The WSJ on college in decline; Lorenzo Warby on heritability, race, and inequality; Alice Evans on cultural conservatism; Virginia Postrel on fame, luck, and Martin Gurri
Here’s a letter he wrote to his father three months before starting college. It has some grammar problems, but I would say it’s better than “poor-literacy.”
LETTER TO MARTIN LUTHER KING, SR.
15 June 1944
Simsbury, Conn.
Dear Father:
I am very sorry I am so long about writing but I have been working most of the time. We are really having a fine time here and the work is very easy.
We have to get up every day at 6:00. We have very good food. And I am working kitchen so you see I get better food.
We have service here every Sunday about 8:00 and I am the religious leader we have a Boys choir here and we are going to sing on the air soon.
Sunday I went to church in Simsbury it was a white church. I could not get to Hartford to church but I am going next week. On our way here we saw some things I had never anticipated to see. After we passed Washington there was no discrimination at all the white people here are very nice. We go to any place we want to and sit any where we want to.
Tell everybody I said hello and I am still thinking of the church and reading my bible. And I am not doing any thing that I would not do in front of you.
So many of our problems can be traced back to state funding of public schools and colleges. It’s time for people to face the truth: government funding of schools is a bad idea. It leads to bad outcomes. Cut the funding.
Note MLK Jr.’s perspective on academic freedom (in my first Substack post). Professors are caught up in the clutches of state funds.
Sweden, and probably other countries, have already solved this problem. They offer the choice between municipal and what we would call private schools, both tax funded. (https://sweden.se/life/society/the-swedish-school-system#)
Here is a quote from Joseph Schumpeter: “. . . . it is absurd for other nations to try to copy Swedish examples; the only effective way of doing so would be to import the Swedes and put them in charge.”
It is not guaranteed to work but to the extent that students and parents have a choice in what school to attend, schools must compete for the students. This is mostly a good thing though parents can select for the wrong reasons or just not know which school will provide the best education.
In the terminology used in Sweden, as best I can relate it our system, schools that are staffed and managed by employees of local government are called public. Schools that are staffed and managed by private companies are called private. Both are tax funded. There is a third category, where parents pay out-of-pocket, but it is quite small.
I see. In the U.S. we call any publicly funded school a public school.
In your article I see the name friskola.
“These publicly funded non-municipal schools are called friskola to differentiate them from tuition-based private schools (of which there are only a handful left in Sweden).”
The closest we have to friskola would be “charter schools.” Charter schools are publicly funded schools in which the parents have much more governing control. Sometimes charter schools are operated by private companies (not common), but the funding source is still public. We still refer to those as public schools, though some cynically refer to them as private schools.
In America, private colleges are increasingly rare. Private colleges are receiving so many tax breaks, subsidies, and grants it’s not really accurate to call them private anymore. Per my count there are only about two dozen private colleges remaining in America. Almost all of these are small Christian colleges, sometimes called Bible Colleges, or maybe faith-based colleges. Though there are many faith-based colleges that receive state funds, grants, etc. There are a small minority that choose not to receive any government money. Once a college takes federal money they are required to follow burdensome and intrusive regulations.
Here is my list of non-profit, American colleges that are truly private. There are only two that are secular.
Not included on this list are hundreds of private, for profit colleges, but these are kind of a strange breed. Potentially they could be very good, but the rules are rigged against them. They mainly consist of career colleges, vocational schools and online schools. Beauty colleges, coding boot camps, automotive technician schools, would fall into this category.
“In order to preserve their freedom and independence. The following colleges in the United States, in order to preserve their liberty and independence, do not accept grants from the federal government or participate in any federal financial-aid or student-loan program.
“The number of subscribers to my substack recently reached 6000, including 300 paid. Others have much, much bigger numbers, but I like to think that my readers will be more likely to remember years from now some of the things that I write.”
I am thrilled to be part of this elite group. And so cheap too.
I wouldn’t classify myself as elite, but I’m thrilled to play in the same sandbox as Arnold, and even though I don’t interact much with the elite commenters here, I enjoy reading their comments and I’m grateful to be among such a welcoming and thoughtful group. In My Tribe is by far my favorite Substack and the first I recommend to any of my friends or family.
I've often heard that social mobility is greater in Europe than the US. Of course this is stated as if this is something Europe does better. But what if their mobility is caused by some type of randomness unrelated to ability? What if the smaller mobility in US is due to inherited (genetic or cultural) ability and sorting more reliably tied to ability?
I'm not saying what causes what but it seems the politically correct position does not consider all possibilities that might lead to the outcomes we see.
“A quarter of college graduates do not have basic skills in numeracy and one in five does not have basic skills in literacy...”
Two of my kids are 8th grade math teachers in Title I schools. They both regularly get students who are functionally illiterate but who had been “socially promoted” even though they hadn’t learned the material. I mentioned this in a post elsewhere and was angrily informed by someone claiming to be a teacher that our public schools are excellent and such things simply don’t happen.
So, now I’m confused. How is it possible that 20% of our college students have poor literacy skills, while all of our 8th graders - both those who are college-bound and those who aren’t - are perfectly literate? There must be something terrible happening between grades 8-12.
I have relatives who are in the teaching profession, both elementary and high school. Their defensive response to the least disparagement of our education system (not them personally) is striking. I suppose this is either (a) not wanting to be painted within that broad brush-stroke of criticism, or (b) guilty as charged. To be sure there are excellent teachers sprinkled throughout the system, but politics, ideology, curricula, as well as incompetence and laziness are prevalent. And parental involvement surely plays a role, too. Thus results like the 2019 Nation’s Report Card, issued by the U.S. Department of Education, in which more than 60% of U.S. public and non-public school students were below grade level in reading.
Everybody wants to held in high esteem, and that means they need people to also hold the thing they do for work in high esteem. The only kind of good person with better options that does crummy work is a saintly altruist, but at least an altruist can point to some positive different in outcomes that they accomplished with their work. But if the keedz cain't read, then where's the beef? That makes people *very* defensive about the reputation and public perception of their work, and to the extent the public holds that work in higher regard than can be justified by reality, it creates irresistible pressure to be a volunteer auxiliary "enemy plane spotter" who is complicit in the perpetuation of those erroneous perceptions.
This goes double for people like public school teachers who also need the public's political support and funding to get paid. So they are instinctively driven by a hair-trigger hypersensitivity to immediately jump on and fight against anyone saying anything that would tend to bring their professional into disrepute, especially when it is truthful correction of those valuably false public perceptions. That makes it really hard to speak truthfully about the subject without painting a target on your back.
See the book Three Languages of Politics - people often use tribal rhetoric when discussing political issues such as public schools. If you’re aware of their oppressed/oppressor narrative, you’d be able to rise above the fray like a Buddha masta, or Jedi, or an Arnold Kling. :)
Tribal dogma explains much of the discourse surrounding any political issue; in this case the pros and cons of public schools and their outcomes. It’s a sensitive subject for many, especially for career public school teachers. To go inside a particular teacher’s head and propose an explanation for their tribal response to your perfectly rational point is not easy to do or even possible without knowing a lot more about them and being on the spot in that conversation. You win! :)
"I like to think that my readers will be more likely to remember years from now some of the things that I write" - you bet!
Substack is a terrific development because I've been able to abandon X and most blogs and focus on longer form, more thoughtful work written by interesting people. You hit the sweet spot between the really long and interesting essay and X with these Links to Consider posts. Not too many words but all good ones!
Hello! I think Warby may be oversimplifying things. The genome is just part of the story. Most of our phenotype is inherited to some degree, but perhaps equally important is the "epigenetic" gene expression in utero and, overwhelmingly, in our early years. Things like nutrition, environmental contaminants, health of the mother, early trauma and exposure to stimuli like spoken language can have profound effects on the way DNA is expressed. Epigenetics is another way to say "cultural inheritance." To my knowledge, James Hecht has not discussed genetics, but his work on early childhood development certainly points this way. Robert Putnam and his twin studies too. Lots of folks now are doing work on epigenetics, but the names I know are Denis Noble, Eva Jablonka, Nessa Carey, Barbara McClintock. The degree to which epigenetic changes can be inherited is a source of fierce debate. Look at the effects of the "hunger winter" in the Netherlands in 1945.
Mostly for marketing purposes, Lorenzo's "Hereditarian" is preferable to "race realism" as the contrast to "Egalitarianism." Bad US Black behavior has some unknown, but significant, genetic component as well as a very significant cultural influence. Even if race realism is as true as is claimed by Confas, perhaps especially if so, we need social policy to focus on improving the behavior of those who now behave badly.
From the NS Lyons' link: "there is one essential difference between a rightist and a leftist. This is not the conservative vs. progressive axis, but one between egalitarianism and hierarchy." Not emphasized in any of the three (Confas, Warby, Lyons) is the French motto "liberty, equality, fraternity". Yet they do all support the idea that Egalitarianism, expecting equal outcomes, is a huge driver of problems today.
Everybody who works for a boss is "oppressed" by the boss, and the hierarchy above. And, if responsible for hiring and firing anybody, is also an oppressor. Those with high IQs often hold themselves as Intellectually Superior and thus above others (me too??). In intelligence, not "more human dignity". Often not as kind as more simple folk, who are often quick to help other people before I even notice they could use help.
In the Lyons post was a great reference to what a lot of techno progress seems to be leading: obese blob-humans as shown in WALL-E. Very very literally, Fat City. But likely quite comfy for most average and below average folk.
There's also a connection to the relative male-female comfort with hierarchy vs equality.
We need Behavior Realism - there are better and worse behaviors, as well as a hierarchy. Plus we need to be honest that those people who choose bad behaviors, get bad outcomes, and they are not oppressed because of their behavior based bad outcome.
Tho many innocent kids ARE somewhat oppressed by absent slut-jerk fathers enjoying individualist sex pleasure with sluts, who then become unmarried mothers.
But most "smart" people don't even want to talk about sluts.
"Given the selection processes involved in being enslaved, it’s likely why social mobility is even lower among slave diasporas."
I've thought this for a long time, but coward that I am, have been reluctant to say so to anyone outside my family. Plus, I'm not confident I could express it in innocuous-sounding jargon like this.
When I was a teaching assistant in senior mechanical engineering 40 years ago, we made the students write 3 formal reports a semester. It isn't creative writing, but engineers have to read and write reports. We told them that if the language was too bad, we had an arrangement with the English department to grade the reports on their writing quality - at which point the engineering content would count for 70% of the grade, with the remainder being the grading from the English department. They did not like it, but the threat was enough. Grading those reports was a pain in the ass, but that was my job.
'That executive function is almost entirely heritable is surely a large reason why social mobility is so persistently low across human societies. Given the selection processes involved in being enslaved, it’s likely why social mobility is even lower among slave diasporas.'
The issue with this is observed history. The US after the Civil war up until the last 1960s saw high wage growth for whites, but higher- to much higher- wage growth for blacks, in an environment where there was active discrimination at local, state and national levels against them. It seems difficult to square faster gains with being significantly closer to a genetic, cognitive maximum.
Re your comments on type 1 and type 2 publishing errors (and I don't know if this story is true or not but I hope it is), somebody asked a particular publisher why they looked at every unsolicited manuscript that came in. The response was, that is how "Cry the Beloved Country" came in.
At my company, we've been hiring people from a local state-run University for years, and this has worked out great for us until about 2018. We hired two of the worst people who have ever come through here then. I found myself wondering if they cheated their way through school, they were so bad. I think (although I'm still not 100% sure) the sad conclusion is that standards have simply fallen to the point where a degree from Local U no longer really means much.
I had the same experience at GMU and other places I taught: foreign kids had far superior writing skills than natives, particularly in grammar.
Regarding the point about Saudi Arabia being rich but tribal, I am not sure I would classify Saudi Arabia as a rich country. Rather it seems to be a rather poor country with a very wealthy and very small ruling class. In terms of the average, median or 75 percentile Saudi, probably the 95 percentile as well, I would expect cultural norms much closer to what we would see in poor countries, not rich.
I had a similar experience at UVM. Complaints were constant, but asking the student to read their papers aloud generally made by objection to their work quite clear.
There was a quite-recent time when the words "college" and "poor literacy skills" would have had no chance of appearing in the same sentence.
Not sure about this. Did you see my post on MLK Jr’s college experience?
Yes, I was suprised to read that he believed he only had an 8th grade reading level, whatever that meant in the 40s.
Here’s a letter he wrote to his father three months before starting college. It has some grammar problems, but I would say it’s better than “poor-literacy.”
LETTER TO MARTIN LUTHER KING, SR.
15 June 1944
Simsbury, Conn.
Dear Father:
I am very sorry I am so long about writing but I have been working most of the time. We are really having a fine time here and the work is very easy.
We have to get up every day at 6:00. We have very good food. And I am working kitchen so you see I get better food.
We have service here every Sunday about 8:00 and I am the religious leader we have a Boys choir here and we are going to sing on the air soon.
Sunday I went to church in Simsbury it was a white church. I could not get to Hartford to church but I am going next week. On our way here we saw some things I had never anticipated to see. After we passed Washington there was no discrimination at all the white people here are very nice. We go to any place we want to and sit any where we want to.
Tell everybody I said hello and I am still thinking of the church and reading my bible. And I am not doing any thing that I would not do in front of you.
Your Son
So many of our problems can be traced back to state funding of public schools and colleges. It’s time for people to face the truth: government funding of schools is a bad idea. It leads to bad outcomes. Cut the funding.
Note MLK Jr.’s perspective on academic freedom (in my first Substack post). Professors are caught up in the clutches of state funds.
https://substack.com/home/post/p-141045565?source=queue
Sweden, and probably other countries, have already solved this problem. They offer the choice between municipal and what we would call private schools, both tax funded. (https://sweden.se/life/society/the-swedish-school-system#)
Here is a quote from Joseph Schumpeter: “. . . . it is absurd for other nations to try to copy Swedish examples; the only effective way of doing so would be to import the Swedes and put them in charge.”
Tax funded private schools huh? Is that not an abuse of language? :) I’ll read the article and get back to you.
It is not guaranteed to work but to the extent that students and parents have a choice in what school to attend, schools must compete for the students. This is mostly a good thing though parents can select for the wrong reasons or just not know which school will provide the best education.
Agreed. Though the purist in me says “Cut all the funding.” Then let’s discuss educating the poor through private vs public means.
In the terminology used in Sweden, as best I can relate it our system, schools that are staffed and managed by employees of local government are called public. Schools that are staffed and managed by private companies are called private. Both are tax funded. There is a third category, where parents pay out-of-pocket, but it is quite small.
I see. In the U.S. we call any publicly funded school a public school.
In your article I see the name friskola.
“These publicly funded non-municipal schools are called friskola to differentiate them from tuition-based private schools (of which there are only a handful left in Sweden).”
The closest we have to friskola would be “charter schools.” Charter schools are publicly funded schools in which the parents have much more governing control. Sometimes charter schools are operated by private companies (not common), but the funding source is still public. We still refer to those as public schools, though some cynically refer to them as private schools.
In America, private colleges are increasingly rare. Private colleges are receiving so many tax breaks, subsidies, and grants it’s not really accurate to call them private anymore. Per my count there are only about two dozen private colleges remaining in America. Almost all of these are small Christian colleges, sometimes called Bible Colleges, or maybe faith-based colleges. Though there are many faith-based colleges that receive state funds, grants, etc. There are a small minority that choose not to receive any government money. Once a college takes federal money they are required to follow burdensome and intrusive regulations.
Here is my list of non-profit, American colleges that are truly private. There are only two that are secular.
Not included on this list are hundreds of private, for profit colleges, but these are kind of a strange breed. Potentially they could be very good, but the rules are rigged against them. They mainly consist of career colleges, vocational schools and online schools. Beauty colleges, coding boot camps, automotive technician schools, would fall into this category.
“In order to preserve their freedom and independence. The following colleges in the United States, in order to preserve their liberty and independence, do not accept grants from the federal government or participate in any federal financial-aid or student-loan program.
1. Aletheia Christian College (Idaho)
2. Bethlehem College & Seminary (Minnesota)
3. Boyce College (Kentucky)
4. Christendom College (Virginia)
5. Crown College (Tennessee)
6. Faith Bible College (Maine)
7. Grove City College (Pennsylvania)
8. Gutenberg College (Oregon)
9. Hildegard College (California)
10. Hillsdale College (Michigan)
11. Mid-America Baptist Theological Seminary (Tennessee)
12. Monticello College (Utah)
13. Mount Liberty College (Utah)
14. New College Franklin (Tennessee)
15. New Saint Andrews College (Idaho)
16. Patrick Henry College (Virginia)
17. Pensacola Christian College (Florida)
18. Principia College (Illinois)
19. College (Massachusetts)
20. Southern Baptist Theological Seminary (Kentucky)
21. Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminar (Texas)
22. Weimar University (California)
23. Wyoming Catholic College (Wyoming)
24. Thales College?
25. UATX?
“The number of subscribers to my substack recently reached 6000, including 300 paid. Others have much, much bigger numbers, but I like to think that my readers will be more likely to remember years from now some of the things that I write.”
I am thrilled to be part of this elite group. And so cheap too.
I wouldn’t classify myself as elite, but I’m thrilled to play in the same sandbox as Arnold, and even though I don’t interact much with the elite commenters here, I enjoy reading their comments and I’m grateful to be among such a welcoming and thoughtful group. In My Tribe is by far my favorite Substack and the first I recommend to any of my friends or family.
"I like to think that my readers will be more likely to remember years from now some of the things that I write."
I appreciate what you write and find your insights helpful.
I've often heard that social mobility is greater in Europe than the US. Of course this is stated as if this is something Europe does better. But what if their mobility is caused by some type of randomness unrelated to ability? What if the smaller mobility in US is due to inherited (genetic or cultural) ability and sorting more reliably tied to ability?
I'm not saying what causes what but it seems the politically correct position does not consider all possibilities that might lead to the outcomes we see.
“A quarter of college graduates do not have basic skills in numeracy and one in five does not have basic skills in literacy...”
Two of my kids are 8th grade math teachers in Title I schools. They both regularly get students who are functionally illiterate but who had been “socially promoted” even though they hadn’t learned the material. I mentioned this in a post elsewhere and was angrily informed by someone claiming to be a teacher that our public schools are excellent and such things simply don’t happen.
So, now I’m confused. How is it possible that 20% of our college students have poor literacy skills, while all of our 8th graders - both those who are college-bound and those who aren’t - are perfectly literate? There must be something terrible happening between grades 8-12.
I have relatives who are in the teaching profession, both elementary and high school. Their defensive response to the least disparagement of our education system (not them personally) is striking. I suppose this is either (a) not wanting to be painted within that broad brush-stroke of criticism, or (b) guilty as charged. To be sure there are excellent teachers sprinkled throughout the system, but politics, ideology, curricula, as well as incompetence and laziness are prevalent. And parental involvement surely plays a role, too. Thus results like the 2019 Nation’s Report Card, issued by the U.S. Department of Education, in which more than 60% of U.S. public and non-public school students were below grade level in reading.
Everybody wants to held in high esteem, and that means they need people to also hold the thing they do for work in high esteem. The only kind of good person with better options that does crummy work is a saintly altruist, but at least an altruist can point to some positive different in outcomes that they accomplished with their work. But if the keedz cain't read, then where's the beef? That makes people *very* defensive about the reputation and public perception of their work, and to the extent the public holds that work in higher regard than can be justified by reality, it creates irresistible pressure to be a volunteer auxiliary "enemy plane spotter" who is complicit in the perpetuation of those erroneous perceptions.
This goes double for people like public school teachers who also need the public's political support and funding to get paid. So they are instinctively driven by a hair-trigger hypersensitivity to immediately jump on and fight against anyone saying anything that would tend to bring their professional into disrepute, especially when it is truthful correction of those valuably false public perceptions. That makes it really hard to speak truthfully about the subject without painting a target on your back.
See the book Three Languages of Politics - people often use tribal rhetoric when discussing political issues such as public schools. If you’re aware of their oppressed/oppressor narrative, you’d be able to rise above the fray like a Buddha masta, or Jedi, or an Arnold Kling. :)
How do the oppressor-oppressed, civilization-barbarism, liberty-coercion modes of thought apply to illiteracy denial?
Tribal dogma explains much of the discourse surrounding any political issue; in this case the pros and cons of public schools and their outcomes. It’s a sensitive subject for many, especially for career public school teachers. To go inside a particular teacher’s head and propose an explanation for their tribal response to your perfectly rational point is not easy to do or even possible without knowing a lot more about them and being on the spot in that conversation. You win! :)
"I like to think that my readers will be more likely to remember years from now some of the things that I write" - you bet!
Substack is a terrific development because I've been able to abandon X and most blogs and focus on longer form, more thoughtful work written by interesting people. You hit the sweet spot between the really long and interesting essay and X with these Links to Consider posts. Not too many words but all good ones!
Hello! I think Warby may be oversimplifying things. The genome is just part of the story. Most of our phenotype is inherited to some degree, but perhaps equally important is the "epigenetic" gene expression in utero and, overwhelmingly, in our early years. Things like nutrition, environmental contaminants, health of the mother, early trauma and exposure to stimuli like spoken language can have profound effects on the way DNA is expressed. Epigenetics is another way to say "cultural inheritance." To my knowledge, James Hecht has not discussed genetics, but his work on early childhood development certainly points this way. Robert Putnam and his twin studies too. Lots of folks now are doing work on epigenetics, but the names I know are Denis Noble, Eva Jablonka, Nessa Carey, Barbara McClintock. The degree to which epigenetic changes can be inherited is a source of fierce debate. Look at the effects of the "hunger winter" in the Netherlands in 1945.
Mostly for marketing purposes, Lorenzo's "Hereditarian" is preferable to "race realism" as the contrast to "Egalitarianism." Bad US Black behavior has some unknown, but significant, genetic component as well as a very significant cultural influence. Even if race realism is as true as is claimed by Confas, perhaps especially if so, we need social policy to focus on improving the behavior of those who now behave badly.
From the NS Lyons' link: "there is one essential difference between a rightist and a leftist. This is not the conservative vs. progressive axis, but one between egalitarianism and hierarchy." Not emphasized in any of the three (Confas, Warby, Lyons) is the French motto "liberty, equality, fraternity". Yet they do all support the idea that Egalitarianism, expecting equal outcomes, is a huge driver of problems today.
"I was always taught in school,
Everybody should get the same" https://www.lyrics.com/lyric/32550664/The+Stranglers/Always+the+Sun
Everybody who works for a boss is "oppressed" by the boss, and the hierarchy above. And, if responsible for hiring and firing anybody, is also an oppressor. Those with high IQs often hold themselves as Intellectually Superior and thus above others (me too??). In intelligence, not "more human dignity". Often not as kind as more simple folk, who are often quick to help other people before I even notice they could use help.
In the Lyons post was a great reference to what a lot of techno progress seems to be leading: obese blob-humans as shown in WALL-E. Very very literally, Fat City. But likely quite comfy for most average and below average folk.
There's also a connection to the relative male-female comfort with hierarchy vs equality.
We need Behavior Realism - there are better and worse behaviors, as well as a hierarchy. Plus we need to be honest that those people who choose bad behaviors, get bad outcomes, and they are not oppressed because of their behavior based bad outcome.
Tho many innocent kids ARE somewhat oppressed by absent slut-jerk fathers enjoying individualist sex pleasure with sluts, who then become unmarried mothers.
But most "smart" people don't even want to talk about sluts.
"Given the selection processes involved in being enslaved, it’s likely why social mobility is even lower among slave diasporas."
I've thought this for a long time, but coward that I am, have been reluctant to say so to anyone outside my family. Plus, I'm not confident I could express it in innocuous-sounding jargon like this.
When I was a teaching assistant in senior mechanical engineering 40 years ago, we made the students write 3 formal reports a semester. It isn't creative writing, but engineers have to read and write reports. We told them that if the language was too bad, we had an arrangement with the English department to grade the reports on their writing quality - at which point the engineering content would count for 70% of the grade, with the remainder being the grading from the English department. They did not like it, but the threat was enough. Grading those reports was a pain in the ass, but that was my job.
'That executive function is almost entirely heritable is surely a large reason why social mobility is so persistently low across human societies. Given the selection processes involved in being enslaved, it’s likely why social mobility is even lower among slave diasporas.'
The issue with this is observed history. The US after the Civil war up until the last 1960s saw high wage growth for whites, but higher- to much higher- wage growth for blacks, in an environment where there was active discrimination at local, state and national levels against them. It seems difficult to square faster gains with being significantly closer to a genetic, cognitive maximum.
Re your comments on type 1 and type 2 publishing errors (and I don't know if this story is true or not but I hope it is), somebody asked a particular publisher why they looked at every unsolicited manuscript that came in. The response was, that is how "Cry the Beloved Country" came in.
At my company, we've been hiring people from a local state-run University for years, and this has worked out great for us until about 2018. We hired two of the worst people who have ever come through here then. I found myself wondering if they cheated their way through school, they were so bad. I think (although I'm still not 100% sure) the sad conclusion is that standards have simply fallen to the point where a degree from Local U no longer really means much.
I had the same experience at GMU and other places I taught: foreign kids had far superior writing skills than natives, particularly in grammar.
Regarding the point about Saudi Arabia being rich but tribal, I am not sure I would classify Saudi Arabia as a rich country. Rather it seems to be a rather poor country with a very wealthy and very small ruling class. In terms of the average, median or 75 percentile Saudi, probably the 95 percentile as well, I would expect cultural norms much closer to what we would see in poor countries, not rich.
I had a similar experience at UVM. Complaints were constant, but asking the student to read their papers aloud generally made by objection to their work quite clear.