The Best and Brightest?

We are told that the best and brightest among us can be found on the campuses of elite colleges and universities like those in the Ivy League, Stanford and Amherst.

Is that true anymore?

Consider the percentage of students claiming disabilities and the startling increase in the numbers at some of these elite colleges and universities over the last decade.

Stanford.       38%

Amherst.       34%

Brown.          22%

Cornell.         22%

Chicago.        21%

Yale.              20%

Credit: https://americaninequality.substack.com/p/accommodating-the-elite-ignoring

At UC Berkeley the number of students who report having a disability has quintupled in the last 15 years.

Claims for disability accommodations are not limited to the most elite colleges and universities.

Pace University in New York reports that 37% of its students have a disability, up from 5% in 2015.

Hampshire College in Massachusetts has 38%, up from 10% a decade ago.

Scripps College in California has seen it numbers go from 11% to 36%.

For context, the number of students at community colleges that typically report having a disability has remained flat over the last decade at 3%-4%.

What is the explanation for the surge in disability claims? 

Mental health experts claim that the increase is due to better diagnosis and less stigma for conditions such as ADHD, autism, anxiety disorders and depression.

This may be true but a big reason seems to be the fact that in 2008 the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) was broadened to include conditions that limited life activities such as thinking, concentrating, reading and communicating to be covered disabilities.

This led the Association on Higher Education and Disability (AHEAD), an organization of disability-services staff, to release guidance urging universities to give greater weight to students’ own accounts of how their disability affected them, rather than relying solely on a medical diagnosis.

This was all it took for college administrators, who generally have a liberal mindset, to grant almost any disability requests that are made by students.

The remedy for someone with a disability is some type of accommodation.

At these colleges if it is ADHD, autism of anxiety it typically might mean more time to take a test or turn in an assignment or being allowed to take the exam home or in a quiet room without distractions.

This then results in a cascade effect.

In a competitive environment, if others are doing it and you are not, you end up being the loser.

You end being stupid if you don't game the system.

This young woman at Stanford tells her story of how the system works at Stanford.

Source: https://www.thetimes.com/us/news-today/article/40-percent-stanford-undergraduates-claim-disabled-sw99r3k8c

Are these the values we want from our best and brightest?

We used to live in a world where having a disability was so stigmatized that many with a disability did everything in their power to try to overcome it so as to blend in.

Those with a disability worked harder as they wanted to prove they could do almost anything any other person could.

We have now reached a point where the opposite is true. 

Those with the most ability are claiming disability to further their natural advantages.

Of course, all of these disability accommodations then further diminishes those that have real significant physical or mental disabilities.

All of this also reinforces a statement I have made often in these pages.

Incentives drive behavior.

There is one absolute when considering human behavior.

Human beings respond to incentives. We quickly understand what is in our interest and what is not, and we respond accordingly. We will act in accordance with what is in our best interest. Period.

If the incentives for people are properly aligned, you will get the behavior and result you want.  If the incentives are not properly aligned, you will get poor results.  Whenever you get a poor result it is likely that you will find that the underlying incentives were not aligned properly.

None of this would be possible but for the college administrators that are allowing it to occur.

This leads to another story that caught my eye recently about the best and brightest at Brown University.

Economics Professor Roberto Serrano has taught a undergraduate course on "Welfare Economics and Social Choice" for much of the 34 years he has been at Brown University.

This is the background for the story in Serrano's words.

In part due to the tragic shooting that took place at Brown on December 13 during a review session for a final exam, I decided to move my course’s two exams—the midterm and the final—from an in-class exam to a take-home, closed-book format. I thought that would help students deal with exam anxiety. The exams would be made available to students through an online portal, and they would have 11 hours (for a two-hour test) to complete and submit each. Unsurprisingly, the course enrollment jumped to 86, far above 30, the highest maximum in previous semesters.

On the midterm exam, the average grade was 96 with 40 students obtaining perfect test scores.

This compared to class averages of between 65 and 80 on midterm exam scores in previous years.

Serrano suspected cheating.

He noted that there were a lot of answers on the exam that included passages that closely matched what he found when he provided the questions to ChatGPT.

Serrano told the class of his suspicions but stated that he would not void the midterm exam scores.

However, he stated that the final exam would be in person.

If the grade distribution of the final was similar to the midterm he would average both scores.

However, if there was a large difference he would void the midterm grade completely for the entire class and the final exam alone would constitute the course grade.

What happened next with the best and brightest?

18 students immediately dropped the course learning the final exam would not be taken at home..

Another 9 students did not even show up for the final.

3 students took the exam but merely signed their name and turned it in blank.

The average fell from 96 to 48---the lowest in the course's history.

More than half did not score above 50%.

Source: https://www.insidehighered.com/news/faculty/learning-assessment/2026/07/08/brown-professor-suspects-most-his-class-used-ai-cheat

 

In reviewing the graph above, I can see only two students who appear to be scrupulously honest.

Student 1---scored 95.5 on the midterm and 95 on the final.

Student 22---scored 55 on the midterm and 59.5 on the final--the only student to score higher on the final than on the midterm. That is one honest and hardworking kid that deserves some type of award.

However, they probably ended up with a D because Professor Serrano set the failing grade at 50.

What's the worst part of this?

Serrano reported the obvious cheating to the Brown administration and characterized its response as "meek".

In May, Serrano submitted the data shown above to Brown’s Standing Committee on the Academic Code and received no response. After he went public with his story in late June, the committee, through his department chair, asked Serrano to submit individual complaints against each student suspected of cheating, including copies of their exams, he said.

“What they are asking is ridiculous … I believe they plan to run them through some AI-detection tool, which is well-known to give many false positives and false negatives,” he said. “Their response, I must tell you, is seen as appalling and insufficient by hundreds of people who have emailed me in support, many of them Brown alumni.”

As colleges and universities grapple with AI, cheating must be taken seriously, Serrano said. “We cannot afford to have a society in which a significant fraction of our best young minds think that cheating is OK,” he said. “That leads to a declining society, to a failed society … We cannot choose to become idiots.”

Keep in mind that the "best and brightest" are supposed to be our next generation of lawyers, doctors and government leaders.

Is a client supposed to agree to a lawyer billing double the hours because he needs more time to complete the task due to ADHD?

A pre-Med student claims they need to take their exams in a quiet room because they are too easily distracted in a crowded classroom. How does that work out if they end up being a doctor in a chaotic emergency room?

Will we ever have a political leader again who can speak on their feet without AI writing their speech?

Are we grooming our young  people in our colleges and universities today to be the best and brightest?

Or just a bunch of idiots devoid of values?