I think the focus on teaching as the role of the university is a mistake in trying to understand it. In economics I heard from multiple people (professors and others) that even saying you like to teach is a bad idea when interviewing, because most schools only care about your research output/grant input, and admitting you like to teach suggests you will coast after tenure. Not just some people, but nearly everyone who touched on the subject said that.
So most big schools, and most smaller ones too probably, are actively selecting against good teachers and for researchers who will only teach if forced. As such, why would students respond well to the average or even above average teachers? They are awful by selection.
The service universities actually provide is research (really successful grant applications), and all the stuff about teaching is just what lets them maintain the nonprofit fig leaf and the subsidy heavy train, along with a steady stream of grad students to do the work.
I agree with the underlying assumptions in Caplan's case, but the interest level of students and professors can vary significantly depending on several factors. I graduated from college relatively recently (within the last decade) and my observation from taking many humanities classes from different departments is that the presence of the professor, dryness of the material, and the length of lectures does matter a lot.
For example, I had a 3 hour lecture on Plato's Republic delivered by a droning professor who did not care if you were listening and that was a very different experience from a 90 minute lecture on the Crusades delivered by a very passionate professor who had written books on that subject. However, I would concede that history majors in general probably have more interest in their major than philosophy majors do in theirs.
Law school. Philosophy majors tend to outperform other humanities majors on the LSAT by quite a bit. The way Greek philosophy, metaphysics, and epistemology are taught is also very dry in my experience even for students interested in those subjects. Formal and informal logic are also inherently unfun to learn but those should probably be taught to all college students regardless.
“Other institutions would emerge to give young people aged 18-22 experiences that they would find interesting and useful.” Seems to me the challenge for these other institutions, competing with the entrenched higher education cartel would require success on two fronts:
A market victory where new institutions prove their worth to employers and students. Credibility will require a relentless focus on results, publishing graduate job placement rates, starting salaries, and building direct hiring partnerships with well-known companies. I rate this uphill but achievable, and I believe this is starting to happen.
A political victory. The education lobby can "mute the competition" by ensuring laws and regulations governing educational funding are written to exclude or disadvantage new models, and by controlling the flow of federal dollars. Rules must change to allow for a truly diverse and competitive educational landscape. I rate this vertically uphill and near hopeless. But if you can achieve the market victory, your odds for the political victory improve.
Your entire premise is incorrect. The number of tenured professors has remained constant since the eighties. But the percentage of tenured professors has declined considerably. Colleges are doing nothing but hiring adjunct professors and adjunct professors would be very easy to dump if they wanted to.
So the idea that colleges are just desperately trying to figure out how to use all these professors that they've created seems completely offbase.
It seems far more likely that colleges, given the guarantee of federal funding, have deliberately increased their student supply.
"Think of the students who are excited by academic subjects as the natural demand for college education."
This certainly ranks as one of the more absurd things said in your posts. Not many comments are worse either.
While there is certainly truth in motives 2-5, motive 1 alone goes far to invalidate the natural demand claim. To that I'd add motives 6 and 7,
6. Most young adults aren't ready to take on any more responsibility than showing up and doing what their told. College is a delay to allow time but also to practice taking more responsibility.
7. We don't know which kids are going to be excited by college learning. For the most part, they don't either. Allowing more people the opportunity increases the odds the ones who will increase their value to themselves and society the most end up going.
In my opinion, most kids not excited but who nonetheless finish still pick up enough to make it worth delaying the start of their work life
"Most young adults aren't ready to take on any more responsibility than showing up and doing what their told."
That is a statement like, "There are lots of jobs that Americans just won't do." Of course, there are lots of jobs that Americans won't take because of the pay, working conditions, lack of status, etc. But they will if conditions change, e.g., better pay and/or working conditions. Similarly, lots of young people don't feel able to take on the responsibility of leading a non-institutionalized life because they don't have to, and they've known that for most of their life. But they would if conditions changed. If say, they didn't have four years of "sports, social life, experimenting with sex and drugs, etc." to look forward to. When most young people didn't go to college, lots of them exercised responsibility at 18. Indeed, when most didn't finish high school, they did even earlier.
"I need four years after high school to find myself" is historically unique. For most college students, I'm not sure benefits like that to some people who go to college are worth the total cost to young people (basically, four years of life that could be otherwise spent--not to mention the money that is spent and the money that is not earned).
You are certainly right that occupations are different than in the past. But that says little about the ability of 18 year olds to be responsible.
I would also go so far as to assert that for most people additional years of schooling don't actually give them anything more in the way of job skills. To a large extent, employers use college as a screen. If you didn't go, you are more likely to be lacking in ambition, smarts, ability to get along, etc.
Perhaps apropos of my other comment: I just watched 1933's Employees' Entrance, starring now forgotten Warren William and about to be a star Loretta Young. She was 19 when she made it.
Today she might instead be a rising sophomore at Emerson College, majoring in something like Theater Arts. Would she be better off today?
For that matter, what about all the young people today majoring in something like Theater Arts, who are deluded into thinking that they can make it in show business? And who have four relatively comfortable years to nurse that delusion. Is that a good thing? For them or for society as a whole?
Some people find themselves at college, but lots of people get unrealistic ideas.
I would operationalize "make it in show business" as "be able to make a living in show business". Some theater arts major do indeed "make it". As do some music performance majors or fine arts majors. But way short of a majority. What bothers me is how many undergraduates go through four years with a very unrealistic expectation of their chances of success. And what really bothers me is how little schools do to disabuse them of their misapprehension. Of course, I feel the same way about graduate schools which cheerfully take PhD students who think they will land a tenure track job, when their actual chances are abysmal.
Lots of things in life are uncertain. We can never be completely sure who should go to college. But one thing we can be sure of is that lots of people who go to school today don't get much out of it in the way of obtaining job skills or developing responsibility. At least, compared to what they could get spending four years differently.
I think a big difference between you and I is that you see college for most people as an opportunity, and I see it largely as a task, a task young people feel they must take on because, to exaggerate, they think that otherwise they will be burger-flipping losers for the rest of their lives.
That's one difference. Maybe the biggest, maybe not. IDK
Your position implies a more optimistic view of the alternatives than I probably have. You also seem to have a narrower view of what is, can or should be gained from college.
They say the worst cynics used to be the biggest idealists. I am disappointed by the difference between what I once thought colleges were and what they actually are. I definitely had a brighter and more expansive view of "what is, can or should be gained from college."
Perhaps I am not cynical enough. After all, I don't know what, if any, better systems are possible. Sure, colleges are phony and pretentious, guilty of false advertising and taking money under false pretenses. But maybe that's the best we can do.
(This would be somewhat similar to Education Realist's claim that American K-12 is doing about as well as can reasonably be expected. International comparison provides some evidence for that:
Comparing pisa scores is a whole other issue. Sailor would tell you it's caused by race. There are equally good arguments for one vs two parent, poverty, probably for a subset of underfunded schools and other causes. It correlates with all of these and most probably contribute. And there are claims that some top performing countries don't include low-performing kids.
I'm not exactly sure how much I agree but I don't disagree with any of that. Hopefully that makes sense.
What would be better is a huge question and I don't think there is a good answer.
I think we overlook how many kids go to community colleges and other relatively inexpensive institutions. Relatedly, for profit schools can be diploma mills but they can also provide educational structure relatively cheaply (without the frills of most college campuses) Same with online. My wife did a nurse practitioner degree online. It was at a private school so it wasn't cheap like community college but still not too bad and negligible compared to the increased earnings. On the other hand I'd argue most masters programs are a joke compared to undergraduate and suffer from signaling more than a bachelors.
I'd agree research universities probably aren't the best fit for most kids who attend them except for the signaling aspect. But then again maybe being with the kids who truly belong there is more important than the signaling. IDK.
Yes, it is absurd for anyone to pretend they know what others want. Part of that absurdity is pretending that all people should go to college, even when their only goal is the diploma. It is high time the government stopped meddling in education and pretending it knows that all people should go to college.
Everything is a tradeoff. College has costs beyond tuition. It is none of the government's business to tip that scale.
You blow your whole argument by starting with a claim that anyone wants ALL PEOPLE to go to college.
Let's say you are right that it's none of the government's business who goes to college. Is it their business who goes to high school? Grade school? Would we be better with no education requirements?
As a former high school teacher, I can tell you that there are people in the business who think that, unless they have Down's Syndrome or something similar, everyone should go to college. Though nowhere near a majority.
You blow your credibility by pretending such obvious hyperbole is meant to be taken literally.
Then you graciously suppose for the sake of argument that it just might not be the government's business to decide who goes to college.
Then you add your own hyperbole, which no sane person would take literally, by asking if we'd be better off if no one went to any school at all. (Hint: there's some non-literal hyperbole in that sentence too.)
Bud. Learn some history. The US and many other countries had high levels of literacy before government ever began tipping the scales. Do you really think so poorly of humanity that parents wouldn't want to educate their children if government didn't mandate it?
What else do you think requires government meddling or it couldn't be done -- roads, dams, airports?
Did you know that US air traffic control was invented by US airlines on their own, starting in 1929, and only taken over by the federal government after WW II, more than 15 years later?
Did you know that ABS brakes were invented by airplane manufacturers and migrated to cars before government mandates? Did you know that car seat belts were available before government mandates?
I wonder if the reason you think government has to mandate schooling is because you have zero intellectual curiosity yourself and credit everything you (think you) know to government coercion.
Sorry I made the conversation more complicated by mentioning requirements. Whether we talk of interest in or requirements for education, my underlying question remains. Does the government have reason to increase education at other levels and if so why is college different?
Fyi: yes, education and schools existed without government involvement but government involvement increased participation.
Clear, parsimonious analysis of the demographic lags and unintended consequences. I would add the relationship of academia to the state. Unusually, America has many institutions, including universities, nominally independent of the state. However, following the money reveals the truth. It seems that the vast majority of academics always end up being tied to the state, and thus naturally advocating for its growth, despite the origins of many institutions lying in churches.
Perhaps we can unify 1 thru 6 — the demand-side explanations of excessive enrollment:
Students (and their parents) want to signal conventional ambition and intelligence and to network for entry to career — all partly as proper cover for intense communal coming-of-age leisure and rituals with like-minded peers.
It looks like selection effects of college, rather than treatment effects, explain most of the demand.
I think the focus on teaching as the role of the university is a mistake in trying to understand it. In economics I heard from multiple people (professors and others) that even saying you like to teach is a bad idea when interviewing, because most schools only care about your research output/grant input, and admitting you like to teach suggests you will coast after tenure. Not just some people, but nearly everyone who touched on the subject said that.
So most big schools, and most smaller ones too probably, are actively selecting against good teachers and for researchers who will only teach if forced. As such, why would students respond well to the average or even above average teachers? They are awful by selection.
The service universities actually provide is research (really successful grant applications), and all the stuff about teaching is just what lets them maintain the nonprofit fig leaf and the subsidy heavy train, along with a steady stream of grad students to do the work.
That is mostly true of R1 research universities, maybe R2 and some others too. It is not true of the vast majority of colleges and universities.
I agree with the underlying assumptions in Caplan's case, but the interest level of students and professors can vary significantly depending on several factors. I graduated from college relatively recently (within the last decade) and my observation from taking many humanities classes from different departments is that the presence of the professor, dryness of the material, and the length of lectures does matter a lot.
For example, I had a 3 hour lecture on Plato's Republic delivered by a droning professor who did not care if you were listening and that was a very different experience from a 90 minute lecture on the Crusades delivered by a very passionate professor who had written books on that subject. However, I would concede that history majors in general probably have more interest in their major than philosophy majors do in theirs.
I don't really understand your last sentence. If philosophy majors aren't interested in philosophy, why are they taking it?
Law school. Philosophy majors tend to outperform other humanities majors on the LSAT by quite a bit. The way Greek philosophy, metaphysics, and epistemology are taught is also very dry in my experience even for students interested in those subjects. Formal and informal logic are also inherently unfun to learn but those should probably be taught to all college students regardless.
Interesting. Thanks.
I'd wager that most students in college aren't interested in anything but that diploma.
“Other institutions would emerge to give young people aged 18-22 experiences that they would find interesting and useful.” Seems to me the challenge for these other institutions, competing with the entrenched higher education cartel would require success on two fronts:
A market victory where new institutions prove their worth to employers and students. Credibility will require a relentless focus on results, publishing graduate job placement rates, starting salaries, and building direct hiring partnerships with well-known companies. I rate this uphill but achievable, and I believe this is starting to happen.
A political victory. The education lobby can "mute the competition" by ensuring laws and regulations governing educational funding are written to exclude or disadvantage new models, and by controlling the flow of federal dollars. Rules must change to allow for a truly diverse and competitive educational landscape. I rate this vertically uphill and near hopeless. But if you can achieve the market victory, your odds for the political victory improve.
I was just watching Oppenheimer, the students’ excitement and interest is another world 🙃
Possibly because it's a movie and they're actors? I haven't seen it.
Your entire premise is incorrect. The number of tenured professors has remained constant since the eighties. But the percentage of tenured professors has declined considerably. Colleges are doing nothing but hiring adjunct professors and adjunct professors would be very easy to dump if they wanted to.
So the idea that colleges are just desperately trying to figure out how to use all these professors that they've created seems completely offbase.
It seems far more likely that colleges, given the guarantee of federal funding, have deliberately increased their student supply.
"Think of the students who are excited by academic subjects as the natural demand for college education."
This certainly ranks as one of the more absurd things said in your posts. Not many comments are worse either.
While there is certainly truth in motives 2-5, motive 1 alone goes far to invalidate the natural demand claim. To that I'd add motives 6 and 7,
6. Most young adults aren't ready to take on any more responsibility than showing up and doing what their told. College is a delay to allow time but also to practice taking more responsibility.
7. We don't know which kids are going to be excited by college learning. For the most part, they don't either. Allowing more people the opportunity increases the odds the ones who will increase their value to themselves and society the most end up going.
In my opinion, most kids not excited but who nonetheless finish still pick up enough to make it worth delaying the start of their work life
"Most young adults aren't ready to take on any more responsibility than showing up and doing what their told."
That is a statement like, "There are lots of jobs that Americans just won't do." Of course, there are lots of jobs that Americans won't take because of the pay, working conditions, lack of status, etc. But they will if conditions change, e.g., better pay and/or working conditions. Similarly, lots of young people don't feel able to take on the responsibility of leading a non-institutionalized life because they don't have to, and they've known that for most of their life. But they would if conditions changed. If say, they didn't have four years of "sports, social life, experimenting with sex and drugs, etc." to look forward to. When most young people didn't go to college, lots of them exercised responsibility at 18. Indeed, when most didn't finish high school, they did even earlier.
"I need four years after high school to find myself" is historically unique. For most college students, I'm not sure benefits like that to some people who go to college are worth the total cost to young people (basically, four years of life that could be otherwise spent--not to mention the money that is spent and the money that is not earned).
Historically unique? Really?
Do we need to talk about how occupations today are increasingly different than the past?
That said, there is an element of truth in everything you said. Maybe it's even mostly true. But it's not entirely true.
You are certainly right that occupations are different than in the past. But that says little about the ability of 18 year olds to be responsible.
I would also go so far as to assert that for most people additional years of schooling don't actually give them anything more in the way of job skills. To a large extent, employers use college as a screen. If you didn't go, you are more likely to be lacking in ambition, smarts, ability to get along, etc.
Yes, many employers use it as you say. That doesn't change or invalidate the benefits.
Perhaps apropos of my other comment: I just watched 1933's Employees' Entrance, starring now forgotten Warren William and about to be a star Loretta Young. She was 19 when she made it.
Today she might instead be a rising sophomore at Emerson College, majoring in something like Theater Arts. Would she be better off today?
For that matter, what about all the young people today majoring in something like Theater Arts, who are deluded into thinking that they can make it in show business? And who have four relatively comfortable years to nurse that delusion. Is that a good thing? For them or for society as a whole?
Some people find themselves at college, but lots of people get unrealistic ideas.
What does it mean to make it in show business? What makes you so sure the Emerson theater arts majors don't make it?
Most businesses fail. Does mean the entrepreneur shouldn't have tried?
The whole idea that we should or could know ahead of time which student should go to college is ridiculously absurd.
I would operationalize "make it in show business" as "be able to make a living in show business". Some theater arts major do indeed "make it". As do some music performance majors or fine arts majors. But way short of a majority. What bothers me is how many undergraduates go through four years with a very unrealistic expectation of their chances of success. And what really bothers me is how little schools do to disabuse them of their misapprehension. Of course, I feel the same way about graduate schools which cheerfully take PhD students who think they will land a tenure track job, when their actual chances are abysmal.
Lots of things in life are uncertain. We can never be completely sure who should go to college. But one thing we can be sure of is that lots of people who go to school today don't get much out of it in the way of obtaining job skills or developing responsibility. At least, compared to what they could get spending four years differently.
I think a big difference between you and I is that you see college for most people as an opportunity, and I see it largely as a task, a task young people feel they must take on because, to exaggerate, they think that otherwise they will be burger-flipping losers for the rest of their lives.
That's one difference. Maybe the biggest, maybe not. IDK
Your position implies a more optimistic view of the alternatives than I probably have. You also seem to have a narrower view of what is, can or should be gained from college.
They say the worst cynics used to be the biggest idealists. I am disappointed by the difference between what I once thought colleges were and what they actually are. I definitely had a brighter and more expansive view of "what is, can or should be gained from college."
Perhaps I am not cynical enough. After all, I don't know what, if any, better systems are possible. Sure, colleges are phony and pretentious, guilty of false advertising and taking money under false pretenses. But maybe that's the best we can do.
(This would be somewhat similar to Education Realist's claim that American K-12 is doing about as well as can reasonably be expected. International comparison provides some evidence for that:
https://www.unz.com/isteve/the-new-2018-pisa-school-test-scores-usa-usa/
Comparing pisa scores is a whole other issue. Sailor would tell you it's caused by race. There are equally good arguments for one vs two parent, poverty, probably for a subset of underfunded schools and other causes. It correlates with all of these and most probably contribute. And there are claims that some top performing countries don't include low-performing kids.
I'm not exactly sure how much I agree but I don't disagree with any of that. Hopefully that makes sense.
What would be better is a huge question and I don't think there is a good answer.
I think we overlook how many kids go to community colleges and other relatively inexpensive institutions. Relatedly, for profit schools can be diploma mills but they can also provide educational structure relatively cheaply (without the frills of most college campuses) Same with online. My wife did a nurse practitioner degree online. It was at a private school so it wasn't cheap like community college but still not too bad and negligible compared to the increased earnings. On the other hand I'd argue most masters programs are a joke compared to undergraduate and suffer from signaling more than a bachelors.
I'd agree research universities probably aren't the best fit for most kids who attend them except for the signaling aspect. But then again maybe being with the kids who truly belong there is more important than the signaling. IDK.
Yes, it is absurd for anyone to pretend they know what others want. Part of that absurdity is pretending that all people should go to college, even when their only goal is the diploma. It is high time the government stopped meddling in education and pretending it knows that all people should go to college.
Everything is a tradeoff. College has costs beyond tuition. It is none of the government's business to tip that scale.
You blow your whole argument by starting with a claim that anyone wants ALL PEOPLE to go to college.
Let's say you are right that it's none of the government's business who goes to college. Is it their business who goes to high school? Grade school? Would we be better with no education requirements?
As a former high school teacher, I can tell you that there are people in the business who think that, unless they have Down's Syndrome or something similar, everyone should go to college. Though nowhere near a majority.
Ok, a minority want something close to that. I'm not sure why that's important. We are a long way from nearly everyone going to college.
You blow your credibility by pretending such obvious hyperbole is meant to be taken literally.
Then you graciously suppose for the sake of argument that it just might not be the government's business to decide who goes to college.
Then you add your own hyperbole, which no sane person would take literally, by asking if we'd be better off if no one went to any school at all. (Hint: there's some non-literal hyperbole in that sentence too.)
Bud. Learn some history. The US and many other countries had high levels of literacy before government ever began tipping the scales. Do you really think so poorly of humanity that parents wouldn't want to educate their children if government didn't mandate it?
What else do you think requires government meddling or it couldn't be done -- roads, dams, airports?
Did you know that US air traffic control was invented by US airlines on their own, starting in 1929, and only taken over by the federal government after WW II, more than 15 years later?
Did you know that ABS brakes were invented by airplane manufacturers and migrated to cars before government mandates? Did you know that car seat belts were available before government mandates?
I wonder if the reason you think government has to mandate schooling is because you have zero intellectual curiosity yourself and credit everything you (think you) know to government coercion.
Sorry I made the conversation more complicated by mentioning requirements. Whether we talk of interest in or requirements for education, my underlying question remains. Does the government have reason to increase education at other levels and if so why is college different?
Fyi: yes, education and schools existed without government involvement but government involvement increased participation.
Clear, parsimonious analysis of the demographic lags and unintended consequences. I would add the relationship of academia to the state. Unusually, America has many institutions, including universities, nominally independent of the state. However, following the money reveals the truth. It seems that the vast majority of academics always end up being tied to the state, and thus naturally advocating for its growth, despite the origins of many institutions lying in churches.
I would add: networking for entry to career.
Perhaps we can unify 1 thru 6 — the demand-side explanations of excessive enrollment:
Students (and their parents) want to signal conventional ambition and intelligence and to network for entry to career — all partly as proper cover for intense communal coming-of-age leisure and rituals with like-minded peers.
It looks like selection effects of college, rather than treatment effects, explain most of the demand.