The New Dark Age of Higher Ed
Where Effort Is Optional, Grades Are Guaranteed, and Learning Has Gone Missing
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I have taught in universities for roughly fifteen years — long enough to know that memory is a cheap restoration artist, painting over the cracks and calling it dignity. We romanticise the past because it’s too late to be disappointed by it. The students were smarter, the winters were harsher, the teachers stricter, the doors unlocked, the milk cheaper, and the neighbours friendlier. Every generation performs the same ritual: “When I was your age…”
I performed it myself until my father died, and I sifted through a box of papers that revealed, to my horror, that the straight-A prodigy I remembered was as mythical as Brigadoon.
The Monty Python “Four Yorkshiremen” sketch captures the pathology perfectly — four old men competing to describe the most implausible hardships, mocking exactly the instinct I had succumbed to.
Psychologists call this “rosy retrospection,” a cognitive bias in which we edit the past, buffing the unpleasant edges until history gleams like a family heirloom. Older generations reliably predict civilizational ruin at the hands of the younger — Plato complained that Athenian youths loved luxury, disrespected their elders, and ignored teachers. Every generation thinks the next generation invented decadence.
And yet, despite my scepticism of nostalgia, something has changed — not because the past was perfect, but because the university has undergone a kind of slow-motion metabolic failure. What was once a place of learning is now a dilapidated credential factory patched together by precariously employed instructors, bureaucratic overlords, and an increasingly disengaged student body that treats education as a subscription service.
As a lecturer, poorly dressed and perpetually irritated by malfunctioning projectors, I avoid discussing religion or politics in class not out of cowardice but because I’ve grown weary of the student who files a complaint because a metaphor bruised their worldview. I also refuse to stand at the front of the room and read PowerPoints aloud like a malfunctioning Kindle; my working assumption is that university students should still be able to read without adult supervision. My slides often contain three words — a pedagogical provocation which, to my ongoing amusement, students treat as a kind of intellectual waterboarding.
The real problem isn’t technology or pedagogy. It is cultural decay.
Students often ask whether they are worse than previous cohorts, and while it is considered unseemly to say so, my answer is yes — not universally, but reliably.
There are always brilliant ones. There is the capable middle. And there is the bottom-dwelling group who seem genuinely surprised to learn that attendance, work, and literacy remain part of the deal.
One of my best students was a 25-year-old Indigenous entrepreneur already running a business; another, a soft-spoken mother of three who looked barely 21 but confessed to being 30, now thrives at the Schulich School of Business.
Then there were the Europeans — Austrians, Germans, Belgians, Spaniards — all on pass/fail exchanges. They had no incentive to perform well, yet outworked, out-thought, and out-learned a distressing proportion of their Canadian-born peers. Several of the German students later told me they were astonished by Canadians’ boredom, phone addiction, and belief that “effort” deserves reward independent of competence.
These anecdotes are not aberrations; they reflect a broader pattern corroborated by international assessments like PISA, where Canada’s reading and math scores have declined steadily over the last decade while countries like Estonia, Finland, and South Korea consistently outperform us. Decline is not a hallucination; it is measurable.
The collapse of standards is inseparable from the opioid of the academy: grade inflation. When I began teaching, university averages hovered in the low 60s — a figure that would now trigger mass student protests, newspaper op-eds, and perhaps the ceremonial burning of my effigy on TikTok. Today, class averages of 85% are normal. One new instructor proudly delivered a 96% average after her students circulated answer keys like party favours.
She was promoted, of course — incompetence is only punished when it harms revenue.
The inflation isn’t merely a moral failure; it is a market signal. Employers are increasingly blunt: graduates are not worth what they used to be. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, real wages have barely budged in two decades. CNBC reports that today’s graduates are earning $10,000 less than their parents did at the same age. And companies like Google, Apple, IBM, Bank of America, and Accenture have relaxed degree requirements entirely in favour of skills testing. The credential no longer guarantees competence; it guarantees only debt.
One reason is structural: universities now admit far more students. Participation in Canada rose from 24% in the early 1990s to about 40% today. The larger the pool, the lower the median competence. And since failure is economically inconvenient — international students, who pay five times the domestic tuition, cannot be failed en masse — standards quietly erode.
This decline is exacerbated by the precarious underclass of sessional instructors. These are the academic migrant workers who teach the bulk of undergraduate courses while being treated like lightly paid freelancers.
A department head can cancel a single section and instantly vaporize 25% of a sessional’s income. Many teach at two or three institutions simultaneously, sprinting between campuses like educational Uber drivers. Meanwhile, permanent faculty are increasingly insulated, unaccountable, and in some cases functionally retired while still employed.
I remember the one at Ryerson who wrote (according to her Masters thesis evaluator) at an 8th grade level, she brings in guest speakers for every class, doesn’t come herself, and gets a TA to do all her marking. What does she do? I supposed she monitors email, but doesn’t write assignments or exams as they the are just copied from the textbook.
Universities compensate for their financial mismanagement not with innovation but with austerity: hiring cheaper, less qualified instructors. I have seen people with no legal training teach law courses, engineers teach marketing, and retirees who haven’t opened a textbook in twenty years teach digital strategy. Students do not complain because they have been conditioned not to expect relevance, coherence, or rigour.
Academic dereliction is now so casual it has become part of the institutional climate: professors reading newspapers during class, assigning students to teach entire semesters through recycled presentations, reusing quiz banks that have been available on Chegg.com for a decade. Universities block pornography on their networks (one assumes), but refuse to block cheating platforms. The message is clear: cheating is tolerable, but sex is not. Or perhaps they just don’t want sticky seats in the study cubicles.
Administrative bloat accelerates the decay. According to the Fraser Institute, non-teaching expenditures per student have grown by more than 40% in eight years. Universities hire associate vice-deans of wellness, climate coordinators, EDI consultants, student engagement strategists, and legions of mid-level management whose job is to produce documents no one reads. Most “work from home” and nobody is sure what they do, they occasionally pop up on some Zoom meeting and say nothing.
Meanwhile, classrooms deteriorate like neglected rental units.
The tragedy is that education once required struggle. Learning was friction: reading, writing, revising, failing, thinking. Today it is two steps: class attendance (optional) and grade receipt (mandatory). The middle step — education — has been murdered.
Students graduate with honours without opening a textbook. They cling to PowerPoints like life rafts. They demand passing grades because their “effort” deserves validation. They file complaints alleging that their professor gave a girl a strange look or mentioned that Israel made the desert bloom — which apparently constitutes an act of colonial aggression.
The result is a generation that spends fewer hours on academics than at any point in history. In 1961, students spent 40 hours a week studying. By 2003, it fell to 27. Today, by most analyses, it is closer to 15–18, depending on the field.
What we now call “education” is not preparation for adulthood; it is aestheticized drift — a stylized loitering through four years of institutional décor. The classroom, once the arena of inquiry, has become a sort of ceremonial holding pen in which “activity” is mistaken for intellect.
Grading, originally intended to measure learning, has been repurposed as a kind of clerical sacrament: perform the motions, collect the blessing, receive the parchment. The implicit faith — touching in its innocence — is that learning will occur somewhere in the narrow gap between “classroom activity” and “assessment,” as if knowledge were a kind of benign mould that might grow on students provided they remain in the same humidity for long enough.
And consider this grotesque paradox: education is the only service industry in which the customer prepays for a product and then celebrates when it is not delivered. Snow day? Cancelled class? Strike? Pandemic shutdown?
Champagne corks and TikToks all around. Nowhere else could a business withhold the very thing it sells and be met with jubilation. If that does not betray a subterranean, collective understanding that no learning is actually taking place — that the commodity being purchased is not education but the ceremonial credential — then I do not know what does.
It is credentialism as cargo cult, parchment in place of enlightenment, and the participants cheer the absence of learning as proof that none was expected.
And the market is noticing. Critical thinking barely improves over four years of university, according to the landmark Arum & Roksa study “Academically Adrift.”
The famous statistic that graduates earn more than non-graduates collapses under scrutiny; it is a selection effect, not a treatment effect. The students with ambition, IQ, and discipline do better — with or without the degree.
The degree is not producing value; it is certifying pre-existing value.
If major companies decide to test applicants directly — bypassing the entire multi-billion-dollar credential machine — the university model could collapse faster than Blockbuster.
It is already happening. We just haven’t admitted it.
The market, unlike the university, does not practice rosy retrospection. It rewards competence, not credentials; discipline, not excuses; intelligence, not performative fragility. If employers start treating driven 18-year-olds as potential hires rather than academically unhatched larvae, universities will face two uncomfortable questions:
What are we actually teaching?
And why should anyone pay for it?
Civilisations do not collapse suddenly. They corrode through cowardice, convenience, and the substitution of illusion for effort. Our universities have become the cathedral of illusion — awarding praise without excellence, degrees without learning, and moral fervour without knowledge.
We tell ourselves the past was better, but the lie is unnecessary. The present is indictment enough.
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