As the graduate of a big state school in the south, I always find the obsession with Ivy+ to be a bit... much.
Everyone I knew in college is successful, employed, and generally functional (graduated '08 into a bad recession!). This spans from people who made millions in the tech industry to doctors, accountants to teachers (me) to artsy-fartsy types who are nonetheless doing fine.
We graduate hundreds of thousands of college students a year, most do not go to Ivy+ or even to moderately selective schools. Why do we insist on pretending that only the top ~50 universities are the pathway to a successful life?
As the graduate of a very-good-but-not-elite liberal arts college in the south, I agree.
I have a comfortable middle class lifestyle without an inordinate amount of stress, and so do most of my friends from college. It's unclear in what way I would be better off if I had gone to Harvard. I can't fathom why parents in places like DC and NYC are losing their minds over college admissions, except that their self worth is wrapped up in comparing their children to other people's.
I have a toddler, and it's already clear she is very smart. I plan to encourage learning and effort in school, but I'm not going to make her break her neck trying to participate in some college admissions competition that doesn't make any sense to me. I have no doubt she can have a great life with a degree from State U. Most of my colleagues went there, and they're doing OK.
Generally speaking, people going to Harvard aren't looking for "successful, employed, and generally functional." There are definitely some things that are easier to reach if one has attended Harvard or maybe another elite U. That's not at all to say others at less elite schools don't also sometimes reach those goals, or even how much the elite school helped in the end.
Some parents are starting to leave the treadmill. I have a BS and MS from MIT and USC. My kids are getting community college degrees for hands-on trades. I may not impress my fellow alums, but I'll probably have more grandchildren.
Also, that scene in the novel is in the movie where Cheswick tell McMurphy that he can leave anytime he wants during the group discussion, and then Randall asks the others if they are there voluntarily, expressing shock that even Billy is there on his own volition.
The universities exhibit a kind of industrial pollution. They are suffocating on their own waste. From substandard raw material they yield an unmarketable product. The waste piles up on the loading dock, floods the factory floor, and fills the halls of management.
Isn't the issue that their product is still quite marketable? That's what Arnold is pointing out... people are still begging colleges to take their money (and the government is still leaning into subsidizing them).
Demand is high because it's heavily subsidized and also because from the perspective of the individual, the product is still quite marketable. Get a masters or PhD in wokeness and you can get yourself a sinecure at a university.
The problem is clear from an economic perspective. There are huge negative externalities that aren't factoring into individual decision-making.
I think Arnold underrates the structural advantages academia has in influencing society and overrates the viability of competition. Encouraging dissidents to leave is a bit like encouraging people you agree with not to vote. Certainly it's in their own interest (working in industry will make one more money) but it only intensifies the ideological uniformity of academia, without doing anything to create competing institutions, basically handing over sole control over important gatekeeping positions to the enemy.
I'm also skeptical of the claim that most students really dislike 'woke' tyranny. Each successive generation is getting more habitually cynical than the previous one. They'll talk cynically about wokeness just like about everything else, but that shouldn't necessarily be taken as sincere disagreement.
I don't see quibbling with the minutiae of university governance as a solution, even if it's broken. That will happen on its own if funding dries up. For that to happen, the government has to drastically cut back subsidies.
Seems impossible, right? Maybe, but I'd argue putting a lot of energy in one big battle to get to the underlying cause is more likely to bear fruit than fighting a million little battles on the opponent's home turf. Just my opinion, but "Stop welfare for the rich and privileged" seems like a winning political argument.
(Secondarily, I'd support a wave of decredentialization efforts)
wonderful essay. thank you! i have no experience of the american system but i can tell you something about two top boarding schools in the UK because i had my kids there. Parents are worse than kids and are bordering schizophrenia: they want highly selective schools (thinking Oxbridge) and then they push for wokism! i have seen it in the aftermath of the George Floyd story when some parents and kids signed a letter to the Headmaster requesting the usual bla bla bla. Be mindful that the school mission was to promote critical thinking and they were doing an excellent job....anyhow your words are very wise.
I suspect I largely agree with Kling on this topic even if in some ways he might be more pessimistic than me. Regardless, I found the short piece he wrote here had too many generalizations for me. Just one example is that students majoring in engineering can pretty much avoid all of this even at the most woke schools. Likewise, I suspect in some majors it's near impossible to avoid this problem at all but the least woke schools, which will mostly have a whole other set of problems.
Jonathan Haidt made a pretty good lecture on the topic of liberal vs conservative representation on college campuses. You can google related information he has on the web. Plenty of others speak on this topic and wokeness too. McWhorter comes to mind on that topic but there are others on both topics.
"Jonathan Haidt: It's what I called structural stupidity. That is you have very smart people, highly educated, highly intelligent, but you put them in a situation in which dissent is punished severely. And what happens? They go silent. And when-- when the moderates, or when anyone is afraid to question the dominant view, the organization, the institution, gets stupid."
FWIW, this is in fact almost exactly what I told my children:
“Don’t worry about getting top grades in high school—it’s ok if you don’t get into Harvard. And choose extracurricular activities based on how well you enjoy them, not on how they will look on your transcript.”
I fully support the idea of a better, Network University - tho it seems to me that Peter Thiel's scholarships that allow good students to avoid college altogether is more likely to provide a real alternative in the next 5 years to more. All alternatives should be supported.
I'm annoyed that the conference doesn't have AI voice-text transcripts - I'd rather read than listen.
As long as Republicans allow the colleges "non-partisan" tax exempt status, despite their clear discrimination against hiring Rep professors and administrators, the main problem will get worse.
Glad Stanford held this conference, despite protests from many in the Stanford community. The associated Hoover Institute, now led by Condoleezza Rice, has lots of fine conservatives - and in many years there are Stanford led petitions to disassociate from those icky Republican types.
Social and elite polarization come far more from acceptance of elite college discrimination against Republicans than from all other polarizing influences combined.
I don't have a great link but there is an article on the WSJ going over local school board races on Tuesday.
---
School Board Candidates Who Pushed ‘Parental Rights’ See Mixed Results
By Ben Chapman
---
The results there match what I saw in the two elections in our district which were the most important elections to me on Tuesday. In essence, there were three candidates in each race.
1) Progressive Candidate
2) Moderate Candidate (I feel like uncommitted is a better description, as when you go on their websites they have no clear policies or stances on anything)
3) Christopher Rufo Candidate
In both races each candidate got around 1/3 of the vote. In one race the progressive candidate won and the other the Rufo candidate won, but in both cases by thin margins and far below 50% of the vote.
---
Ballotpedia, a nonpartisan election site, analyzed 361 races and found that about 36% of candidates who opposed school Covid protocols, diversity initiatives or the use of gender-neutral learning materials, won their elections.
About 28% of winning candidates in the analysis supported those policies or efforts. That percentage is down from elections in April and November 2021, according to Ballotpedia. About a third of candidates in Tuesday’s election analysis didn’t take clear positions on these issues, according to the site.
---
The biggest driver is focused outside help. The race the progressive won she was backed by the teachers union.
---
The National Education Association each year recommends thousands of candidates for school board races, and about 71% of candidates in 300 races tracked by the union won seats Tuesday, union officials said.
---
On the flip side where someone like Ron De Santis got involved also are overwhelming successes. He has won 24/30 of his endorsed races, even thought many of the races are in blue areas like Miami city.
In Virginia Governor Youngkin spent most of his time traveling to rally for national Republican races. He did not endorse anyone for local school boards. The two Rufo candidates running were just ordinary concerned parents with not institutional organization.
While I think the right can have success if they have someone like De Santis running things, you can't have a De Santis everywhere. The teachers union isn't going away. The only real solution is to get the funding to the parents.
The movie does include the scene you're talking about. I've never read the book but I remember that scene pretty vividly.
Hosnas' point only applies to private schools, not public, which is what Cowen is alluding to re GMU. Elite *public* universities are also lacking in the ideological diversity department, but you do have more robust freedom.
Cowen's talk was important throughout, it was one of only two I watched that I could sit through without reaching for the barf bag (the other being Hosnas). This was a highly polarized group of speakers. Anyway, Cowen is right that US universities are excellent in many ways and it's no good pretending that isn't true.
Re: Arnold's hypothesis no. 2 (students' need for in-person contact).
As far as I can tell, most students at selective colleges want the continuous residential campus experience. The conventionally ambitious student is buying 24/7 ivory-tower interaction -- academic, social, extracurricular, athletic -- with a curated peer group, courtesy of the admissions gatekeepers. By and large, she is buying prestige, the student body, and the fancy campus -- not the Faculty.
Families persuade themselves that relatively talented 18-22 year-olds should spend all their time with one another in a total institution -- rather than 40 hours a week with adults in the workplace, learning to meet the market test and to navigate internal labor markets, with a real separation of spheres among household, career, neighborhood, and civic life. They persuade themselves that the residential college is a coming-of-age rite of passage, not a delay of adulthood.
It might take real education to understand (or to acknowledge) that one is trapped in a bad, if glittering equilibrium.
I hope that the faculty complaints that Arnold quoted are myopic in two regards. First, that they only represent a minor subset of experiences, although I fear that is not the case. Second, I hope the complaints are myopic over time or, in other words, that they reflect near-termism. I am more hopeful about this second point. Will the pendulum be missing forever? Will competition be missing forever? Time will tell.
It would be a tragedy if refereed journals devolve into irrelevance for lack of rigor and logical coherence. Journals that I used to read regularly as a graduate student and for a time thereafter have been published for more than 100 years and developed worthy reputations. What a waste if they lose (have already lost?) those reputations in a matter of a few years.
As the graduate of a big state school in the south, I always find the obsession with Ivy+ to be a bit... much.
Everyone I knew in college is successful, employed, and generally functional (graduated '08 into a bad recession!). This spans from people who made millions in the tech industry to doctors, accountants to teachers (me) to artsy-fartsy types who are nonetheless doing fine.
We graduate hundreds of thousands of college students a year, most do not go to Ivy+ or even to moderately selective schools. Why do we insist on pretending that only the top ~50 universities are the pathway to a successful life?
As the graduate of a very-good-but-not-elite liberal arts college in the south, I agree.
I have a comfortable middle class lifestyle without an inordinate amount of stress, and so do most of my friends from college. It's unclear in what way I would be better off if I had gone to Harvard. I can't fathom why parents in places like DC and NYC are losing their minds over college admissions, except that their self worth is wrapped up in comparing their children to other people's.
I have a toddler, and it's already clear she is very smart. I plan to encourage learning and effort in school, but I'm not going to make her break her neck trying to participate in some college admissions competition that doesn't make any sense to me. I have no doubt she can have a great life with a degree from State U. Most of my colleagues went there, and they're doing OK.
Generally speaking, people going to Harvard aren't looking for "successful, employed, and generally functional." There are definitely some things that are easier to reach if one has attended Harvard or maybe another elite U. That's not at all to say others at less elite schools don't also sometimes reach those goals, or even how much the elite school helped in the end.
Some parents are starting to leave the treadmill. I have a BS and MS from MIT and USC. My kids are getting community college degrees for hands-on trades. I may not impress my fellow alums, but I'll probably have more grandchildren.
Also, that scene in the novel is in the movie where Cheswick tell McMurphy that he can leave anytime he wants during the group discussion, and then Randall asks the others if they are there voluntarily, expressing shock that even Billy is there on his own volition.
The universities exhibit a kind of industrial pollution. They are suffocating on their own waste. From substandard raw material they yield an unmarketable product. The waste piles up on the loading dock, floods the factory floor, and fills the halls of management.
Isn't the issue that their product is still quite marketable? That's what Arnold is pointing out... people are still begging colleges to take their money (and the government is still leaning into subsidizing them).
Demand is high because it's heavily subsidized and also because from the perspective of the individual, the product is still quite marketable. Get a masters or PhD in wokeness and you can get yourself a sinecure at a university.
The problem is clear from an economic perspective. There are huge negative externalities that aren't factoring into individual decision-making.
I think Arnold underrates the structural advantages academia has in influencing society and overrates the viability of competition. Encouraging dissidents to leave is a bit like encouraging people you agree with not to vote. Certainly it's in their own interest (working in industry will make one more money) but it only intensifies the ideological uniformity of academia, without doing anything to create competing institutions, basically handing over sole control over important gatekeeping positions to the enemy.
I'm also skeptical of the claim that most students really dislike 'woke' tyranny. Each successive generation is getting more habitually cynical than the previous one. They'll talk cynically about wokeness just like about everything else, but that shouldn't necessarily be taken as sincere disagreement.
Exit is a powerful tool if the goal is "strategic retreat to gain strength and reconquer/replace".
If its just running away, whose to say where you ran to won't be next.
I don't see quibbling with the minutiae of university governance as a solution, even if it's broken. That will happen on its own if funding dries up. For that to happen, the government has to drastically cut back subsidies.
Seems impossible, right? Maybe, but I'd argue putting a lot of energy in one big battle to get to the underlying cause is more likely to bear fruit than fighting a million little battles on the opponent's home turf. Just my opinion, but "Stop welfare for the rich and privileged" seems like a winning political argument.
(Secondarily, I'd support a wave of decredentialization efforts)
wonderful essay. thank you! i have no experience of the american system but i can tell you something about two top boarding schools in the UK because i had my kids there. Parents are worse than kids and are bordering schizophrenia: they want highly selective schools (thinking Oxbridge) and then they push for wokism! i have seen it in the aftermath of the George Floyd story when some parents and kids signed a letter to the Headmaster requesting the usual bla bla bla. Be mindful that the school mission was to promote critical thinking and they were doing an excellent job....anyhow your words are very wise.
I suspect I largely agree with Kling on this topic even if in some ways he might be more pessimistic than me. Regardless, I found the short piece he wrote here had too many generalizations for me. Just one example is that students majoring in engineering can pretty much avoid all of this even at the most woke schools. Likewise, I suspect in some majors it's near impossible to avoid this problem at all but the least woke schools, which will mostly have a whole other set of problems.
Jonathan Haidt made a pretty good lecture on the topic of liberal vs conservative representation on college campuses. You can google related information he has on the web. Plenty of others speak on this topic and wokeness too. McWhorter comes to mind on that topic but there are others on both topics.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gatn5ameRr8
From 60 Minutes Nov 7 2022
"Jonathan Haidt: It's what I called structural stupidity. That is you have very smart people, highly educated, highly intelligent, but you put them in a situation in which dissent is punished severely. And what happens? They go silent. And when-- when the moderates, or when anyone is afraid to question the dominant view, the organization, the institution, gets stupid."
FWIW, this is in fact almost exactly what I told my children:
“Don’t worry about getting top grades in high school—it’s ok if you don’t get into Harvard. And choose extracurricular activities based on how well you enjoy them, not on how they will look on your transcript.”
I remember telling my daughter that learning things was more important than grades, and she replied that I must be the only one who thinks that.
I fully support the idea of a better, Network University - tho it seems to me that Peter Thiel's scholarships that allow good students to avoid college altogether is more likely to provide a real alternative in the next 5 years to more. All alternatives should be supported.
I'm annoyed that the conference doesn't have AI voice-text transcripts - I'd rather read than listen.
As long as Republicans allow the colleges "non-partisan" tax exempt status, despite their clear discrimination against hiring Rep professors and administrators, the main problem will get worse.
Glad Stanford held this conference, despite protests from many in the Stanford community. The associated Hoover Institute, now led by Condoleezza Rice, has lots of fine conservatives - and in many years there are Stanford led petitions to disassociate from those icky Republican types.
Social and elite polarization come far more from acceptance of elite college discrimination against Republicans than from all other polarizing influences combined.
Eugene Volokh posts some thoughts from Prof. Anup Malani of the University of Chicago Law School that seem relevant here.
https://reason.com/volokh/2022/11/16/enforcing-the-first-amendment-on-campus-wont-by-itself-address-the-problem-of-academic-freedom
I don't have a great link but there is an article on the WSJ going over local school board races on Tuesday.
---
School Board Candidates Who Pushed ‘Parental Rights’ See Mixed Results
By Ben Chapman
---
The results there match what I saw in the two elections in our district which were the most important elections to me on Tuesday. In essence, there were three candidates in each race.
1) Progressive Candidate
2) Moderate Candidate (I feel like uncommitted is a better description, as when you go on their websites they have no clear policies or stances on anything)
3) Christopher Rufo Candidate
In both races each candidate got around 1/3 of the vote. In one race the progressive candidate won and the other the Rufo candidate won, but in both cases by thin margins and far below 50% of the vote.
---
Ballotpedia, a nonpartisan election site, analyzed 361 races and found that about 36% of candidates who opposed school Covid protocols, diversity initiatives or the use of gender-neutral learning materials, won their elections.
About 28% of winning candidates in the analysis supported those policies or efforts. That percentage is down from elections in April and November 2021, according to Ballotpedia. About a third of candidates in Tuesday’s election analysis didn’t take clear positions on these issues, according to the site.
---
The biggest driver is focused outside help. The race the progressive won she was backed by the teachers union.
---
The National Education Association each year recommends thousands of candidates for school board races, and about 71% of candidates in 300 races tracked by the union won seats Tuesday, union officials said.
---
On the flip side where someone like Ron De Santis got involved also are overwhelming successes. He has won 24/30 of his endorsed races, even thought many of the races are in blue areas like Miami city.
In Virginia Governor Youngkin spent most of his time traveling to rally for national Republican races. He did not endorse anyone for local school boards. The two Rufo candidates running were just ordinary concerned parents with not institutional organization.
While I think the right can have success if they have someone like De Santis running things, you can't have a De Santis everywhere. The teachers union isn't going away. The only real solution is to get the funding to the parents.
https://www.city-journal.org/ron-desantis-school-board-candidates-vs-teachers-unions
The movie does include the scene you're talking about. I've never read the book but I remember that scene pretty vividly.
Hosnas' point only applies to private schools, not public, which is what Cowen is alluding to re GMU. Elite *public* universities are also lacking in the ideological diversity department, but you do have more robust freedom.
Cowen's talk was important throughout, it was one of only two I watched that I could sit through without reaching for the barf bag (the other being Hosnas). This was a highly polarized group of speakers. Anyway, Cowen is right that US universities are excellent in many ways and it's no good pretending that isn't true.
Re: Arnold's hypothesis no. 2 (students' need for in-person contact).
As far as I can tell, most students at selective colleges want the continuous residential campus experience. The conventionally ambitious student is buying 24/7 ivory-tower interaction -- academic, social, extracurricular, athletic -- with a curated peer group, courtesy of the admissions gatekeepers. By and large, she is buying prestige, the student body, and the fancy campus -- not the Faculty.
Families persuade themselves that relatively talented 18-22 year-olds should spend all their time with one another in a total institution -- rather than 40 hours a week with adults in the workplace, learning to meet the market test and to navigate internal labor markets, with a real separation of spheres among household, career, neighborhood, and civic life. They persuade themselves that the residential college is a coming-of-age rite of passage, not a delay of adulthood.
It might take real education to understand (or to acknowledge) that one is trapped in a bad, if glittering equilibrium.
I hope that the faculty complaints that Arnold quoted are myopic in two regards. First, that they only represent a minor subset of experiences, although I fear that is not the case. Second, I hope the complaints are myopic over time or, in other words, that they reflect near-termism. I am more hopeful about this second point. Will the pendulum be missing forever? Will competition be missing forever? Time will tell.
It would be a tragedy if refereed journals devolve into irrelevance for lack of rigor and logical coherence. Journals that I used to read regularly as a graduate student and for a time thereafter have been published for more than 100 years and developed worthy reputations. What a waste if they lose (have already lost?) those reputations in a matter of a few years.
Possibly the long term effect of Griggs v. Duke Power Co. could be considered.