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Many colleges and universities have been called “elite” for so long that almost nobody stops to ask whether the word still applies. It is time to stop.
A growing body of evidence — from professors at these institutions to surveys by the New York Times — reveals that a significant, growing number of students arriving at America’s most prestigious universities cannot do something long considered a basic prerequisite for higher education. They cannot read a full book.
This is not a matter of willingness. According to professors who have taught great books courses at Columbia for decades, students arrive bewildered that they must finish multiple books in a semester. It’s not that they don’t want to read. It’s that they have never been asked to. Middle and high schools have spent years assigning short excerpts instead of complete texts — catering to shortened attention spans rather than building the sustained focus that serious reading requires. The result: students who arrive at Ivy League institutions dependent on whoever chose the excerpt to tell them what the author meant. They have been trained to be intellectually passive.
Now add Artificial Intelligence to the picture. As we reported last week, Brown economics students averaged a ninety-six on a take-home midterm and crashed to a forty-eight when the professor moved the final into the classroom. The same pattern repeats across disciplines at institutions that charge sixty, seventy, eighty thousand dollars a year to produce graduates who cannot demonstrate mastery without a machine doing it for them.
Underneath it all sits the DEI agenda that has reshaped admissions and academic culture at these schools for decades. When institutions prioritize representation over demonstrated ability, students admitted under loosened standards arrive underprepared. They turn to AI to survive courses they lack the foundation to engage with. And institutions look the other way because the alternative is admitting the policy has failed.
Here is what the word elite is supposed to mean: a group superior in ability to the rest. By any honest measure, that description no longer fits these schools. What they have is prestige — a brand name built on a century of genuine excellence — now being hollowed out from the inside.
The solution starts where it always has. Assign whole books. Expect students to read them. And stop calling institutions elite that have decided excellence is optional.
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