Greg Gutfeld warned viewers this week that a dangerous new trend is sweeping the nation’s campuses: colleges and school boards quietly easing standards while selling us the same pricey diplomas. He slammed the bureaucratic logic that treats accountability as an “attack” and walked through the numbers showing how academic rigor is being hollowed out right before parents’ eyes.
Take Oregon, where officials have effectively suspended the requirement that students demonstrate proficiency in core skills like reading, writing and math, a move defenders call “equity” and critics call a dagger to opportunity. This isn’t theory — the state’s board extended the suspension of its essential skills assessments through 2027-28, leaving diplomas less meaningful and employers worse off.
Gutfeld didn’t mince words: when states start promising diplomas without demonstrable competence, they’re handing out participation trophies and insulting the ambitions of the very students they claim to help. That blunt assessment cuts to the ethical heart of the matter — lowering standards is not charity, it’s surrender, and it punishes kids who actually want to learn and compete.
Meanwhile elite institutions charge full freight for remote learning while students get a fraction of the campus experience, another example Gutfeld mocked as the grift of credentialism. If Harvard and others insist on extracting enormous sums for Zoom lectures, they should lower tuition accordingly or stop pretending reputation replaces real education.
This rot in higher education is part of a broader cultural failure where competence is traded for compassion theater and political signaling. When standards are recast as “barriers” rather than safeguards, the result is generational harm: employers can’t trust diplomas, taxpayers subsidize underperformance, and ambitious young Americans lose their shot at real upward mobility.
The remedy is obvious and patriotic: demand accountability, restore objective measures of learning, and empower parents to choose schools that value hard work over hashtags. Conservatives must press state legislatures, local school boards, and governors to stop normalizing lowered expectations and to prioritize literacy, numeracy, and practical skills that lead to jobs and dignity.
Hardworking Americans don’t need their credentials devalued by ideological experiments; they need schools that teach, communities that enforce standards, and leaders who value excellence over excuses. Stand up for real education—because if we don’t defend the basics now, the next generation will pay for our silence with fewer opportunities and a weaker America.
