The decay of Higher Education in the United States over the last half century is a multi-faceted issue that has no single root cause that can be easily identified and isolated. Instead, a myriad of causes including government student loan support, administrative bloat through sinecures, lack of endowment taxation, ideological polarization and homogenization and the highly corrupt and easily manipulated admissions process all combine to create a uniquely morbid entity.

One facet of this issue that has not been as broadly discussed is the system of education testing itself that ultimately influences the students that populate these institutions.

Like the Keju, the SAT and other exams were designed to select the individuals with the highest intellectual aptitude from the population and raise them to a high place in society, centralizing the nations collective intelligence and channeling it into a bureaucratic apparatus to serve the ruling political class. In practice this examination system would gradually degenerate and become corrupted as time progressed and ultimately helping to weaken the state from within.

Cheating on the exam became widespread which eroded propriety in the population. Families of means would expend vast resources on to confer their children taking the exams every possible advantage often exacerbating inequality and defeating the egalitarian purpose of the exams. General learning stagnated due to the lack of practical knowledge or advancement. In the Qing dynasty, this would eventually became a huge problem due to the nature of the exam materials being relatively unchanged from the preceding centuries, which had the effect of stripping officials of practical ability in government.

Eventually a surplus of skilled candidates developed in the late Qing dynasty, with these talented members of society shut out of government through other often arbitrary methods - something that both wasted talent and created the conditions for revolution.

The ETS, or Educational Testing Service, was established in 1948 and was headed by Henry Chauncey and James Connant. These men would institute the SAT in the United States, which would eventually give rise to the myriad of other standardized tests such as the GMAT, ACT and LSAT. Connant believed in creating an intellectual elite that would govern society in addition to being affiliated with the United States government as a diplomat later in life.

In under three quarters of a century, this system and the progeny that have sprung from it that now populate academic institutions have degenerated into a structure that resembles the state of the Keju in later Qing China. Entire industries have sprung up around preparing students to mechanically perform on standardized tests, narrowing their field of practical intelligence and capacity substantially. Affluent families spare no expense in preparing their children for these exams.

Perhaps worse than the formalized and slowly changing subject matter of the Imperial Civil Service exams, modern standardized exams are often modified in arbitrary ways to make them easier for a broader portion of the population to take, creating a negative feedback loop into the educational system.

Like the Keju, cheating (or outright fraud, such as that enabled by fraudulent medical diagnoses to obtain extended time or the unobservant using the sabbath takers LSAT) is also a widespread problem that creates a highly porous filter that selects for uniquely unscrupulous individuals.

As with the Later Qing, the United States also now has a surplus of college graduates which poses a unique long term threat to social and political stability within the nation.

This vast surplus of somewhat educated individuals are a population that has become particularly bitter due to being unable to attain a meaningful level of achievement promised either academically or economically after graduating. This population also often has suffered from increasingly arbitrary and formalized methods of rejection for graduate admissions, post graduate appointments and employment due to a myriad of factors only the qualia used to reject this over saturated pool of qualified candidates is now often on the basis of race, political or gender orientation which is itself dictated by those within the highest echelons of the Higher Education apparatus and is gradually accepted as dogmatic by broader society.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4938760&forum_id=2#43245257)

I just could not stomach paying for law school knowing that I could've gotten HYS or a full scholarship at another T14 if only I were a "URM". Or even, if I had just "realized" that I had Latin American ancestors and so I were in fact a URM as well. That's not even layering in the bullshit LSAT accommodations to inflate scores and the same accommodations on law school exams that ensure every class is booked by someone with a "learning disability".

This whole process is such a load of shit. I don't even want to participate in society anymore.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4938760&forum_id=2#43246408)