American Colleges Are Building a New Elite

On paper, he should have been the dream candidate. IQ over 145. SAT score of 1580. Valedictorian. Varsity athlete. Student-government leader. Dozens of AP classes. In a more rational time, dominated by more rational minds, that résumé would have been a golden ticket. The young man could have had his pick from the likes of Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. Instead, rejection after rejection after rejection. No scandal. No black mark. Just a long, rather brutal silence from the institutions that claim to champion excellence.

The story of this anonymous young man, shared by his frustrated father, went viral last month for several reasons. First, his rejections were, and still are, undeniably absurd. Second, his story taps into something millions of American families are waking up to: The rules have changed, and not in the way the Ivy League wants you to think. Officially, elite schools offer a neat story. Competition has exploded. Applications are up. Acceptance rates are down. The bar is simply higher than ever before. But look closer and you’ll find gaping holes in this carefully crafted narrative. This isn’t merely the arithmetic of supply and demand. It’s a complete rewriting of the rules of merit—and a quiet betrayal of the very principle that made these institutions powerful in the first place.

America’s higher-education system long operated around a hard but fair rule: Raw intellectual firepower mattered. For most of its history, America’s higher-education system, for all its flaws, operated around a hard but fair rule: Raw intellectual firepower mattered. Talent mattered. The ability to retain information and apply it correctly mattered. Academic excellence was the surest path to opportunity. You didn’t need family connections (although they certainly helped). You didn’t need a billion-dollar last name (again, that didn’t hurt either). You needed results.

Academic brilliance is now, in many cases, a liability unless paired with the “correct” ideological identifier. Today, that operating system is being systematically dismantled. Academic brilliance is now, in many cases, a liability unless paired with the “correct” ideological identifier. In the modern Ivy League, identity is currency. Grievance is gold. Merit, once the only metric that really mattered, is treated like a relic of an oppressive past.

With President Trump in charge, elite universities claim they are moving beyond DEI. But these claims are, on the whole, disingenuous. The slogans have changed, but the ideological sorting continues. If anything, it’s accelerating. There are now entire industries within academia—admissions consultants, diversity officers, narrative polishers—devoted to repackaging applicants’ privilege into victimhood. Mediocrity is now marketed as “lived experience.” Students with extraordinary achievements but the “wrong” identifiers are quietly filtered out. Those who fit the ideological profile are quietly ushered in.

The consequences are bleeding into every corner of the system. College enrollment is collapsing. According to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, enrollment of 18-year-old freshmen fell by five percent last year. Public and private nonprofit colleges saw more than a six-percent decline. In 46 states, the decline approached seven percent. Most damning of all, enrollment among black freshmen—a group elite universities loudly and proudly claim to champion—dropped by nearly 17 percent. In other words, the system is failing even on its own self-declared terms.

Yet, somehow, acceptance rates at top-tier schools are getting even lower. The contradiction should be blindingly obvious. Fewer students are enrolling. Fewer students are applying to mid-tier and lower-tier institutions. Yet it has somehow never been harder to get into elite schools. This is not organic. It reeks of deliberate, artificial inflation. Universities inundate their mailing lists with glossy brochures, invite unqualified students to apply, and then reject them in record numbers—all to create an elusive image of exclusivity. They don’t want excellence. They want prestige. They don’t want the best. They want to look like they are selecting the best, while quietly prioritizing ideology, identity, and narrative conformity.

The Ivy League’s tactics mirror a Ponzi scheme of reputation. Enroll fewer students. Reject more applicants. Inflate the brand—all while quietly dismantling the academic foundation that once made these institutions truly great. It’s no surprise that two-thirds of U.S. universities have fallen in the QS world rankings. UC Berkeley has slipped out of the top 10, while the University of Chicago has fallen a shocking 10 spots to 21st. This is what happens when universities shift their focus from sharpening minds to manufacturing prestige—when the pursuit of status replaces the pursuit of knowledge. Slowly but surely, campuses morph from centers of intellectual rigor into experimental labs for the already credentialed elite. Meanwhile, America’s friends and foes aren’t playing the same game. Far from it. China, Japan, and Singapore are hyper-focused on producing engineers, scientists, and builders. They’re training minds to conquer reality, not to create illusions of progress.

Inside the U.S., a new hierarchy is being celebrated. Inside the U.S., a new hierarchy is being celebrated. Forbes’s “New Ivies” list includes the likes of Vanderbilt, Rice, and Washington University in St. Louis. These institutions, we’re told, are the rising stars—outpacing the old Ivy League in employer respect and real-world outcomes. But, once again, I urge you to look a little closer. The hyper-selectivity alone—Vanderbilt admits just six percent—raises red flags. It suggests the same old academia-oriented affliction: artificial scarcity, inflated prestige, and an unhealthy obsession with yield rates. Merit may be cited, but manipulation seems ever-present. The New Ivies may not have constructed the crumbling old order. However, many are adopting its bad habits and applying them directly. What the old Ivy League has forgotten—and what the New Ivies also seem to overlook—is that clout earned through capability can endure the harsh lessons that life has in store for us. Earning one’s place through talent and hard work built America and is the only thing capable of sustaining it.

The collapse of meritocracy isn’t some boutique grievance. It is a national emergency. The old elites are playing a dirty, dangerous game. Publicly, they present themselves as guardians of fairness. Privately, they smile to themselves, believing that we don’t see through the lies. They rake in foreign donations from regimes that view American universities as branding opportunities. They expand armies of DEI bureaucrats while starving merit-based scholarships. They pour resources into political activism while allowing basic educational standards to drift away.

President Trump—and any American who cares about the nation’s future—must take note. The collapse of meritocracy isn’t some boutique grievance. It is a national emergency. It affects everything. America’s universities shape the culture. They train the CEOs. They produce the judges, the lawyers, the senators, the journalists. They manufacture the national myths by which the next generation will live or die. If these ideas are no longer built around excellence, ambition, and freedom but around victimhood, censorship, and conformity, then America’s days as a global superpower are numbered.

There are urgent steps that must be taken. Federal funding must be tied directly to verifiable merit-based admissions. Foreign donations must be audited, exposed, and, if necessary, banned. New universities—genuinely independent, genuinely meritocratic—must be built. Every institution that prioritizes ideology over excellence must be put on notice: adapt or lose public funding. Adapt or lose accreditation. Adapt or die.

The gates of opportunity must be rebuilt. The culture of merit must be restored. The lights must be turned back on before it’s too late.

John Mac Ghlionn is a psychosocial researcher and essayist. His work has been published by the New York Post, Sydney Morning Herald, Newsweek, National Review, and the Spectator (U.S.). He covers psychology and social relations and has a keen interest in social dysfunction and media manipulation.