The Atlantic is actually becoming a reasonable venue instead of a woke one. Example in point: this article by podcaster and writer Josh Barro. We’ve probably encountered most of his indictments before, but he explains why the problems with American universities is making most Americans—Democrats, Republicans, and independents—lose respect for the institutions. Click to read, or, if the article is paywalled, you can find an archived version here.
First, the data that constitute the problem (Barro’s words are indented):
Over the past few years, conservatives have rapidly lost trust in higher education. From 2015 to 2023, Gallup found that the share of Republicans expressing “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in higher education fell by 37 points, from 56 to 19 percent. As conservatives have come to look negatively at these institutions, Republicans have engaged in political attacks on the sector, most recently in the fact-finding and pressure campaign that caused Claudine Gay to resign as president of Harvard.
This decline is something close to common knowledge. Less discussed is the fact that public confidence in colleges has fallen significantly across all ideological groups since 2015. Though Republicans’ confidence cratered the most, Gallup found that it fell by 16 points among independents (from 48 to 32 percent) and nine points among Democrats (from 68 to 59 percent, not far from where Republicans were nine years ago).
Below are some data I found from that Gallup poll (click to enlarge if you can’t see the figures).
First, the data for all Americans, showing a drop in just the last 8 years from 57% to 36% in those who have either a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in higher education:
And the data divided by demographics. Notice that confidence fell in other groups, too, especially those with no college degree, and also a greater decline among older than among younger people.
Why is this happening? According to Barro, and he seems on the mark to me, it’s largely because the institutions are perceived as dishonest and weaselly. I’ll summarize his reasons, giving Barro’s quotes as either indented prose or with added quotation marks.
a. Universities seem less interested in finding truth that in supporting an ideology, usually one aimed at social justice. (Thinks of all the “studies” courses that exist now but didn’t in the past. Even the University of Chicago now has a Department of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity.)
b. “Their public accountings of the reasons for their internal actions are often implausible. They deceive the public about the role that race plays in their admissions and hiring practices.” It’s clear that many universities now are trying to maintain race-based admissions though that’s been outlawed by the Supreme Court. And there doesn’t seem to be any push to expand ideological or political diversity.
This also goes for hiring practices as well as undergraduate admissions. A quote from Barro:
Because using racial quotas in hiring is illegal, universities can’t explicitly admit to setting positions aside for candidates from underrepresented minorities. Instead they use ideological screens and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) statement reviews as a proxy for race. This approach has many drawbacks—in addition to involving a concealment of the university’s true objectives, it is of no use to Black and Hispanic candidates who are not interested in “ideologically supercharged” areas of study, and sometimes it leads to the hiring of white candidates anyway, if they know best how to include the magic trendy words in a DEI statement.
And a quote about Harvard’s litigation about race-based admissions policy, about which they simply dissimulated. This went all the way up to the Supreme Court, of course:
The dishonesty at elite universities extends beyond their research output to how they describe their admissions processes. Like many universities, Harvard has long used race as a factor in college admissions, producing a class that is less Asian and more Black and Hispanic than it would be if it did not consider race. Throughout the litigation over this practice, the university’s representatives didn’t just defend the appropriateness of race-conscious policies to promote diversity; they denied that they were discriminating at all. They played word games—similar to the “what even is plagiarism?” bit deployed by Gay’s defenders—arguing somehow that race could be used as a positive factor for admission without ever being a negative one, a mathematical impossibility when awarding a fixed number of admission slots.
c. The degrees that universities give “will not justify the time and money that students invest in them.” I’m sure this is one factor, as some schools give degrees with ridiculous names, or “studies” degrees that would make it hard to get a job. And, of course, schools are expensive, especially for “elite” colleges. This is what it’ll take you to send a student to Harvard next year. If you multiply that by four, you get nearly $320,000, not counting books and other supplies.
Even at the state school where I went, The College of William & Mary, tuition for an out-of-state student is $63,967, not that much less than Harvard’s, while in-state students pay amore reasonable amount: $39,595 When I went there it was $1200 per year, which works out, with inflation, to be the equivalent of $10,800 today—a bit more than just half in real money of the student tuition-only fee of $18,252. But the point is that except for state schools if you’re a resident, college costs more than many parents make.
Of course you shouldn’t look at college as a way to get a pecuniary return on your investment, but that’s the way things have become. It’s this “consumerist” mentality that is in fact ruining many colleges, leading to lame “pop culture” courses, grade inflation, the decline of the humanities, and the fear of professors that their students will beef because they’re not getting a monetary return. (When I taught evolution to students who were mostly pre-meds, I got complaints that evolution wouldn’t help students become better doctors. And they’re largely right, but that’s not the point of studying evolution.)
d. The “replication crisis” affecting the reliability of data has led people to think that many researchers are either sloppy or dishonest, so what you learn in college may not be trustworthy. This is Barro’s accusation, though I don’t see it as nearly as big a contributor to the problem as the first three issues above.
e. The waffling, euphemisms, and plagiarism evidenced in the Claudine Gray scandal. This doesn’t play into the Gallup data above, which were compiled before Gay resigned as President of Harvard, but it’s surely embedded in the minds of the public now. They also remember the waffling that she, Liz Magill, and Sally Kornbluth showed during the House hearing. Granted, they were being bullied, but none of them made a particularly good showing, and Magill has resigned as well. This, I think, did a great deal to debase higher education in the minds of Americans. I’m not even mentioning the use of euphemisms like “duplicative language” instead of “plagiarism,” which didn’t fool anyone but made Harvard look defensive and weaselly.
f. Even science has been tarred by misguided advice by experts, especially during the pandemic. Barro:
Yet another distortion of academic output is subject-matter specialists using the guise of expertise to impose their policy preferences on the public. This phenomenon exploded as a huge problem early in the coronavirus pandemic, and it wasn’t limited to universities—some of the public-health professionals who fought to turn transmission estimates into policies that closed schools, offices, and places of worship were on faculties, some were at hospitals, some worked for the government, and some just posted a lot on Twitter. But I’ll say that several years of hearing “science says” prior to claims that weren’t science as such but rather were applications of scientific claims through a specific value framework I didn’t share—part-communitarian, part-neurotic, part-left wing—made
I’m going to add two others, which are mine. Here they are. They’re coming now. First, the deplatforming of speakers. This mainly affects conservative speakers, like federal judge Kyle Duncan, who was shouted down at Stanford Law School, an incident for which the university had to apologize. This, of course, turns off more right-wing than left-wing Americans, but the problem is that all Americans are losing confidence in colleges, and many on the Left, like me, still favor free speech for everyone.
Second, the spread of identity politics and identity issues, which “intersects” with several of the issues above. These include “studies,” DEI, and the segregation of students by race, often in “affinity houses” or in race-specific graduations. This again is guaranteed to anger a lot of people, including members of minorities who don’t favor this kind of voluntary segregation.
Finally, I want to quote one bit from Barro’s piece that’s particularly invidious:
The commentator Matt Yglesias wrote a few weeks ago about a paper by Jenny Bulstrode, a historian of science at the University of London, who alleges that a moderately notable metallurgical technique patented in England in the late 1700s was in fact stolen from the Black Jamaican metallurgists who really developed it. The problem with Bulstrode’s paper is that it marshals no real evidence for its allegation—not only failing to show that the Englishman Henry Cort was aware of a Jamaican metallurgical technique similar to the one he patented but failing to show even that such a technique was ever used in Jamaica.
The paper, because it fit into the fashionable category of “historian finds yet another thing that is racist,” garnered credulous press coverage. And when people pointed out that the paper didn’t have the goods, the editors of the journal that published it came out with a “what is truth, anyway”–type word salad in defense of the article, including this:
We by no means hold that “fiction” is a meaningless category—dishonesty and fabrication in academic scholarship are ethically unacceptable. But we do believe that what counts as accountability to our historical subjects, our readers and our own communities is not singular or to be dictated prior to engaging in historical study. If we are to confront the anti-Blackness of EuroAmerican intellectual traditions, as those have been explicated over the last century by DuBois, Fanon, and scholars of the subsequent generations we must grasp that what is experienced by dominant actors in EuroAmerican cultures as ‘empiricism’ is deeply conditioned by the predicating logics of colonialism and racial capitalism. To do otherwise is to reinstate older forms of profoundly selective historicism that support white domination.
This ideology-first, activism-oriented, the-truth-depends-on-who’s-looking approach leads me to suspect that a lot of what’s happening at universities isn’t really research—it’s social activism dressed up as research, which need not be of good quality so long as it has the right ideological goals.
Look at that word salad in the penultimate paragraph! As best I can figure, it really says that a paper which is completely bogus is okay, so long as it adheres to the narrative of white oppression and cultural appropriation. For the kind of “selective historicism” that called out Bulstrode’s paper simply “supports white domination”—even if Bulstrode was dead wrong.
Is this loss of trust good? In two ways, yes; in another way, no. The good bits are that this lack of trust may force colleges to clean up their act. Further, people who really don’t want to go to college or need to go to college (John McWhorter says that college isn’t necessary for many people, and others may want to go to trade school), this could put them on a better career path.
But the worst part is that for those who really want a good university education, the structure has to be in place to offer one. All of the problems above reduce the quality of education on tap, and, if you’re concerned about such things, will make America sink even lower in the worldwide competition for good colleges. Although I don’t care much whether, say, Britain offers a better college education than does the U.S. (I don’t know if this is the case), you simply want every school to be as good as it can, no matter where it is.
Barro has put his finger on a serious issue, and perhaps now that GayGate has occurred and the Supreme Court has begun dismantling DEI, the decline in respect for colleges may slow or even reverse.
h/t: Carl
Word salads apart, I agree with this assessment and I am eternally grateful I am recently retired for a state university.
Saw on Twitter these stats about the new intake to Johns Hopkins:
Johns Hopkins class of 2026:
16% Black (US overall: 13%)
16% White (US overall: 60%)
21% Latino (US overall: 19%)
30% Asian (US overall: 7%)
16% International students.
Note the huge underrepresentation of white Americans. This is what DEI means in practice. Despite figures like these, we’re also supposed to believe that the entire society is “systemically racist” and massively rigged against anyone “of color”.
Note that the Johns Hopkins student body is 55% women and 45% men, so white males will be even more underrepresented. (And if anyone is thinking, “that must mean that white males are doing badly on exams these days and so failing to win places on merit”, well, no, that is not the explanation.)
RE: “if anyone is thinking, ‘that must mean that white males are doing badly on exams these days and so failing to win places on merit’, well, no, that is not the explanation.”
How do you know that this is not the explanation?
I haven’t read this (but I expect that it will discuss this):
Richard V. Reeves: Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do About It. Brookings Institution Press, 2022
https://www.amazon.com/Boys-Men-Modern-Struggling-Matters/dp/0815739877
Male inequality, explained by an expert | Richard Reeves, Jan 2023, 15 mins
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DBG1Wgg32Ok
Michelle Goldberg: Boys and Men Are in Crisis Because Society Is. New York Times, Oct 2022
https://archive.is/l2swT
There are also more female than male college students in Iran and, to a lesser extent, Saudi Arabia, which suggests, at least to me, that girls may be more innately disposed to academic life.
Given these two countries, the NYT’s Michelle Goldberg might equally well claim that women are innately disposed to cover their hair.
While the statistics are correct, they are usually explained, including on this website, by the fact that women in these countries have hardly any other career option. Conversely, and some say paradoxically, indications are that in western countries, which plausibly offer far more liberty to women to follow their innate dispositions, fewer of them choose to seek fulfillment in academic life.
RE: “Given these two countries, the NYT’s Michelle Goldberg might equally well claim that women are innately disposed to cover their hair.”
No she would not claim that because the fact is that there are more female students than male students in Iran, Saudi Arabia AND the USA (where women do not cover their hair).
I don’t know why there are mor women than men at university in these 3 countries. I was asking Coel. I wasn’t quoting Goldberg because of her hunch that “girls may be more innately disposed to academic life.”
Only certain forms of “disparity” should ever be noticed or commented upon, the underrepresentation of persons of pallor at elite institutions being not in the least “problematic”.
At my son’s freshman orientation at (a US state) university, they spoke about “gender disparity” at universities.
I just wanted to get along, so I said nothing; but I wanted to say, “you mean the 58% to 42% disparity of women students over men students? Or the 90%/10% women/men in veterinary medicine?” The 58/42 disparity (in favor of women) is bigger than it was the other way around in 1979.
And no one says a word … (Except Richard Reeves and a very few others brave enough to buck the accepted narrative.)
“(And if anyone is thinking, “that must mean that white males are doing badly on exams these days and so failing to win places on merit”, well, no, that is not the explanation.)”
In my country, this is exactly the explanation. With the exception of certain male-dominated fields such as engineering and computer science, university classes are either female-dominated or use frank quotas to prevent feminization. The faculty of medicine where I work uses 50% quota for boys.
My explanation (and not only mine) is that the standard educational setting, where success largely depends on discipline and obedience, better suits female than male personalities. I have read somewhere that to reduce the sex gap in secondary school, teachers should give less homework because girls tend to do the homework as best as they can while boys tend to regard it as optional.
Of course, once the quota is introduced, sex disparities only grow because the brightest boys, knowing that they will have to compete only with other boys and are spared the competition of better performing girls, don’t work very hard, and the poor girls, knowing that they compete with each other for limited slots, work as hard as they can. I guess the same is true about candidate students of different races in the USA.
Interesting — which country is that?
“Of course you shouldn’t look at college as a way to get a pecuniary return on your investment, but that’s the way things have become.”
I disagree. Given the cost of college has quadrupled in 30 years and become untenable for a middle class family to afford that has more than one child (or risk constraining your child’s future with crippling debt), ROI must be part of the calculus. Especially if some majors have weak career prospects. I hate to see it and the decline of liberal arts education but the cost of college is insane. What if a parent gave their talented HS student $250K (instead of 4y of college) to start a new business or take affordable job training classes? That’s the conversation now outside of rich families from around the world.
When discussing cost of college in the US one has to take into account the difference between posted prices and what most students actually pay (much less than the posted prices). Many colleges engage in what economists call “price discrimination” (charging different customers different prices for the same service, based on the customers ability to pay; like airlines charge business travellers more than leisure travellers; price discrimination requires that the seller has some market power – all businesses would like to engage in price discrimination, but few actually can)
For an explanation:
The Socialist Economics of College Tuition (2002)
Why elite universities charge $38,000 per year, and why they don’t expect you to pay it.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2002/05/the-socialist-economics-of-college-tuition.html
Price Discrimination in Higher Education (2012)
https://slate.com/business/2012/11/sticker-cost-vs-net-cost-of-college-it-s-all-about-the-price-discrimination.html
The Economist: American universities have an incentive to seem extortionate. The Economist, July 2023
They are much cheaper than the “crisis of college affordability” suggests
https://archive.is/TTICB
Most undergraduate degrees in America are actually affordable, and in many cases going to college is actually getting cheaper.
Sorry, no. Then why is student debt a major govt problem to be solved? The average US household income is $75K. After taxes and expenses, that’s not a lot left to save for a college education that can cost $250K but let’s grant deductions and scholarships and in-state tuition and put it at half price: $125K (it’s not). Now what if you have 2-3 kids? It’s Sophie’s academic choice. Which of your children shows less academic potential or should burden more debt, the younger ones?
And student debt is not forgivable in bankruptcy. It’s debtor’s prison plain and simple and now a staggering $1.8T in total US student loan debt. Hell, the sum of all US housing loans is $12T.
I’m not saying college should be free or $50K for 4 years but at least acknowledge the middle class has been priced out.
Maybe the decline of liberal arts education is an inevitable consequences of the decline of upper classes with all but guaranteered incomes.
+ a large number.
My main reason for going to university? The improve my economic prospects. And I sure did.
And the children go to summer camp
And then to the university
Where they are put in boxes
And they come out all the same
As a parent of a college student, the biggest issue I have is with Point C above: The degrees that universities give “will not justify the time and money that students invest in them.” For many years I have felt that more colleges/universities should be more like Brown in that students should design their own curriculum according to their interests/field of study. Grades K-12 should be the diverse study years…learn a little of everything to give you a good platform to build upon. But by the time you enter college, that should be the end of needing two semesters of math or three semesters of a foreign language, etc unless you intend to pursue fields where you will be using those skills.
Students are so stressed out because they must keep up their grades or lose their scholarships. If they lose their scholarships, then they have to quit school because they can’t afford to pay for college.
Do colleges want to be unaffordable to most? Do we want a country that is uneducated and unskilled so that we can turn into a third-world country that pays workers cents on a dollar so companies can profit even more? Or just scrap the workers and build AI to do the work of people?
I’m all for wokeness until it goes to an extreme…and it appears it has in many areas. I can’t even post a happy family event on social media without someone lecturing me on its appropriateness. (I love that BLOCK feature) I can’t imagine how annoying this could be in the university setting with faculty and staff. We’ve become so nitpicky over microscopic things.
Let’s stop being so WOKE that we become zombies from “lack of sleep.”
When people are shouting about student debt relief, I am thinking: No, not on my tax dollars.
What were you thinking paying $250,000 for a bachelor’s degree in Sociology (or similar)? You don’t get to float free of the economics of life unless you are independently wealthy. I’m sure it was a lovely experience at college. But so are cruises and such. And I’m not willing to subsidize those either.
Universities are there to give the students an education. Education should be subsidised by the tax payer because having educated people joining the adult population makes society a better place to live for everybody.
You benefit greatly from other people’s tax dollars. You should be prepared to give something back.
Generally, I would agree with you but not anymore with top tier universities costing $250K, the economics don’t work. The cost to the taxpayer would be unsustainable unless we cut defense spending by a lot (not a bad idea) and why Biden’s debt forgiveness program for some college students ($127B) was defeated by SCOTUS and deemed unfair by so many.
Smaller countries with publicly funded colleges still require a more stringently meritocratic system that selects for top students enter college. The US has applied market values to education, not to educate the populus but to sell to the highest bidder with way too many colleges and successful ones stockpiling endowments of billions of dollars.
Jeremyp, you’re absolutely right, “having educated people joining the adult population makes society a better place to live for everybody.” However, it isn’t like plumbers, carpenters, nannies and car mechanics don’t already pay taxes for this purpose. So, why should they now pay off the loans of college grads.
About 70% of Americans over the age of 24 do not have a college degree. On average, lifetime earnings of college grads are about $500k more than people without college degrees. The average college student loan is about $30k. I haven’t run the numbers, but the ROI on this investment surely beats most any alternative.
Given this ROI, I can’t imagine explaining to my car mechanic its because “those college grads will make society a better place to live” for him and all the plumbers etc. I think he’d ask me when am I going to pay off his auto loan.
On the topic of cars, if the amount of college loans (~$1.7T) is the definition of a crisis, then we also have an auto loan crisis. Those loans total about $1.2T. I don’t see the college grads in the gov’t or the media talking about that.
Perhaps, that is because the beneficiaries of auto loan forgiveness are lower income people who could not afford a car outright. Whereas student debt forgiveness benefits the lawyers, doctors, MBAs and others with advanced degrees. High-income students and others such as lawyers, doctors and others with advanced degrees account for 42% of all student debt.
During my 4-1/2 years at university (very early 1980s), my tuition went up by a factor of ten from my first term to my last term. No kidding.
I’ve watched the GOP push to defund state universities for my entire adult life. And they have managed it. And this makes it damned hard to afford for anyone not wealthy or with big scholarships. Which, if you did the right thing, as we did for our son, and save for his schooling, you lose on scholarships because of the need factor. We got nothing in financial aid. (He had a 3.80 GPA with lots of AP and college-credit classes and a very full load at a very highly ranked high school. He got a 32 combined on his ACT on one try.)
I saved for him since he was less than one year old. We’ve got him covered for 2-1/2 years fully loaded at his school. And he worked and saved enough for one more year. Because of high school AP classes, he should finish in 3-1/2 years. He just needs to earn enough the next three summers to cover the final year’s worth.
I was showing him net present value for college costs (and earnings with the degree) since he was about 14. He’s quite cost-conscious.
Jim, this may be of interest to you:
The Economist: American universities have an incentive to seem extortionate. The Economist, July 2023
They are much cheaper than the “crisis of college affordability” suggests
Beth Akers: Making College Pay: An Economist Explains How to Make a Smart Bet on Higher Education. Penguin Random House, 2021, 176 p.
You’ll learn:
– Why choosing the right major matters more than where you enroll;
– The best criteria for picking a school (hint: not selectivity or ranking);
– Why there’s a high cost of working part-time while earning your degree;
– Why it’s often best to borrow, even if you can afford to pay outright;
– The pros and cons of nontraditional degree programs; and
– How to take advantage of new, low-risk financing tools.
I realised some years ago just how lucky I was to be born when and where I was, with respect to university education. Prior to WW2, it was all meritocratic entry and private payment but the post-war Labour governments in the UK felt that all should be able to go to university if clever enough, and not be held back by monetary considerations.
In my day you had to compete for a place, and if one was offered, it would be conditional on sufficiently good results on school-leaving exams (GCE A-levels). At that point, your tuition was paid by the county where you lived, and you were supported by a means-tested grant. In the mid-1970s my father paid about £400 a term, and a grant paid another £400. If he was able to pay but had declined, I’d have been out of luck. The grant varied from full (parents unable to contribute) to minimal (parents wealthy), and was not repayable. Something like 11% of school-leavers went on to university, and did so without money worries, but only if they were clever enough.
Since Tony Blair’s bright ideas, it’s all student loans, universities run for profit, anyone can go and the value of a degree has plummeted. If I’d been born earlier, I could not have afforded to go (my father got into civil engineering by articling, rather than a degree, and something like that would have been the best I could hope for), and the same is true if I’d been born later! As I said, lucky!
I have long believed that practical subjects, and not just manual trades, are often better taught via practice (duh). Such subjects include areas of engineering, accounting, law, journalism, and computer programming. Appropriate theory, history, and other traditional academic aspects of the subject can be introduced when actually relevant and/or of interest to the particular student. This is basically apprenticeship. It does require much more individualised attention, but that cost can be worth it.
Journalism and programming are OK but I disagree about the rest. Without a solid theoretical basis, anyone practicing these fields will be prone to mistakes with disastrous results for himself and others, esp. when the situation changes. I have heard of electricians grounding devices by connecting them to iron water pipes, and continuing this even after the iron pipes were replaced with PVC ones.
I fully agree that knowing the general principles surrounding one’s technical work is very important. As the Taoist sage Chuang-Tzu (c. 200 BC) said:
I had a blog exchange with an apprentice electrician who was griping about needing to study lots of useless theory stuff (e.g. Ohm’s law). It seems that trade training imunises one against theory much like academic training imunises one against practicalities, kind of a Two Cultures phenomenon. IMO, this is Bad.
In general I’m a big fan of general principles, but trying to stuff them into an unmotivated student, like force-feeding a foie gras duck, is often useless or even counterproductive, not to mention cruel to the duck and student.
Agreed. I don’t think you can be an effective engineer without a solid degree. Or, for a very few individuals, some of whom I knew, through a decade or three of experience on the job.
Articling was the standard way of producing engineers in the 1930s. My father did two years before 1939, when he volunteered and then spent six years in the Royal Engineers. After the war, he did a further two years and then passed his ‘civils,’ ‘structurals’ and ‘municipals,’ giving him three professional qualifications. Those examinations are still required to be a professional engineer: if you have a degree but have not passed them, you cannot practice unsupervised in the UK or Canada. I don’t know if that is true for America. Eventually he became a Borough Engineer, supervising all engineering projects for a large town in the UK. As for knowledge, let me say he continued to set himself calculus problems to solve over breakfast until he died. He delighted in the mathematics required.
I can’t claim to know anything about journalism, but a degree in computer science is definitely a big help for those who wish to be effective computer programmers.
Thanks to Tony Blair I’m of an age when I did accumulate student debt, but the amount was limited due to my studying during the period when costs were phased in and grants phased out. It wasn’t that much of an issue for me and was paid off in a few years. My views regarding Blair and new labour are largely favourable, but I will never understand nor agree with the changes and the speed with which they were introduced. I cannot forgive them for this as I believe it had a deleterious effect on UK higher education.
The debt racked up now by an average UK student is ridiculous, approaching ten times the amount I had to repay. I went to university because of my passion for science – my need to know more. I didn’t even consider job prospects for the first couple of years. I went to learn about stuff that I loved.
The extortionate cost of uni education is now causing students to disregard their passions, instead it’s forcing them to make ROI calculations to justify their studies. I find this consumerist, value-for-money, investment-focused approach antithetical to what university should be about. My kids are now at the age of starting or nearly starting university and I speak to so many of their friends who question the value of even bothering. With the costs so high they and their parents have no choice but to be concerned about whether there is a worthwhile ROI to be had. This is completely understandable, given the current system, and I find it very hard to convince youngsters of the immense value in education itself, not jus the opportunities it may provide.
It’s quite depressing.
My experience is similar. When I went to university to read Chemistry in 1968, the Government grant was £600 a year; I opted to go on a grant from BP, worth £650 (and lost out in the long run, because I had to work for BP for two months each summer…but that’s another story). That was it.
All four of my children went on to higher education between 2000 and 2010. All of them have accrued a substantial debt on both tuition and maintenance costs, although my son’s is less than those of his sisters, because he dropped out after a year to do something more rewarding. Although they are exempt from repayment until their salaries exceed a certain value, the debt will continue to hang over them for years.
One of my daughters, who lives in Italy, has recently completed a further degree in Italy. Her fees were about €600 a year. Nice to know that EU countries can still get some things right!
Christopher, I had a similar experience in the UK, doing my 3-year degree (in music) in 1982-85 and graduating without a penny of debt. Of course it was obvious that in an education system where three times as many people go to university as in my day, the nature of the educational experience they have is going to be very different — less academically rigorous, certainly, less intellectually exploratory, less about the transition to self-reliant adulthood. Was it worth the change, to have a country where higher education is seen as less elitist (because more people have it) and a larger portion of the population becomes used to thinking of higher education as a normal and valuable part of life? Perhaps it’s still too early to say, and the answer for society as a whole will not necessarily be the same as the answer for any individual. But what it feels like to me is that a great deal has been lost, and little gained. Universities were the country’s golden goose, and if the Blair-era and subsequent reforms haven’t killed it yet, they are certainly doing a damn good job of squeezing the life out of what’s left.
For 45 years after the Bakke decision, academia has used one trick or another to game the Supreme Court ruling, and evade assorted state votes against racial quotas, so as to retain some form of race-based admission. Everyone is aware of this dissimulation, and its empty, euphemistic label, “affirmative action”, virtually gives the game away. No surprise, then, that large parts of the public begin to suspect dishonesty in the groves of academe. In the last decade, a similarly tricky use of a few big words (Diversity! Inclusion! Belonging! etc.) has made the groves look even more a bill of goods. The last straw may be pronouncements against simple biology by academic wizards of Gender Theory. Frankly, it’s a surprise that as much as 36% of the public maintains some confidence in academe—but that fraction is probably still going down.
Why is academia so eager to fill itself with underperforming students based on their skin pigmentation? One would expect faculty to want the best applicants. Eh well, plus some athletes and children of donors, but generally the best ones.
“Why is academia so eager to fill itself with underperforming students based on their skin pigmentation?” Because the people who make those admissions decisions think that they don’t pay the consequences of those decisions. Until they have surgery in a hospital or fly in a plane staffed by affirmative action admits.
I so appreciate your comment, Mike. It’s kind of sad to think we hold most jobs in such low esteem that we don’t mind that they might be performed by sub-optimal employees. Granted, flying planes and performing surgery are absolutely of prime importance. I just hope my accountant, my electrician, etc. also are chosen on merit rather than skin color.
You may be making assumptions here. At my fairly selective research university applicants for the freshman class are first put into one of three buckets. The first is those whose qualifications suggest that they will not succeed, which refers to two measures: likelihood of returning for a third semester (i.e. coming back after the freshman year), and likelihood of graduating. They get rejected. The second bucket consists of applicants who have a reasonable likelihood of success, and the third bucket is those applicants who are pretty much guaranteed to be successful. The applicants in the third bucket exceed the number who can be admitted, so some additional criteria have to be used to select those who will be offered admission. Often ‘race’ or ‘ethnicity’ are used, to achieve “diversity,” but the point is that these are applicants whose qualifications are already sufficiently strong to justify admitting them.
In the recent Harvard lawsuit, for example, it was emphasized that the graduation rate at Harvard College is over 97% — and of the 3% who do not graduate (usually within 6 years, the standard measure), many have left for reasons that have nothing to do with academic performance (think Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerburg, et al…) Harvard may be accused of admitting unqualified applicants based solely on their skin color, but they still manage to graduate.
What happens to the people in the second bucket? If you can’t admit all the people in the top bucket anyway, why bother having a middle one? Or is it the source of the applicants you will be tempted to dip into to make your freshman class the desired degree of diversity, whom you can’t find in the top bucket? These are people whom you acknowledge were not a sure thing to graduate and will be taken in preference to an equal number of ones who were. And if you already couldn’t admit everyone from the top bucket, how many additional top-bucket applicants have to be rejected in order to take enough from the middle to make your diversity numbers, and how deeply into the middle bucket do you need to dip? What if the top third of the middle bucket is itself 95% white or Asian? If you pass them over as being no more “diverse” than the top bucket, this would make a strongly and visibly bi-modal class, with the very top levels of the top bucket clustering around one mode and a tranche from the middle- to lower- third of the middle bucket forming the other.
If you have to take any, even one, from the middle bucket, then your claim that everyone in the freshman class has met that top-bucket standard for success breaks down. All you can say is that you haven’t taken anyone clearly unable to succeed. The alternative is to reject outright both lower and the middle buckets and take from the very bottom of the top bucket if you want to, but recognize that this puts a hard ceiling on the degree of cosmetic diversity you can achieve. Perhaps this is what you do, but then what is the middle bucket for?
“…your claim that everyone in the freshman class has met that top-bucket standard for success breaks down.”
I did not make such a claim.
I am not involved in admissions at my university, so I cannot answer questions about the ‘second bucket’ definitively, but my understanding is that we compete with some excellent colleges for applicants, and it is not uncommon for us to dip into the second bucket to offer admission to applicants who appear to be — what? — reasonably likely to succeed, to fill out a freshman class. The biggest barrier to returning for a third semester, at my university as well as nationally, is financial, so I would not be surprised if some of the decisions are driven by the financial status of applicants in the second bucket.
So simple when 80% of students get A’s as they apparently do at Yale. 80%! That’s an interesting Gaussian distribution, I wonder if they still teach statistics at my former Alma Mater. What buckets? The thumb is on the scale of meritocracy – everyone gets a participation trophy for the low price of exorbitant tuition.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/05/nyregion/yale-grade-inflation.html#:~:text=By%202018%2D19%2C%2073%20percent,figure%20was%20about%2079%20percent
Coincidentally, this just popped up in my notifications. I read it through quickly, am pondering it, offer it for your consideration.
https://www.elysian.press/p/we-should-remove-electives-from-higher?r=2xi1r&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
I disagree that an understanding of evolution does not help people be better doctors. Without that core concept, how can anyone understand (and appropriately fear) antibiotic resistant infections and cancer with induced chemotherapy resistance?
The very concept of gateway resistance in bacteria is one of the things that keep me up at night. Take a look at Streptococcus pyogenes for an example of how the lack of appreciation/respect/knowledge of evolution harms people who choose convenience first.
I was about to write something in these lines.
A premed candidly said the following to me about 15 years ago: “I don’t like biology or science, I’m only majoring in this field so I can go to medical school. If I don’t get an A in your class I’ll switch to a major where I know I can succeed and make money.”
At the time I was deeply and personally offended. As the years have passed I came to thank that student for his honesty. Nearly every student in the health sciences (including veterinary medicine) I’ve encountered has been the same. They know they need perfect grades and will use their memorization skills to get them. Evolution is a process that occurs over a time scale of no interest to them. Medicine is largely about developing highly specialized skills and using a scalpel or a prescription pad to solve the proximate problems as they present themselves. A large number of physicians take credit for the grinding work done in the research lab by PhDs and their students; people they dismiss as “not being real doctors.”
My own take is that the exams select for the very people you are describing (I flater myself to believe I am an exception).
For an overly simple example;
a typical medical school question would be to ask something like, what is a handkerchief for?
To blow your nose is the obvious answer and one people would memorize.
The alternative is to ask how many different things can you use a handkerchief for? Write down all you can in the next 60 seconds.
I would argue the second question is much more relevant to medical people and is the type of thinking that is completely unassessed at any level of education/ training.
I can’t blame you for being offended, for that comment was callow and callous. That being said, it’s worth acknowledging just how competitive it is to get into medical school. If one isn’t particularly smart–able to think through and solve complex problems–then one will not be able to compete and get into (a good) medical school. We didn’t just make thousands of flashcards and feel superior to other people when we regurgitated those facts.
We have to think quite a bit about why a patient is having a particular problem. Sometimes the answer is straightforward, but there are times when it’s by no means clear. One can’t just whip out a prescription pad and move on to the next patient, though our system in the U.S. gives us very little time with each patient.
And I’m sure you’re right that many physicians imply a big “we” in talking about medical discoveries and understanding. That being said, most of us know just how much we don’t know. If you are an OB/Gyn like I am, you quickly realize how wonderful it is to have others who have expert understanding about anesthesiology, internal medicine, and other areas. We (hopefully) recognize just how hard it is to become a PhD in the hard sciences, and we should definitely acknowledge that much of the science that illuminates the right diagnostic or treatment path is shone by PhDs.
I completely agree, Tom. Biology is at the center of what we do, and the keystone of biology is evolution.
RE: “it’s social activism dressed up as research”.
My younger colleagues do not dress up their activism as research. They claim that their activism IS their research.
In their minds, this claim puts them safely out of the reach of any kind of criticism or vetting of their work by anyone who does not share their activist agenda. I think that these younger colleagues genuinely do not understand the difference between activism and research. They are not dressing things up. There is no intent to deceive. They are simply unaware of the meanings others attach to these terms.
Good gawd. What departments, S? Where are their PhD’s from? Do they publish in peer-reviewed journals? Do they recognize scientific method? Or is their world a post modern whatever I believe is true?
They are from excellent PhD institutions. They publish in top international journals, but they publish the stuff that makes WEIT readers’ skin crawl and which sometimes features in WEIT for exactly that reason. Yes, their world is fully postmodern. Their disciplines cover the gamut — hard sciences, social sciences, humanities — but I know of none in the business school.
These people have been passed through the entire system with accolades and awards and glowing references because of their various sorts of minority/oppressed status. In the process, they have developed no real foundation to fall back on when this nonsense is exposed and suddenly out of favour. That worries me a lot — there really is nothing much there, limited self awareness, no 2nd string to the bow. A decisive shift against the woke/DEI/decolonising ideology could be catastrophic for many of my colleagues. Personally not just professionally. Often, there are obvious mental health issues and identity issues which compound this worry. It’s hard to wish them ill, because they all mean well and think they are making the world a better place. But they are not scholars. They are only activists.
No, they don’t belong in academic jobs, and they never did, but they are in them now, the oldest have been for close to a decade, now approaching middle age and tenured.
Thanks. I had no idea that the problem had become the rule rather than the exception. Going to be hard to get to sleep tonight.
Rest easy! It’s not the rule. It’s just that there are numbers of these people today, enough of them that they have real power in some areas. But they tend to be so gauche, expecting that everyone wholeheartedly shares their particular passions, that they produce a strong backlash wherever they go. It’s been drawing my other colleagues closer together. (Also, I’m in a nation where people have been very high on this nonsense. Other places mightn’t be so bad?)
Thanks for the clarification. So maybe not the rule, but obnoxiously present. That’s better!
“A decisive shift against the woke/DEI/decolonising ideology could be catastrophic for many of my colleagues”. Oh dear, how my heart bleeds. /s
I guess that I don’t have much confidence in so-called confidence polls. I would think that the general population has little real basis on how much confidence they should have in higher ed. Is their confidence based on their recent experience at one or a few colleges? Their child’s recent experience? What they have heard or read from pundits? What we hear is mostly the man bites dog or leads because it bleeds exceptions. We do not hear of those classes that proceed much as mine (and I think our host’s) did fifty years ago in providing me an excellent education both for a career and to prepare me for further lifelong education (like reading WEIT!). Yes, the inflation in college cost is obscene; an emphasis on competitive intercollegiate sports is crazy; coddling of students treated as customers is business school marketing and management over-reach. And I do think that the FIRE findings are of real concern and the DEI structures and impacts at SOME schools are nuts. But my little anecdotes of auditing a freshman biochem course four years ago (just pre covid) at a state school; my grand son’s recent degree in neuroscience (clinical) at a large state university; and grand daughters degree in sports training at a small state school show me that there are still very serious professors, still a healthy core of required humanities coursework, and still some very serious, bright, and hardworking students quietly going about their business in courses that are at least as demanding as those that I took fifty years ago. There are some things that really need to be cleaned up at some schools -often this is a matter of political will; catching dei before it went further is important; can we see change in the boards of trustees at some colleges that approved of the dei policies and appointed presidents to carry them out? Will UChicago demonstrate the political will to enforce the Principles post the late President Zimmer?
Btw, I also remind Jerry, that as part of the total annual $1200/yr bill at William and Mary was a $20 laundry fee that provided for a full week’s laundry each week including seven dress shirts cleaned, pressed and boxed, underwear, towels, etc. what a deal!
It’s good to hear your report on the success of your grandchildren—and the fact that that there is still serious education taking place. I have been out of the academy since 1996, so only know what I read.
At my undergraduate university, SUNY-Binghamton, tuition was $325 per semester or $650 per year for in-state students. That’s about $4,000 per year in 2023 dollars. An amazing deal by any standard. I had a free towel service and laundry, provided by my mother. 🙂
For out-of-state students in our time all-in cost was $2200/year including room and board….assuming the latter was constant across in-state and out, the pure tuition element for in-state had to have been very low. Laundry was 20 pieces/week with two socks counted as one item. If you gave them seven dress shirts you wouldn’t have much underwear that week.
I had a daughter just graduated from W&M 2021. Got to know a lot of her friends. The academic rigor (outside of STEM and the B school) and just joy of learning are nothing like we remember. Sadly.
Even more sadly, kids with opinions at variance from the mainstream now are terrified of being seen to have those heteradox opinions (now conservative rather than liberal as they were in our day) and if voiced in the classroom run they run the risk of being humiliated about them by their professors. Although it’s fair to say that i was at odds with the majority political climate of the time that kind of pressure didn’t exist…the environment was far more tolerant and engaging.
Thanks for the corrections and update Mike. Environment did not look like that to me from my little freshman biochem course knothole in Fall 2019, which was STEM but college-wide. Academic rigor was de rigeur…very demanding and kids stepped up to the plate. Though I trust your wider and deeper view as more accurate. Too bad.
I’m an Atlantic subscriber and think that they’ve had some pretty good pieces of late on DEI, the speech police, and all the rest. I hope they keep going.
I’m saddened by what has happened to the universities, particularly as I spent half a career as a college professor. That was so long ago (1983-1996) that I can’t even imagine what it would be like in today’s climate. Could I bring myself to take the performative unconscious bias courses that might be required? Would I be able in all good conscience to trumpet my (limited) social justice activities on my annual report? Would I be able to tell my students that they might be triggered hearing me talk about the two biological sexes (pretty much necessary when teaching evolution, even as a paleontologist)? Would I be called names for doing so?
Can it all be fixed? I agree that a) and b) above are probably the biggest problems, with identity politics and DEI as intersecting factors. Perhaps the Harvard case will get the attention of other college and university administrators and convince them that they can no longer live in splendid isolation as if they are their own little countries. More likely, things won’t get much better without hitting the institutions where it counts—in their pocketbooks. That means lawsuits.
The elite universities are increasingly looking like finishing schools for the well-off, who defend their privilege by pretending to be social justice activists. Perhaps this is a sign that state, local, and federal governments should invest more in trade schools, community colleges, and state universities. The concept of higher education needs to be rethought, especially since not everyone can be part of the information economy.
I’d agree, but the people that would drive the change have come from the finishing schools for the well off and probably are quite happy defending the status quo.
The Academic Left’s scholar-activism has its ideological roots in a certain conception of the relationship between scientific theory and political praxis, according to which there ought to be a “dynamic unity”:
“Critical theory aims not merely to describe social reality, but to generate insights into the forces of domination operating within society in a way that can inform practical action and stimulate change. It aims to unite theory and practice, so that the theorist forms “a dynamic unity with the oppressed class” ([Max Horkheimer] 1937a [1972, 215]) that is guided by an emancipatory interest – defined negatively as an interest in the “abolition of social injustice” (ibid., 242) and positively as an interest in establishing “reasonable conditions of life” (ibid., 199). “The theory never aims simply at an increase of knowledge as such,” but at “emancipation from slavery” (1937b [1972, 246]) in the broadest sense of eliminating all forms of domination.”
Critical Theory: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/critical-theory/
A comment above makes reference to Ohm’s law, which reminds us of the lack of
Diversity in the names memorialized in electricity, not only in laws but even in units (volts, amps, watts, ohms, etc.). Surprising, really, that this lamentable whiteness has not been the subject of an exposé in Scientific American, or a contrite apology by the DEI Committee of The Electricity Journal.
The field of cultural studies has always been politicized:
“It remains difficult to pin down the boundaries of cultural studies as a coherent, unified, academic discipline with clear-cut substantive topics, concepts and methods that differentiate it from other disciplines. Cultural studies has always been a multi- or post-disciplinary field of enquiry which blurs the boundaries between itself and other ‘subjects’. It is not physics, it is not sociology and it is not linguistics, though it draws upon these subject areas. Indeed, there must be, as [Stuart] Hall [1932-2014] argues, something at stake in cultural studies that differentiates it from other subject areas.
For Hall, what is at stake is the connection that cultural studies seeks to make to matters of power and cultural politics. That is, to an exploration of representations of and ‘for’ marginalized social groups and the need for cultural change. Hence, cultural studies is a body of theory generated by thinkers who regard the production of theoretical knowledge as a political practice. Here, knowledge is never a neutral or objective phenomenon but a matter of positionality, that is, of the place from which one speaks, to whom, and for what purposes. At the start of the evolution of British cultural studies the idea that the field was politically engaged was taken as a defining characteristic. Today, cultural studies’ alignment with political activism is more controversial – both inside and outside of the field.”
(Barker, Chris, and Emma A. Jane. Cultural Studies: Theory and Practice. 5th ed. London: SAGE Publications, 2016. p. 5)
I used to have a rant about “Cultural Studies” – U.S. style in particular – that focused on the traditional place of English departments in colleges and universities, and the changes, including decline, of English as a subject of relevance to students and the university.
At many, if not most universities, English departments were, traditionally, the core of a liberal arts curriculum, and were often the largest department, controlling considerable resources and both actual and symbolic power in the academy. By the time of the Vietnam War, that power was beginning to decline, “English Lit” was increasingly seen as an irrelevant luxury in universities in which the important work was being pursued in the hard sciences, and “Literature” with a cap “L” was seen as part of the production of a privileged class that no longer dominated higher education.
The dilemma for English departments in the U.S. – how to maintain power and control of often shrinking resources – was resolved in part by embracing the notion of “Cultural Studies,” which had no clear boundaries, and authorized English Lit faculty to pursue any subject they wished, no matter how remote from literature, English or otherwise. I remember being an external evaluator for a full prof promotion for an English department faculty member whose full prof book was an ethnography of gay sex clubs – a perfectly interesting ethnography, but not up to the standards that a sociologist would hold, and utterly unrelated to anything that an English Lit department would traditionally pursue, yet it was all legit as “Cultural Studies.” At last count, about half of his department faculty specialized on topics that had nothing to do with “literature” in any traditional sense. But it allowed this large department – over 50 full-time faculty – to maintain its position in that university.
I see this story repeated over and over. It relies on maintaining a kind of ambiguity about what “Cultural Studies” is, since pinning that down would invite questions about why such topics are located in English departments where amateur economists can write about “economic” issues without the need for any expertise, and amateur sociologists can re-invent wheels that sociologists invented decades ago.
Josh Barro’s observations strike me as accurate, but I wonder if they describe attitudes more than they explain those attitudes. For example, just to take the first item in the list — colleges appear to be less interested in discovering truth than in promoting social justice ideologies – it is not clear why that would be regarded as a bad thing. The notion that colleges pursue the truth is a relatively recent innovation in the history of higher education, driven in part by the role of research universities in the space race or earlier with the rise of scientific medicine – generously we might say that the late 19th century saw the rise of finding truth in institutions of higher education that had, for several hundred years, pursued social agendas rather than epistemological ones. And that is limited in many ways to research universities rather than liberal arts colleges. My own alma mommy, St. Johns College in Annapolis, continues to promote a broad, Great Books program that is less interested in finding truth than in finding the grounds for truth and the historically shifting contexts for what counts as truth – in other words, an agenda for a kind of sociology of knowledge. We are all familiar with the disdain with which Harvard men in the 19th century regarded the “mechanics” who studied at that college for machinists, MIT.
Perhaps the shift in attitudes that Barro discusses is a kind of correction in public understanding of higher education – a place where natural sciences might be pursuing some kind of “truth” but no one else is — but it is also a response to the failure of higher education to benefit directly those without that level of education. The simplistic response that most of the drugs that cure our ills and extend our lives are the product of university research, or that the computers we use to post our complaints about higher education were the product of university research, etc. don’t leave factory workers feeling better about “diversity” in the workplace or anywhere else.
Sorry to ramble.
# 17 raises A very good point: “…the late 19th century saw the rise of finding truth in institutions of higher education that had, for several hundred years, pursued social agendas rather than epistemological ones.” Or, in other words, the universities are returning to the medieval studium generale, charged only with discussing and disseminating the dominant religion. No wonder that every subject (and every new academic hire) will be expected to work ad majoram gloriam DEI. Just as Latin was the language of Oxford in the time of Duns Scotus, the new language of academia will be DEIspeak. Departments and whole schools (Medicine, Engineering, Forestry, etc.) formerly directed toward the exploration of reality will be redirected to rhetoric in the new language, and pursuit of the desired social agenda.
The groves of academe will thus become a western version of Cairo’s venerable Al Azhar University, founded in the 10th century. And the society around them will enjoy all the benefits that Cairo did from the 10th century on. Wikipedia reports that “In 1748, the Ottoman pasha tried to get Al-Azhar to teach astronomy and mathematics, to little avail.” What a feast of the intellect the rising generation of academics can look forward to!
“Ad majoram gloriam DEI”. I’m going to nick that. Thank you.