Why Do We Keep Watching Outrage Videos While Saying Academic Discrimination Is Wrong?

Once again, a YouTube channel built around academic credentials made inflammatory remarks about a particular university, prompting the university to file a formal protest.

The claim was apparently that the university’s academic standards were so low that it should not be allowed to conduct important research in fields such as radiation.

How many times have we seen a story like this?

Almost no one openly disagrees with the statement, “We should not discriminate against people based on their education.”

And yet, YouTube is full of widely viewed videos about “bottom-tier universities,” “poorly educated people,” and university rankings.

The university is, of course, entirely justified in being angry. But from the perspective of an outrage-driven YouTuber’s business model, that anger has the opposite effect.

The university protests. The media covers it. The story spreads across social media. Even people condemning the video go to watch it for themselves.

The view count rises.

In other words, once the controversy erupts, the video has succeeded as a business venture.

So why do these creators use academic credentials as material?

The answer is simple.

Everyone loves academic status.

We Say Credentials Do Not Matter, Then Check the Rankings

People say that a person’s worth is not defined by their education.

At the same time, when we hear that a doctor graduated from the University of Tokyo, many of us instinctively assume that the doctor must be capable. University names are also carefully considered in hiring and even marriage. Every year, the internet fills with entrance-exam scores and university rankings.

The University of Tokyo, Kyoto University, Waseda and Keio, MARCH, Nitto Komasen, and so-called F-rank universities.

We say it is wrong to rank people by education, yet we are remarkably familiar with the hierarchy.

If nobody truly cared about academic credentials, YouTubers who specialize in them could never build a business around the subject.

Some people get angry. Others are delighted. Some feel superior, while others have their insecurities exposed.

Those emotions generate views.

YouTubers are simply mining them.

Academic Credentials Are an All-Too-Convenient Ranking System

My own view is that people have a natural tendency to compare themselves with others and work out where they stand.

Money, occupation, employer, home, appearance, and income all provide material for comparison.

Academic credentials are especially convenient because they even come with a numerical score in the form of entrance-exam rankings.

Income and wealth are not visible from the outside, and we cannot judge someone’s professional ability without working with them. A university name, however, takes only a few words.

“I graduated from the University of Tokyo.”

That alone prompts other people to fill in an enormous amount of information on their own.

Academic background is an extraordinarily convenient label for classifying people quickly and crudely.

Academic Credentials Can Become a Socially Acceptable Weapon

Ranking people by race, ethnicity, or religion would quite rightly cause a serious outcry.

Academic credentials, however, are supposedly something people earn through their own effort. That makes them strangely easy to weaponize.

Saying that someone is less capable because of their nationality is recognized as discrimination. Say that someone must be unintelligent because they attended a university with a low entrance-exam score, however, and some people suddenly treat it as entertainment.

Discrimination is wrong. But people still want to rank one another.

Academic credentials are an exceptionally convenient way to manage that contradiction.

Blaming Outrage YouTubers Alone Will Not Solve the Problem

Outrage-driven YouTubers do not create feelings that never existed in us.

They find the superiority, insecurity, jealousy, and anger already present, then package those emotions as content that attracts views.

That is why we misunderstand the problem if we blame only the creators and stop there.

“We should not judge people by their education.”

Then we open a university ranking.

“This kind of discriminatory video is unacceptable.”

Then we play it to find out what was said.

The next day, YouTube recommends another video mocking a different university.

The algorithm has no interest in the principles we claim to hold.

It treats the click as the truth.