Ramaswamy is right, America's culture puts jocks, prom queens over academics

The day after Christmas, Vivek Ramaswamy, former presidential candidate and Dublin, Ohio resident threw a rhetorical hand grenade into the immigration debate. What really blew up, however, was his apparent insult to American culture.

In a post on X (formerly Twitter), Ramaswamy wrote that “the reason top tech companies often hire foreign-born & first generation engineers over ‘native’ Americans” is because “our American Culture has venerated mediocrity over excellence for way too long.” He went on to claim that “a culture that celebrates the prom queen over the math olympiad (sic) champ, or the jock over the valedictorian, will not produce the best engineers.”

To date, his post has been viewed more than 110 million times, and attracted over 50 thousand comments, the vast majority of which were critical.

I’m not surprised. I doubt most people are fond of having their culture criticized, particularly when that someone is a child of immigrants with a foreign-sounding name.

Mature adults should be able to brush off the slight and open our eyes to the reality Ramaswamy’s comments reveal.

He’s right: the American K-12 education system has been failing its students for far too long. I’ve written about those failures in several previous columns and will likely continue to do so because it’s so important to our nation’s — and our children’s — future.

An article in Education Week paints a grim picture: “the millennials in our workforce tied for last on tests of mathematics and problem solving among the millennials in the workforces of all the industrial countries tested.”

That’s reality. How much more clear can the failures of our educational system and the culture that produced it possibly be?

Another reality is that there’s far too much focus on youth sports, often to the detriment of academic achievement. This is particularly so when that focus is on travel teams, which can demand more than a dozen hours of weekly practice, plus entire weekends for games and tournaments.

Youth sports have undeniable value. They help build healthy bodies and foster habits of physical activity, competition, and teamwork. For some students, sports can offer a path to college, with a select few earning full or partial scholarships.

These benefits are important, but school is a student’s full-time job. Adding the equivalent of a second full-time job with intense youth sports is too much for most. Exceptional students, like Ramaswamy, may thrive in both areas, but the majority cannot.

If you want to be hired as an engineer, academic achievement matters — a lot.

That’s because engineering is about following well-established rules of math, physics, chemistry, and logic. I certainly want the engineers designing the products I depend upon to master and apply those rules. Similar rules apply in medicine, law, finance, and virtually every professional domain.

We’ve allowed our schools to lose focus of their primary educational mission and substituted non-academic partisan pablum and extracurricular activities like sports to distract ourselves and our kids from those failures.

Of course, academic success isn’t everything for everyone. Hard work and entrepreneurial zeal is a winning combination too. A study of over 700 American millionaires showed their average college GPA was just 2.9. Some of the most successful people didn’t even finish college, if they went at all.

Part of America’s strength lies in this entrepreneurial risk-taking and a culture that fosters it. Such risk-taking is often about breaking rules rather than following them. Think SpaceX, Apple, or Netflix.

That’s where U.S. culture has historically triumphed, including our willingness to welcome and leverage the talents of highly skilled immigrants.

Until 2010, the U.S. led the world in patent applications. Now China does. We need to develop our own engineers while simultaneously offering a path to citizenship for immigrants who come to study here and are committed to advancing American interests. Sending them home is short-sighted.

Our immigration system is deeply flawed, including the H-1B visa system many of our technology companies use. But the anti-immigration sentiment that prompted Ramaswamy’s post isn’t the answer.

I’ve worked with many immigrants and expats during my business career and still stay in touch with a couple of them. One is a very successful financial services executive who became an American citizen and is raising his beautiful family here. He is smart, driven, kind, and accomplished, and his English is better than many native-born speakers.

The other is an intensely driven young woman who did great work but was forced to go back to her home country when her visa expired. She’s been working to be able to return to the U.S. to earn her MBA ever since and will be an asset to whoever hires her — as long as they’re as driven to succeed as she is.

She followed the rules, but the rules deprived the rest of us of her talents, at least for now.

These are exactly the kind of people who have and will continue to make America great. We need immigration reform so we can bring in the best talent while not putting equally qualified American citizens at a disadvantage.

I’m far more concerned with our nation’s turn toward safetyism and a preference for so-called equity over excellence than I am with any possible over-reliance on immigrants. But those are topics for another day.

Americans have to compete against the best from around the world. That’s reality whether we like it or not.  So we must adjust our priorities — and our culture.

 Our nation’s history suggests we can rise to the challenge, but in order to do so, it’ll take all of us: engineers and prom queens, jocks and valedictorians, and talented, hardworking immigrants.