RUTHFULLY YOURS

Admissions officers from two of the nation’s elite law schools joined the Advisory Opinions podcast in early August for a conversation about how students earn a coveted spot in their institutions. Surprisingly, both lamented the dearth of high objective standards at many of the prestigious colleges and universities from which their applicants came.

“It’s actually absurd, the level of grade inflation,” said Kristi Jobson, dean of admissions at Harvard Law School. “When you have tons of people with high LSAT scores and everyone is coming with a 3.9 and up, how do you distinguish between people in a way that feels objective?”

“At one of our top national state schools, just over a 4.0 is at the 75th percentile . . . At one of our Ivy League Institutions, a 3.95 is at the bottom half of the class,” said Miriam Ingber, associate dean of admissions and financial aid at Yale Law School. As a result, she said, “we’ve stopped looking at GPA as a number.”

While it may be depressing that top students’ academic performance has been rendered meaningless, it should not be surprising. In recent decades, these institutions’ goals have gone from the pursuit of truth and the development of liberally educated citizens to the pursuit of jobs and an orthodoxy of equity.

What’s needed is a shakeup. Thankfully, new competitors are challenging the status quo. New colleges like the University of Austin and Wyoming Catholic; new college rankings like City Journal’s; new higher-education accreditors; and new admissions exams like the Classic Learning Test all offer a breath of fresh air in a stagnant marketplace.

In 2009, President Barack Obama declared that “every American will need to get more than a high school diploma.” “College for all” became the rallying cry, reiterated from the U.S. Capitol to the elementary classroom. Access to a degree became a matter of political and economic obligation. The purpose of college was no longer to learn but to serve the time required to earn a credential.

It’s no surprise that since President Obama made that statement, the proportion of Americans who view higher education as “very important” has dropped from 75 percent to 35 percent. The proportion of students showing up to college unprepared, and leaving in federally incentivized debt, has skyrocketed.

As excellence gives way to access, institutions have adapted. Take the College Board, the company responsible for the SAT. In recent years, the organization has declared that colleges should not consider its exam as the “principal” variable “in judging a student’s ability to succeed at a particular institution.” Instead, the organization has increasingly focused on promoting “equitable access.”

Many colleges and universities have similarly drifted from their foundational mission of nurturing liberally educated citizens. Instead, they pursue ideological purity, catalyzing a form of activism that often descends into violence.

Thankfully, a remarkable tool exists for challenges such as this: free-market competition.

In the decades between the Civil War and the Great Depression, America experienced a higher education revolution driven largely by private entrepreneurs. Cornell and Johns Hopkins were launched by their namesakes just after the war to compete with the long-established colleges. The Carnegie Foundation, Rockefeller Foundations, and families like the Vanderbilts soon followed, investing huge sums in new institutions.

The marketplace soon teemed with competition. Colleges raided each other’s faculty in search of the best professors. Eventually, most schools ended the practice of open enrollment, and competition for students began. In response, the Scholastic Aptitude Test was launched in 1926, serving as an objective measure by which students of all backgrounds could highlight their readiness. The combination of entrepreneurship and merit created the most accomplished, dynamic, and expansive higher education marketplace in the world.

But the Higher Education Act of 1965 transformed college education into a political and policy lever in President Lyndon Johnson’s “War on Poverty.” While the law had many important aims, it piled a mountain of regulations on institutions taking federal money and made the federal government the backer of private college loans.

Since then, the government has been the primary customer of American higher education institutions. And the combination of regulatory barriers to entry and trillions of dollars in government-backed financing has blocked meaningful entrepreneurship in the sector for decades.

Things may be changing. New entrepreneurs are coming to the fore. And like their nineteenth-century predecessors, they are not intimidated by the powers that be. City Journal’s new College Rankings system, the Classic Learning Test (where I work), and the rise of new educational institutions, each serve as inspiring examples.

The new College Rankings provide a refreshing window into where colleges and universities truly stand. By including variables such as a faculty and student ideological pluralism, support for free speech, return on education investment, and quality of courses, this tool will give students the opportunity to view their options clearly.

The three highest-ranked universities underscore the power of innovation. The Universities of Florida, Texas, and North Carolina have each launched nation-leading colleges or institutes focused on civic and classical education. These programs reinvigorate the undergraduate study of a subject matter disregarded as a relic of an oppressive past by the dominant orthodoxy.

But innovation is not relegated to incumbent institutions. Wyoming Catholic College (launched in 2007) and the University of Austin (launched in 2021) have provided vivid examples of what it means to bring competition to the higher education marketplace. Like some educational ventures of the nineteenth century, these institutions were made possible by the investment of private individuals and groups who saw the need for something new. And the leadership of both institutions have taken firm stands against the equity orthodoxy.

Meantime, the CLT, and several new accreditation organizations currently seeking Department of Education approval, aim to hold students and institutions of higher education, respectively, to a higher objective standard.

The CLT, launched by a former teacher and SAT test-prep company owner, stands as an alternative to the SAT and ACT. It presents students with substantial reading passages from classic works of literature, history, philosophy, and the sciences. Its math section tests both students’ reasoning ability and mathematical achievement—no calculators allowed.

With a new civics exam and an alternative to the College Board’s Advanced Placement program set to roll out in 2026, we aim to hold college-bound students to an ambitious standard while validating what we call “classic” forms of education. Only one student has earned a perfect score on the CLT; nearly 200,000 students are expected to take the exam this year.

Both university systems and policymakers in a growing number of states have begun to recognize the need for competition in the long-stagnant testing marketplace. One of the first public university systems to adopt the CLT, the State University System of Florida, is also working to bring the new accreditation models to fruition. Led by Chancellor Ray Rodriguez, the system has gathered a consortium of six public university systems to create the Commission for Public Higher Education. The commission will be a much-needed alternative in an industry dominated by a few out of touch national organizations.

At one point during the Advisory Opinions podcast, Jobson asked, “why are we not trying to support our best and brightest from all sorts of backgrounds to really distinguish themselves instead of having everyone kind of look the same?”

Combined, these new ventures could mark the beginning of a truly competitive higher education marketplace that would do just that. Each aims to revive a focus on excellence. Each aims to rectify the problem of forced uniformity that Jobson and Ingber rightly lament.

Many will declare these new entrants unproven or unworthy. But if American history is any prelude to the future, dynamism will win out against a stifling incumbency.