flatreader

College graduates are getting an ‘F’ in the real world

We graduated from Davidson College in 1982 and 2025, respectively. Connie serves on the board of Davidsonians for Freedom of Thought and Discourse, an alumni group that supports free inquiry and sponsors student organizations including Young Americans for Freedom and Turning Point USA. Hannah interned with DFTD during her senior year, where we met. Although she majored in biology, her work with DFTD and other campus groups led her to the Oversight Project in Washington, D.C.

Our experiences, separated by four decades, have produced the same concern: Higher education is failing to prepare too many students for demanding careers and responsible citizenship.

The answer is not to replace progressive indoctrination with conservative indoctrination. It is to restore the conditions under which education can do its job.

Connie began seeing the change in 2015. For nearly 40 years, her career has involved preparing, interviewing, and placing college graduates in their first jobs. She saw a growing share of seniors arrive less engaged and less prepared. By 2020, retention among some of her placements had fallen sharply. One employer told her that of five Davidson graduates it had hired, two had been fired within 18 months and a third was on probation. She also found fewer students eager to test themselves at the start of their careers.

At Davidson, a DFTD review of public voter registration records found that 3.17% of faculty were registered Republicans, compared with 46.03% registered Democrats. Party registration is not a complete measure of ideology, of course, but the imbalance is hard to dismiss. When one outlook dominates, students receive fewer opportunities to challenge assumptions and defend unpopular conclusions. Davidson is hardly alone. Connie also serves on the board of the Alumni Free Speech Alliance, a national network of alumni groups confronting similar problems.

Open inquiry is vital because employers value people who can think critically, absorb disagreement, and defend a position under pressure. Hannah saw the opposite at Davidson. One professor offered to help students find abortion services but did not mention prenatal or parenting resources. Another dismissed the possibility that COVID-19 originated in a Wuhan laboratory. Several of Hannah’s professors canceled class after Donald Trump won the 2024 election. Those episodes sent a clear message about which views were welcome.

Professors also control grades, giving students another reason to keep dissenting opinions to themselves. Conservative students learn to calculate the social and academic cost of speaking. Students who echo the campus consensus rarely face the same test.

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Administrators shape the climate beyond the classroom. They approve speakers, recognize student groups, enforce conduct rules, and decide whether controversial events can proceed. Conservative groups at Davidson have repeatedly encountered restrictions that pushed events off campus, according to our work with DFTD. The point is not that every administrative decision is ideological. It is that vague rules and uneven enforcement teach students that permission matters more than argument.

DEI policy offers one example. President Trump’s January 2025 executive order directed federal agencies to end illegal race- and sex-based preferences and enforce civil rights law; it did not simply “ban DEI” in every college classroom.

The harder question is whether universities that formally changed policies continue embedding DEI concepts in curricula. In July 2025, the Oversight Project requested syllabi and course materials from more than 70 UNC-Chapel Hill classes. Faculty resisted the breadth of the request, and documents later surfaced through other channels. Months later, UNC System President Peter Hans adopted a systemwide policy treating syllabi as public records and requiring a searchable database.

Transparency will not settle every curriculum dispute, but it gives students, parents, and taxpayers a chance to see what public universities teach.

Anonymous bias-reporting systems raise a related concern. Maxient has said its platform receives about 7,000 reports a day across roughly 1,300 institutions, but that figure covers many kinds of campus cases — not 7,000 anonymous bias complaints. Bias portals are only one use. Even so, FIRE has documented hundreds of campus bias-response systems that invite reports about protected expression. Whatever administrators intend, systems that allow anonymous complaints about speech can make students hesitate before challenging campus orthodoxy.

Academic standards deserve scrutiny too. Davidson’s Class of 2025 profile shows that roughly three-quarters of seniors had GPAs at or above 3.5, the college’s threshold for cum laude. Harvard’s faculty has now voted to limit flat A grades to 20% of a course, plus four additional students, beginning in fall 2027. The policy came after flat As reached two-thirds of Harvard College grades. Elite institutions do not adopt measures like that unless grade compression has become impossible to ignore.

Meanwhile, national academic performance is moving the wrong way. On the 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress, only 35% of 12th-graders scored at or above Proficient in reading and 22% in math. Nearly half fell below Basic in math. Yet the National Center for Education Statistics projects colleges will award about 2.04 million bachelor’s degrees in 2025-26, roughly twice the 1989-90 total. More degrees are not a problem by themselves. The problem is expanding credentials while the preparation beneath them weakens.

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Employers see the consequences. In a 2024 survey commissioned by Intelligent.com, 79% of companies that hired recent graduates said they had placed at least some underperforming hires on performance improvement plans, and 60% said they had fired at least some. The survey has limits, but the signal matches what Connie has heard from employers: Too many graduates need basic workplace habits taught after graduation.

Weak preparation, inflated grades, and narrow intellectual environments also leave many graduates in jobs that do not require their degrees. A 2024 report from the Strada Institute for the Future of Work and the Burning Glass Institute found that 52% of graduates were underemployed one year after college and 45% remained so a decade later. That is not evidence that college causes underemployment, and the figure varies greatly by major and internship experience. It is evidence that a diploma alone no longer guarantees a college-level start.

New York’s 13th Congressional District shows the civic stakes. In June, democratic socialist Darializa Avila Chevalier defeated longtime Rep. Adriano Espaillat in the Democratic primary. Chevalier attended Columbia and helped organize the pro-Palestinian movement on campus. She was involved in launching Columbia University Apartheid Divest, which seeks the “total eradication of Western civilization.”

Chevalier’s success cannot be blamed on the university alone, but campuses that teach students to regard their country primarily through oppression, grievance, and ideological conformity should not be surprised when some graduates carry those habits into politics.

This is why the problem is larger than a few offensive syllabi or one-sided classroom discussions. Colleges are supposed to prepare students to enter institutions they did not design, work alongside people who disagree with them, accept criticism, recover from failure, and distinguish argument from injury. Grade inflation, ideological conformity, administrative overprotection, and weak career preparation all work against those goals.

The answer is not to replace progressive indoctrination with conservative indoctrination. It is to restore the conditions under which education can do its job: serious academic standards, genuine intellectual diversity, transparent curricula, freedom to argue, and a campus culture that expects students to become adults.

Parents spend enormous sums on college, and students devote four formative years to earning their degrees. They deserve more than a credential and shelter from challenging ideas. They deserve an education that prepares them for work, citizenship, disagreement, responsibility, and life beyond the campus gates.