DEI Quotas the Final Nail in the Coffin for America’s Ivy League | Victor Davis Hanson

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🗓️ 11 April 2026

⏱️ 10 minutes

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Summary

Add up a corrupt admissions system, a corrupt DEI industry, a corrupt therapeutic curriculum, a corrupt method of grading and a corrupt, politicized faculty, and it’s no wonder the Ivy League is in crisis and higher education is in panic. Harvard, with the help of the state of Massachusetts, whose Democrat governor is an alumnus, hopes to issue $675 million in tax-exempt bonds as applications took a 21% dive for the 2025-26 academic year, according to the Washington Free Beacon. This, coupled with rising. “grade inflation”—more and more professors giving out A’s to unqualified students—has many asking right now: Are America’s preeminent institutions of higher learning still worth their salt? Probably not, argues Victor Davis Hanson on today’s edition of “Victor Davis Hanson: In a Few Words.” By that I mean, I went to a rural high school. It wasn’t that competitive, Selma High School. They would just say, “If Victor Hanson applies to Harvard, and he has an A, it’s the same A as somebody from Sacred Heart Prep School in Palo Alto, where the curriculum was much more difficult.” And they did that, and the result was they had students who could not do the work, and the faculty was confronted with the dilemma. They either had to water down the curriculum. Or they had to introduce new therapeutic courses, or they had to give 60% or 70% of the people A’s, and they could do all three at the same time, which they did. 👉 The Daily Signal cannot continue to tell stories like this one without the support of our viewers: http://dailysignal.com/donate 👉 Don’t miss out on Victor’s latest short videos by subscribing to The Daily Signal today. You’ll be notified every time a new piece of content drops: ⁠https://www.youtube.com/dailysignal?sub_confirmation=1⁠ Also on Spotify: https://megaphone.link/THEDAILYSIGNAL9753340027 👉 Want more VDH? Watch Victor’s weekly, hour-long podcast, “Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words,” now! Subscribe to his YouTube channel and enable notifications: https://www.youtube.com/@victordavishanson7273?sub_confirmation=1 👉 More exclusive content is available on Victor’s website: https://victorhanson.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, this is Victor Davis Hansen for the Daily Signal.
0:13.5	I'd like to talk a little bit about higher education.
0:16.4	Harvard University, which has, according to news reports, been forced to borrow against its endowment,
0:25.3	has the largest endowment of any university in the United States, probably of any university in the world.
0:29.8	So it's kind of a new story.
0:32.0	And in addition to that, remember that it's under fire from the Trump administration for what they call institutionalized
0:39.8	anti-Semitism but they've announced that they're very very worried that their admissions fell by
0:46.9	20,000 applicants but more importantly they were worried about grade inflation and grades are
0:52.9	over 60% A's.
0:55.4	And just 20 years ago, they were down in the 35%.
0:58.6	And this is a shared phenomenon.
1:01.5	Princeton is about at the same level of the Ivy League, somewhere between 60 and 65%, maybe maybe a little higher or grade A.
1:12.4	And I don't know if that counts A minuses or not, but that has gone very high.
1:16.9	And they tried to remedy that by limiting the faculty's issuance of A's, and they gave up.
1:22.0	It didn't work.
1:22.7	There was outrage.
1:24.3	Yale apparently had the worst grade inflation.
1:30.2	There were reports that A and A minuses might have been up to 70 or 80 percent. Stanford won't release theirs, but there's rumors that
1:35.8	they're up in the 60 to 70 percent category. So what's going on at these universities?
1:43.6	Well, remember how they built their reputation.
1:46.9	They assured us that they had the highest admission standards in the world.
1:53.5	Three, four, five percent of tens of thousands of applicants got in.
	...

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