Education Links, 3/21/2025
Listener on higher ed; Jacob Shell on academia's political isolation; Megan McArdle on same; Moses Sternstein on elite universities tapping the credit markets
The federal government gives more to colleges and universities ($85 billion) than they receive in tuition and fees ($83 billion)!
I can’t vouch for those numbers. But I think of the spat between the Trump Administration and Columbia University. My first reaction as a libertarian is to say that I don’t like the government meddling in the university. But my next reaction is to say that I don’t like the government funding universities. You can play the “public good” violin all you want. In practice, even if I squint I cannot see the positive externalities that justify generously subsidizing higher ed.
it is hardly surprising that the Trump White House has universities in its crosshairs. Academe is a uniquely vulnerable target: an ideological enemy camp dependent on state largesse (especially in the form of grant funding, for both public and private institutions) and accordingly subject to federal oversight. This means that academics need to contend with the fact that campuses have become ideological monocultures out of sync with the surrounding political landscape. Self-preservation demands significant reform. By and large, these are reforms we academics should have done anyway, and years ago.
Pointer from Razib Khan.
The Trump administration is not just trying to get the government under control or save taxpayers money. It is mounting a frontal assault on every center of left-wing institutional power it can reach: academia, the civil service, nonprofits. The object is to break these institutions so badly that the next Democratic administration will not be able to put them back the way they were.
The left, not the right, picked this fight. Too many institutions set themselves up as the “Resistance” to Trump and tried to make a lot of mainstream political opinions anathematic, while expecting to be protected from backlash by principles such as academic freedom that they were no longer honoring. This was politically naive and criminally stupid for institutions that rely so heavily on U.S. taxpayer support.
Why are they anxious? Let me count the ways:
endowment returns on private capital investments are paltry;
fundraising has taken a major dive, as donors have wizened to the culture and (anti)virtues that these institutions have been cultivating;1
government subsidies have been pulled for similar reasons, and other taxpayer-subsidized preferential treatment may also be on the chopping block (e.g. un-taxed endowments, and tax-free bond issuance);
the cash cow of foreign students may be tapering;
demographic tailwinds have become headwinds, and more and more young people are realizing that four years of play-acting at life + hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt, may not be worth either the real costs or the opportunity costs.
He is listing reasons for record borrowing by elite universities in the tax-free bond market in the first quarter of this year. When you read his post, you will find that he is not exactly sympathetic to the leaders of these institutions.
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So much of society functions on assumptions and norms. They don't ask "what if?" When 50% or whatever large percentage of your budget comes from the government you are vulnerable. they can cut off your oxygen. All this could have been prevented if the colleges had done a better job of also staying with in norms with a less progressive faculty and student body and maintained civility and order on campus. Don't want to do that? fine. be self sufficient. otherwise they need to migrate back to the center
The fact is, a whole culture is dead. It’s as if the cocktail party from the novel “Pictures From an Institution” had been going on unceasingly since the 50s, blissfully unaware of the change.
I had a college professor, full not adjunct, charismatic enough to be sought after among the English teachers, who was an expert on Donne. Hated the modern, with a trenchantly amusing loathing of Yeats - instructive to babies like us who had assumed civilization was All One Thing. But she had read Yeats - mention e.g. Hemingway at your puerile peril. She taught a late 16th/17th century lit survey, poets like Herring and clerical writers and Anatomy of Melancholy and Thomas Browne and all that - but it was Donne who was her obsession, sensual and divine and numerological. The Elvis of metaphysical poets. Mostly she sat in her office. She wrote a couple of books about him. She was eccentric and interesting as are people who indisputably know their subject. But her other great subject, which we were always to keep in mind, was that she was barely paid enough to afford a cup of coffee.
I knew at the time that this was ridiculous. She had a great life, pursuing her passion while kids annually passed through acquiring no great acquaintance with any of it, no real knowledge - but a smattering of “college” to store away in adult life.
It’s like the symphony in my current city. Internal discord, musicians’ complaints of poor pay when the whole thing was kept alive through the donations of precisely the people whose deaths the left anticipated with ghoulish glee - not tickets; a strike, bankruptcy, presently yet another attempt to rise from the ashes because it’s *so* important and *so* embarrassing that a city this size cannot “sustain” a symphony …
The intellectual class just has no idea that the country has changed - and that they were the ones who changed it.