Author’s Note: This article originally appeared in my weekly Top of Mind newsletter, which goes out to subscribers every Thursday. Sign up to receive it directly in your inbox.

A friend and I got to talking recently about higher education. I have been thinking about going back to school, so we discussed cost, value, and whether any of it still means what it used to. Somewhere in there, the conversation turned to foreign languages.

My friend is somewhat of a savant. He is fluent in French and is now teaching himself Latin, all while earning a PhD in mathematics. Naturally, I found myself wondering how proficient students actually are after spending several semesters earning a degree in a foreign language.

Neither of us expected a great answer, but we didn’t expect the results to be as bad as they are.

A quick Google search while we were still on the phone suggested that not even half of the students who graduate with a foreign language degree are remotely proficient in the language they majored in. When I dug deeper afterward, I found an essay by W. Russell Neuman in Inside Higher Ed from 2017 that put numbers to it. Among all college graduates who studied a foreign language—majors, non-majors, and heritage speakers—only 24 percent report proficiency.

That is an abysmal showing, especially since the figure includes language majors and heritage speakers. If most majors were proficient, you would expect the number to be considerably higher. That it isn’t suggests proficiency is lacking even among those who earn foreign language degrees.

If someone hands you a degree that says “Bachelor of Arts in French,” the reasonable assumption—for an employer, for anyone—is that he or she can speak French. That’s what the credential implies. But clearly, we have reason to doubt that implication.

The culprit for these abysmal numbers, many educators say, lies in how languages are taught. Language coursework is largely built around memorization—vocabulary lists, conjugation drills, and syntax rules. But memorization doesn’t develop conversation skills, and once the test is over, most of the lessons are forgotten. What actually works is immersion. You must hear it, speak it, stumble through it in real life. My friend, for instance, keeps his French sharp by speaking it regularly with friends—and knowing him, he’ll have a Latin group going before long.

To be clear, I have no standing to be smug about any of this. I took a few semesters of French and retained just enough to read it, and read it badly. And aside from English, the only language I ever took hold of was American Sign Language—not through any course, but through my grandmother, a church interpreter who immersed me in it from childhood.

My point here, however, is not about languages; it is that a degree is supposed to mean something. It should represent genuine competence, but too often, it does not.

The numbers—and the anecdotal evidence—around language proficiency are simply where the lack of educational quality is most plainly visible. But if outcomes are this poor in a subject with an obvious, testable measure of success, one has to wonder what the picture looks like everywhere else—particularly now, as mainstream outlets have finally begun to reckon with rampant grade inflation on college and university campuses. Just how many students are handed As for work that earned Cs or worse?

What we have, in too many cases, isn’t education. We have a credentialing mill, and a debased one at that.

Follow Jared Gould on X.