and parents’ income and education.
Now, it’s true that legacies do even better in admissions than their 33% application strength advantage would suggest—they’re actually a full four times likelier to be admitted than the average applicant. But Harvard simply isn’t letting morons in. No matter how legacied or how wealthy you are, if you score poorly on the SAT, or have an awful GPA, or write an illiterate essay—you’re not getting in!
The Times article gives the straight dope:
“This isn’t about unqualified students getting in,” said Michael Hurwitz, who leads policy research at the College Board and has done research on legacy admissions that found similar patterns. “But when you’re picking a class out of a group of 10 times more qualified students than you can possibly admit, then a modest thumb on the scale translates into a fairly large statistical advantage.”
It’s an unfair and silly practice, sure. But it’s not causing Harvard to be overrun with midwits.1
4. Blame Covid (and Also the Woke Mindvirus)?
There’s probably some truth to
’s view, even if it’s cloaked in layers of political instigation.Kids throughout the American education system definitely got dumber after Covid:
But high school grades kept on rising:
Look back at that graph, though: grade inflation has been a consistent trend since the 1970s! The colleges know about it. The colleges are adjusting for it. They have all sorts of proprietary algorithms intended to counteract grade inflation—in fact, high schools submit a report with each student’s application that details just how much grade inflation they’re doing.2
Elite schools care a lot more these days about class rank and standardized test scores. Sure there was a spurt of new test-optional (TO) policies in the wake of Covid—but this was stupid, the colleges know it was stupid, and they’re going back on it now.
Yeah, the TO-era probably had some effect. When Yale abandoned its policy last year, its Dean of Admissions, Jeremiah Quinlan, admitted that “test scores are the single greatest predictor of a student’s performance in Yale courses in every model we have constructed.”
He also noted, however, that “students who have been admitted to Yale without test scores have done relatively well in their Yale courses.” And, interestingly, he wrote that “applicants without test scores have been less likely to be admitted.”
In other words, the TO era’s effect was limited by admissions officers’ natural adaptation to the new scheme. They realized that an unreported score was a negative signal, and so admitted fewer students who applied without one.
In sum, Sailer’s wrong about GPAs, which have been inflating steadily for the last 50 years; he’s wrong about students hacking the AP system, which doesn’t “inflate GPA” because the norm is for elite colleges to perform a “contextual analysis” of your GPA that adjusts for any sort of society-wide shifts in behavior; and he’s got half a point about test-optional policies, though their impact is probably being exaggerated.3
Alright, so what actually is going on?
5. It’s the Phones, Stupid
The average American teenager spends five hours on social media every day.
Phone use is linked to massively reduced attention spans.
It’s also linked to memory impairment.
You know what you really need a lengthy attention span for? Reading hundreds of pages of a novel in one sitting!
You know what you need a decent memory for? Remembering what you learned in the algebra class you took four years ago!
It’s a lot less obvious, though, that you need a lengthy attention span to answer a series of minute-long SAT questions. Or that you need an effective memory to score well on a test where all the important formulas are given to you on the first page.
I don’t think college students are actually getting dumber—they’re clearly smarter than ever, as evidenced by the surplus of stellar SAT scores and incredible extracurricular achievements—they’re just getting more distracted.
A smart high schooler can get away with not paying so much attention—reading the CliffsNotes, studying the night before the exam, and using her big fat brain to outsmart the test itself. But at elite colleges, attention matters. So all these naturally very gifted kids forget how to do algebra and break down when asked to read more than 50 pages a week.
Solid hypothesis, right? If only there were some way to prove it…
6. I Have the Data
I sent a Google Form out in a few different places where I know high-achieving high school seniors congregate. The Yale admitted students Discord group, some of my very-smart friends at my very-weird school, and a Slack channel for a semi-prestigious program I participated in about a year ago.4
My survey had four parts:
General academic profile. The respondent’s GPA, SAT score, ACT score,5 number of AP or IB classes taken, number of high-scoring AP and IB exam results, and a self-assessed “quality of extracurriculars.”
Internet usage. Hours the respondent spent using their phone daily, hours spent watching ‘infotainment’, hours spent brainrotting and doomscrolling, and a self-assessment of social media addiction.
Features under investigation. How many books the respondent had read cover-to-cover in the last twelve months, how many books excluding graphic novels, YA, and romance, whether they’d taken calculus or a more advanced math course, and whether they planned to take a remedial algebra class in the fall.
Demographic controls. First generation / low income (FGLI) status, race, gender, and international status.
I also asked what the best school the respondent had been accepted to was, and coded their response as “elite” or not—the only schools I considered “elite” were the Ivy League, plus Stanford, MIT, Oxford, and Cambridge.6
Over the course of a day, I got 84 responses, and I ran an analysis to check whether my hypothesis held up.7
First of all, here are the general academic features of my respondents:
And this outstanding selection of students had a lot of success applying to extremely-elite universities:
Put simply: these are the kids everyone’s talking about.
7. Oh God, They’re on Their Phones A Lot
Not so abnormal for a group of teenagers—which is a bit of an odd result, given how abnormal we know this group of teenagers to be otherwise.8
Is there a substantial difference in social media use between the kids who got into elite schools and the ones who didn’t?
Nope!
If anything, the elite-accepted students might be a little more addicted to their phones, though the difference isn’t statistically significant.
On to the main event now:
8. It Really Is the Phones, Stupid!
This correlation looks stronger than it is… very few people gave themselves an addiction rating of 1, so we can’t really trust the trend seen here.
In fact, if we instead create a scatter plot using “hours spent brainrotting” on the x-axis, we find:
A much weaker-looking relationship. But, hey look at that, it’s very significant (p < 0.005)! Consuming brainrot is negatively correlated with reading real books cover-to-cover. That’s a good match for my hypothesis!
Of course, this wouldn’t be such an exciting result if brainrot was negatively correlated with all measures of academic success. So is it?
The correlation with SAT scores is super weak and doesn’t achieve significance (p > 0.1).
The correlation with GPA is actually slightly positive, and does barely achieve significance (p < 0.05). So, you heard it here first: brainrot is good for your grades!
All of this is, basically, extremely good news for my hypothesis. Spending time on the worst parts of the internet makes smart students worse at reading long books, but has little effect on their SAT scores or grades.
9. What About Math?
Here I hit a bit of a snag.
14.3% of 84 is… 12. I’ll run these tests, for you, because I love you, but don’t expect any sort of significance!
This is strange. It looks like remedial math students use their phones a little more, but also consider themselves less addicted. Are either of these results significant?
The difference in PhoneHrs isn’t (p = 0.30). And neither is the difference in AddictionRating, but it gets close (p = 0.052)!
I’m leaving the Google Form open—maybe if I get a lot more responses, I’ll have something more interesting to say about this soon.
10. You Already Knew This Was the Answer, Right?
At the very least, Tyler Austin Harper got to the meat of it when he replied to Douthat’s plea for a reconciliation:
It’s all about attention span! And attention span is all about the phones.
If you’re still tempted to blame the legacies and the rich, for some reason, consider this: legacy advantage used to be much much larger. In 1992, 74 of the top 75 universities in the country had legacy preferences. Today, elite schools like MIT, Amherst, Wesleyan, and the entire UC system have disavowed legacy preferences entirely. Even Ivy League universities like Yale are announcing critical reviews of the practice.
So why are college students getting dumber right as all of these positive changes are taking place? If anything, the evidence might come out in favor of legacy admissions policies, but at worst, they’re almost entirely inconsequential to the trend of college kids getting dumber.
You can see my school’s report here. Headline numbers: 25% of the graduating class has an unweighted GPA of 3.994 or higher. Out of 4.
Sailer actually put up another theory in response to Douthat’s tweet: blame the Asian mothers? Later sections dig into the more interesting parts of my analysis, but this theory isn’t as outlandish as it sounds:
The difference between Asians and whites is the only one that’s statistically significant (p < 0.01).
In any case, this is probably too small an effect to explain the entire phenomenon. It also definitely doesn’t explain why Harvard’s offering a remedial math class.
Special thanks to Gurnoor Sembhi (
) for her help getting more eyes on my survey via her much-more-popular-than-mine Instagram account.In my analysis, all ACT scores have been converted to their SAT-equivalents using this chart.
This means I excluded schools like Duke, Tufts, and the University of Michigan. That’s because these guys just… aren’t quite at the level of the Ivies. They’ve had college algebra classes since forever, and no one’s panicking because all of a sudden some Michigan students are struggling to read a hundred pages of a novel. At Harvard, though, this is all big news.
Because my sample is so small and so tied to my social orbit, I’m not gonna be publicizing the data. But if you’d like to double-check my work or play around with spreadsheet yourself, please get in touch with me via email—I’m ari (at) shtein (dot) net—and we’ll work something out.
In case you’re curious, that maximum-brainrotter—the 7 hours a day—they got into Yale!
I also wonder if this has to do with students who get admitted to top institutions being judged less and less on their ability to do well in class/take tests and instead on their ability to have strong extracurriculars, due to the high saturation of students with 3.7+ GPAs and 1500+ SATs.
I know many people within my class who reached top institutions despite being "bad students." Not showing up to classes, ChatGPTing their assignments, only studying for tests through all-nighters the day before etc. They spend all their time working on their extracurricular activities for college applications that they fail to remember and learn content, they're unable to analyze texts without Sparknotes and ChatGPT shortcuts, and in general, the grades they receive don't reflect what they've learned. They optimize themselves to do the bare minimum in class to receive just enough credit to get an A, and they end up not actually learning or excelling in their classes and not knowing how to do the skills these classes are supposed to teach. (Maybe they lock in for one class just for the recommendation).
I think the less people think about school as the stepping stone for college, the more people will actually try to learn in their classes. To them, college admissions is just a game, and all they do is min-max that shit. Very cool article though, that was very fun to read :]. See you at Bulldog Days maybe.
I liked this article a lot. One thing that came to mind: the SAT takes 2 hours ish. So everyone who crushes the SAT can focus (and focus *well*, absorbing, retaining, and processing information) for at least 2 hours straight. But then we shouldn't expect to see students struggle with reading long books so much. All they'd have to do is spend 2 hours reading a day (or even 1 hour, if they want to take it easy) and they'd get through English classics/seminal works in philosophy/lots of math exercises in no time. So the *pure attention span* they have is more than sufficient to be a great student.
We might be looking at a lack of desire, more than a lack of ability. They desire to do well on the SATs, so they lock in for those 2 hours and crush the test. But they don't lock in every day, because they don't desire to make reading or doing math a routine part of their daily life. Most of the successful academics I know read for at least an hour a day, even when they're on vacation. If students don't have the desire to do this, then they won't be successful academics. You can make up some stories about why they've lost the motivation (ChatGPT makes it too easy?) but that's pretty speculative. But I think the root cause is not that they can't focus, it's that they don't want to.
By the way...
> It looks like remedial math students use their phones a little more, but also consider themselves less addicted (weird!).
This isn't weird to me. Lots of addicts are in denial about the extent of their addiction and maintain that they can stop any time they want. But also, if you're terminally online and hang out with terminally online people all day, you might get a warped idea of how much phone usage is normal. So someone who uses their phones for 5 hours every day, but mostly talks to people who use their phone for 7 hours every day, is going to start thinking that they're actually a below-average phone user, and hence less addicted.
I also suspect that people aren't very good at self-assessing how many hours they've used their phone every day. I couldn't give you a confident answer as to how many hours I've used my phone yesterday myself without checking. It's probably a lot less than 4.98 hours, though... Anyway, if you do surveys like this in the future, you should probably instruct respondents to rely on the "phone usage" statistics that most modern smartphones will provide upon request.