Can Grit Save Higher Education?

American, Australian and British universities are facing a serious input crisis. The number of students capable of anything resembling a conventional university education is drying up and the spectre of extinction is haunting British and American campuses. London Metropolitan University is closing two campuses and cutting 400 jobs.  Twelve of those jobs will be managerial ones so the situation must be really desperate. Hull University has closed a campus at Scarborough. The Open University is closing several regional centres with 500 plus jobs at risk.

Meanwhile small colleges in the US are shutting down: Dowling College, New York, Burlington College, Vermont, Tennessee Temple University and no doubt more to come.

Many English speaking universities  have tried to cover the deficit by aggressively recruiting international students. That is helping a little and science and technology departments in the Russell Group, the Group of Eight and the Ivy League are becoming increasingly dependent on graduate students and faculty of East Asian origin or descent. But the number of students who can perform adequately at degree level is not infinite. There are signs that the Flynn Effect has run its course even in China and there seems to be an increasing large amount of test and credential fraud, plagiarism and ghost-writing associated with the influx of international students.

The problem is compounded by the pressure to admit increasing numbers of historically underrepresented  groups who may come with substantial loans and grants but are often inadequately prepared for higher education. Such students frequently find that attending classes with classmates who perform much better is a deeply painful and humiliating experience, all the more so since they have from childhood been steeped in a warm bath of self esteem and excused almost any anti-social behaviour.

The admission of increasing numbers of unprepared students can also have serious consequences down the road towards and after graduation. More students with poor ACT or SAT scores or failing to graduate on time, if ever, means that ranking scores will suffer, with serious consequences for applications and admissions, and that employers and graduate schools will be less welcoming.

So we have increasingly desperate efforts to find something, anything, that will predict academic success but where less able students can do just as well or better. The problem is that so far nothing has been found that matches the predictive validity of standardised tests that are highly correlated with general intelligence.

There has even been a serious proposal by a group of elite admissions officers to reward applicants for doing ordinary things like baby sitting or punish them for a lack of authenticity in their resume compliant extra curricular activities. Taken seriously this would effectively randomise university admissions and turn US higher education into a flat swamp of mediocrity.

The latest in a succession of attempts to find the really effective non-cognitive factor that will transform American higher education and achieve the holy grail of true diversity is something called "grit", supposedly discovered by Angela Duckworth a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania and a certified genius and author of an instant New York Times best seller. Grit is supposed to be a combination of passion and perseverance and is claimed to be important in determining job and academic success. It is allegedly a better predictor of success than IQ, health, good looks, or even social intelligence. It is, it would seem, "going to change the world".

Unfortunately, a thorough meta-analysis suggests that grit is almost the same thing as conscientiousness, a long established personality trait, and that its impact on academic success is modest and much less than that of cognitive ability.

And so the search for the Really Significant Non-Cognitive Factor continues.