The real reckoning in higher education: The U.S. is slipping.

K-12 education in the U.S. isn’t much to write home about compared to other advanced nations, and hasn’t been for as long as I can remember. However, our colleges and universities have long been the envy of the world.

The world is catching up, though. That’s the finding of a new global index from the Times Higher Education (THE).

Further evidence comes from a recent paper that found the U.S. has fallen behind China as the world leader in producing high-impact research.

Our top research universities still dominates the THE index. However, THE’s editor states:

The data is very clear: America can no longer take for granted its decades-long dominance of world higher education and research, and it is China that is leading the challenge. If current trends remained the same, we would see China overtaking the US in the coming years.

The relative decline in our universities can be explained, in part, by China’s relentless push to catch up. However, it is also explained by the fact that while China focuses single-mindedly on excellence, our universities temper that pursuit with a fixation on “diversity, equity, and inclusion.”

China’s universities are nearly pure meritocracies. Ours use merit to rate people within their racial/ethnic categories, but not to rate them in relation to members of other groups.

This, I think, is part of a larger problem. Our colleges and universities focus unduly on the past and are guilt-ridden about it.

Thus, they obsess over their founders’ relationships with slavery; with the tribes who, 400 years ago, occupied their land; and with discriminatory admissions policies from 70 years ago, or more. They seem at least as interested in making amends for all of this as they are in upholding standards and staying ahead of the rest of the world. I sometimes wonder whether they see a loss of preeminence as a just reckoning for their past sins. Or maybe they don’t think the incorrigibly racist U.S. deserves preeminent institutions of higher learning.

Consider this article in the Washington Post by three Stanford professors about their university’s past sins. The focus is on its discrimination against Jews in the 1950s. But the authors also bemoan “the extent to which government research contracts favored a handful of elite and predominantly White universities, and the sobering degree to which government investments in 20th-century war-craft seeded today’s global tech sector.”

The authors claim that facing up to this history will help restore public trust in America’s colleges and universities. This is nonsense.

The woke leftists who worry about discrimination from the distant past and the award of government contracts to elite universities (which institutions should have received these contracts, mediocre ones?) are unlikely to trust Stanford unless it becomes a free university with open admissions. The rest of us don’t care much about this history.

If colleges and universities really want to restore trust, they should stop current discrimination against white and Asian-Americans; end the dominance of the far left in their humanities departments; make sure the rot doesn’t spread to STEM; slash their bloated administrative staffs; and focus on providing students with the kind of high-quality education that begins to justify the outrageous prices they charge.

But colleges and universities aren’t interested in restoring trust, any more than they are interested in competing with the Chinese. Their administrators view the public at large with contempt and probably consider public disaffection a badge of honor. They want to signal their virtue.

Their Chinese counterparts want to establish their superiority. For them, that’s virtue enough.

No wonder they’re catching up with us.