Bryan Caplan on UATX
His observations strike me as spot on
UATX spurns holistic admissions, automatically admitting students with a 1460+ SAT, 33+ ACT, or 105+ CLT. But by my lights, their students had much better personalities than top schools that officially put high weight on personality! Curiosity and intellectual engagement aside, UATX students were strikingly cheerful, gregarious, agentic, and enthusiastic.
He has a numbered list of 14 observations, based on spending a few weeks at UATX as a visiting professor. Based on my own experience as a visiting professor last winter, I agree with every single one on his list. If you are interested in the University of Austin, read Bryan’s whole post.
I especially agree with his observations about the students. “Agentic” definitely fits. The students were my favorite part of UATX. Anyone who meets the students would want their own children to attend UATX.
Bryan writes,
Isn’t single-minded dedication to the Great Books a bizarre fetish in the age of AI? I’m definitely inclined to say so, but even I think the Western canon is awesome enough to keep training a few hundred new enthusiasts per planet every year. Given today’s top universities’ low interest in our Western canon, it makes sense for UATX to pick up the slack.
I’ll take the dead white males any day over the critical race theorists, Marxists, and other modern academic slop. But whether you’re interacting with AI or the Great Books, you should never should drop your critical-thinking defenses.1
If it were up to me, I would replace some of the required courses in dead white males with required courses in learning and using AI tools. “AI application lab,” in which students have to build something. The STEM types who want to see the code can use Claude Code or Cursor. The humanities types can use regular Claude or Replit.
In general, I hope that UATX builds out its offerings for students who want to be entrepreneurs, work in finance, or work on policy. I have heard that a course on game theory, taught by a business practitioner, was heavily subscribed. Several of my students expressed an interest in more courses on finance and financial modeling.
If you think that AI hallucinates, you should read what Claude said when I prompted it about Plato and Aristotle! To check it, I asked ChatGPT for comments. It wrote,
If you’re writing or speaking about this, I’d use something like:
“Plato and Aristotle made many claims that, from a modern perspective, look a bit like AI hallucinations: highly confident, systematic, and often wrong. But the analogy is imperfect. Their mistakes usually arose not from random confabulation but from deep theoretical commitments, limited empirical methods, and the absence of experimental science.”
I now have three children who have graduated from college—our daughter is a recent 2026 graduate.
Our sons both went to STEM schools (the names are somewhat irrelevant). Both had humanities as part of their curriculum (our oldest got to read JD Vance’s book, Hillbilly Elegy, and Plato’s Republic. Our youngest son took a philosophy class that focused on feminism, but it was his choice because the generic class was full.) Both got hands on experience with their core subjects (Environmental/Civil Engineering and Mechanical Engineering). Both are happily employed in their respective fields.
Our daughter’s school is an entirely different story. Again I won’t give any names, but I don’t believe her school’s curriculum is dramatically different from any other top, small, “liberal arts” college. She was a psychology major and even had to write an independent study paper to graduate, but after that it’s all downhill. Her non-psych classes were a useless collection of misfit studies and courses that emphasized “White Privilege” and “Western Imperialism and Oppression”. I was thrilled when she received a D+ in her woke fashion class that asked the students to proclaim how shameful the fashion industry is for exploiting third world countries (clearly our daughter was unable to conform to the class standards).
If I had to give any advice to parents of soon-to-be-graduating high schoolers, I would say, unless your kid is going to become an engineer (STEM fields) or go on to a professional school like medicine or law, don’t waste your money.
But if your kid can meet the standards of UATX that sounds like a great opportunity.
PS—Our daughter picked her school because she wanted to play college lacrosse, which worked out well—her team made the NCAA Tournament twice.
I have always wanted to educate myself on the Western canon. I found a website called wellread40.com. What I don't have is a group to discuss it with and a teacher to weigh in! I wish I did. My goal is to truly understand Western ideas.