Jordan Peterson on education: what the evidence says · JRE #877
SUBJECT: EDUCATION
Not a true/false call. Every claim is logged with its sources; read the exhibits below.
we did it at Mohawk College in Canada a year ago, and we dropped their dropout rate in the first semester 50%
What the evidence says 01 / RECORD
Peterson co-created and commercially sells the Self Authoring writing program and has cited large dropout-reduction figures from pilot implementations at several colleges, including Mohawk College, but no peer-reviewed study documenting a 50% first-semester dropout reduction at Mohawk College could be located in academic databases (OpenAlex, Crossref, Europe PMC). The one peer-reviewed evaluation of the Self Authoring intervention Peterson co-authored, published in 2015 in Palgrave Communications (now Humanities and Social Sciences Communications), studied first-year students at Rotterdam School of Management, not Mohawk College, and reported a 54% retention increase specifically among ethnic-minority male students plus 44% more course credits earned, alongside gender and ethnicity achievement gap closures of 38-98%, not a uniform 50% first-semester dropout reduction. No independent replication of a Mohawk College effect has been published in peer-reviewed literature. Because the specific figure cited comes from Peterson's own spoken account of an unpublished pilot, with no matching published data at that institution, the claim as stated is unsupported by independently verifiable evidence.
Who Benefits
Jordan Peterson co-created the Self Authoring writing program and sells it commercially through selfauthoring.com; he has a direct financial interest in colleges adopting it and in publicizing favorable retention statistics like the Mohawk College figure.