My VP of Europe had the phrase that pays, "Recruit the attitude, train the skill." Outside of STEM jobs, many employers have no expectation that any knowledge, skills, and abilities (KSAs) gained by undergraduates will transfer to entry-level jobs. In the US, professional KSAs are learned in business, law, or medical school. In other countries, these professional KSAs are taught at the undergraduate level. Thus, the US liberal arts degree is a luxury good that subsidies have extended to too many.
In the most recent episode of Dad Saves America, Stephen Hicks blames the education system for mis-preparing students for the cognitive and emotional rigors of the real world for ideological reasons (I'd add economic and political reasons too). Senior, experienced educators have told me about the shift to "college for all" in the early 2000s that included the shuttering of vocational programs. If we believe the bad boy of social science, Charles Murray, these students have little business in liberal arts programs. After all, my sense is that these programs were created centuries ago to train the second sons of the aristocracy for the priesthood.
Joining these thoughts shows how the education system has set up a lot of people for failure at high prices. Personally, I think government seeks to indoctrinate its subjects, hide the unemployment it creates, and fund its friends. This is done partly consciously (bootleggers) and partly as the revealed effect of its ideologies (baptists). "College for all" achieves all three aims.
It is quality measurement of professors that is most missing. How can any stakeholder, student, admin, parent, govt (loan guarantor or grantor), or even the professor himself, know if he’s doing a good job? Universal & centralized lack of standards doesn’t change this. Autonomy on a clear standard is likely better than even excellent bureaucracy.
Ivy+ college grads do better because of selection & network effects, not because of much better teachers.
Good teaching, on a subject, needs far better definition:
A) a student has some knowledge of the subject, shown by tests,
B) the student learns more in the class, dependent on the professor/ teacher
C) the student gains knowledge about the subject, maybe an improvement of critical thinking, shown thru testing,
D) the professor is graded by how much the student has learned.
This grading of professors is needed, not a loss of autonomy. Tho external grading, & external standard tests for a subject are a loss of autonomy for the professor, no longer able to claim being a great professor due to self-assessment, autonomously.
The same process should used to grade aigent tutors, and seems to be like what Alpha school is doing with human guides & ai courses & standard tests.
UATX should be pushing this or something similar.
Arnold, your reports here are great-how do you know if you are doing a good job as a teacher? And, aren’t you more able to use ai because you have autonomy, rather than lots of good old bureaucracy?
Reduce grade inflation:
C2) students get a grade, based on some bureaucratic curve for A, B, C, D, Fail %. Per professor.
Those in classes of under 20 starting students (30? 10? ) all students are ranked, 1- 20 (# students), ties give all tied the lower rank (maybe 2 are ranked second, both, or three ranked third, never 2 ranked first.)
The problem with these metrics is, I think it's very likely that most of the impact from a given instructor comes from a handful of their top students, rather than the average student they have. Most students don't learn a ton in a typical class, for reasons that are the students' fault (just like most people with a gym membership don't get very fit). But good instructors are very valuable to the sort of student who will go on to be the next Stephen Hawking, HR McMaster, etc.
I don’t know how to say this: nobody cares. Employers can complain all they want about the skills of college grads, but they’d like the skills of college dropouts or high school graduates even less, on average. I work at one of the “college for all” colleges and am not fond of it, but the reason we have it is that parent-voters noticed that college grads have nicer lives than non-grads and assumed the degree was a causal effect. You can Bryan Caplan it all you want—parents see who has the nicer lives, and they want that for their kids. And employers can bitch that grads aren’t what they expected, but non grads have, on average, even worse skills. And whatever shenanigans you want to ascribe to admissions, there is still plenty of sorting on ability between college and non college and across colleges.
I don’t know what I’d pick to work on if I weren’t a prof, but I stopped working in for profits and government because decision makers didn’t want my analysis; they wanted me to justify someone’s position. I have been disappointed that, at the institutional level, my university is no different. And I didn’t get into academia for the research—I’ve always thought of it as a silly parlor game, and besides I’m not playing at the level where it might matter. So I’d shoot myself before I gave up my favorite part of the job: that I get to decide how to run my classes. I suspect where this will be easier is at research schools, where admin can pull the research faculty out of the classroom altogether and order adjuncts and GAs to follow a script.
I don't think that the choice is between 100 % autonomy for professors and 0 % autonomy. But some coordination among professors would be better than what exists today. Also, some collective thinking about how to respond to the AI challenge.
"...what universities badly need, and will not get, is much better leadership (bureaucracy, if you will) and way less autonomy for professors." I'm not an academic and it's been years since I took graduate courses, so my viewpoint is miles away from the action. Yet my sense is that autonomy thing is a revolution not ever happening from within the institution. The current stasis will be disrupted from the outside and the current model will be replaced.
Very talented youths will find their ways to productivity in the wild in any case.
I worry less about very imperfect Ivy faculty, and more about the total institution that is the residential college, which, at selective and non-selective four-year colleges alike, delays adulthood, by secluding youths from the workplace and by channeling their interactions almost wholly within their age group.
There are two kinds of universities, broadly speaking. There are universities whose main purpose is teaching -- teaching new things and teaching-and-preserving the old. And there are research institutions that do a certain amount of teaching. There is considerable overlap -- some of the teaching at the latter is much better than at the former. The focus of the discussion often seems to be on the teaching. But in addition to some, often small, teaching institutions, the jewels of the American system are institutions such as Yale and Michigan. AI will change a lot of research, of course.
Also, teaching (and research) are multi-attributive activities. This complicates evaluation considerably (Arrow's theorem). Socrates stumbled on the best form of teaching a few thousand years ago, but institutions can't for the most part have many tutorials. Teachers often are in charge of fifty to several hundred students. AI will help, but success doesn't mean doing well on one particular (and measurable) dimension. There's a reason why the field of Education, as important as it may be, is not very successful.
Agree entirely that what McArdle is talking about has become a problem. Lazy coasters who don't want to alter their syllabi, and woke profs who are overly worried about accommodations for in-person tests, will keep having too many of their assignments as take-home essays.
At many universities, though, I don't think the administration *wants* people to make their assignments AI-proof. They are cowed by accommodation administrators who subscribe to bizarre legal theories about ADA requirements, and so they think in-person assignments are too difficult to make safe for disabled students.
The reduction in autonomy would only have to be very mild in order to accomplish the goal McArdle has in mind: just require profs to use an assignment structure that makes it hard to cheat with AI.
The work of rooting out recent vibe coded products, mostly apps, will have very little cost. There was little cost in replacing Ask Jeeves search with Google, nor My Space with Facebook.
Plus, the ISO requirements themselves will soon be incorporated in Claude & all major AI models, so then all vibe coding will automatically have ISO compliance (opt-out default? Or opt-in, cheaper?).
The human+aigent vibe coded apps of 2026 will all be candidates for aigent total substitution with same inputs & outputs but optimized, & compliant (to any compliant level).
Your points about the need for testing students echo my own, so I fully agree.
The increased ability of aigents to cheaply comply with regulations seems a hugely underreported & unappreciated capability. Likely will undercut many big company regulation based moat protection from competition.
The fact that "the ISO requirements themselves will soon be incorporated in Claude & all major AI models" sets off all sorts of alarm bells for me. It seems way too easy for that to turn into censorship of contrary opinions and inconvenient facts, along with a general "this is how you should view the world."
The last decade has seen how seemingly benign standards--e.g., "don't hate"--have been used to impose orthodoxy in universities.
Maybe I'm too simplistic, but it seems to me that a comment will be read and taken seriously if the main idea is stated clearly early on (hook the reader), with details to develop the idea later on. And only the details that are relevant and don't make the comment too long. "Too long" can be simply length but it can also be "oh, it looks like he just copy-and-pasted something from AI and I'll bet some of it isn't on point, so I'm not going to invest any more time reading."
My VP of Europe had the phrase that pays, "Recruit the attitude, train the skill." Outside of STEM jobs, many employers have no expectation that any knowledge, skills, and abilities (KSAs) gained by undergraduates will transfer to entry-level jobs. In the US, professional KSAs are learned in business, law, or medical school. In other countries, these professional KSAs are taught at the undergraduate level. Thus, the US liberal arts degree is a luxury good that subsidies have extended to too many.
In the most recent episode of Dad Saves America, Stephen Hicks blames the education system for mis-preparing students for the cognitive and emotional rigors of the real world for ideological reasons (I'd add economic and political reasons too). Senior, experienced educators have told me about the shift to "college for all" in the early 2000s that included the shuttering of vocational programs. If we believe the bad boy of social science, Charles Murray, these students have little business in liberal arts programs. After all, my sense is that these programs were created centuries ago to train the second sons of the aristocracy for the priesthood.
Joining these thoughts shows how the education system has set up a lot of people for failure at high prices. Personally, I think government seeks to indoctrinate its subjects, hide the unemployment it creates, and fund its friends. This is done partly consciously (bootleggers) and partly as the revealed effect of its ideologies (baptists). "College for all" achieves all three aims.
It is quality measurement of professors that is most missing. How can any stakeholder, student, admin, parent, govt (loan guarantor or grantor), or even the professor himself, know if he’s doing a good job? Universal & centralized lack of standards doesn’t change this. Autonomy on a clear standard is likely better than even excellent bureaucracy.
Ivy+ college grads do better because of selection & network effects, not because of much better teachers.
Good teaching, on a subject, needs far better definition:
A) a student has some knowledge of the subject, shown by tests,
B) the student learns more in the class, dependent on the professor/ teacher
C) the student gains knowledge about the subject, maybe an improvement of critical thinking, shown thru testing,
D) the professor is graded by how much the student has learned.
This grading of professors is needed, not a loss of autonomy. Tho external grading, & external standard tests for a subject are a loss of autonomy for the professor, no longer able to claim being a great professor due to self-assessment, autonomously.
The same process should used to grade aigent tutors, and seems to be like what Alpha school is doing with human guides & ai courses & standard tests.
UATX should be pushing this or something similar.
Arnold, your reports here are great-how do you know if you are doing a good job as a teacher? And, aren’t you more able to use ai because you have autonomy, rather than lots of good old bureaucracy?
Reduce grade inflation:
C2) students get a grade, based on some bureaucratic curve for A, B, C, D, Fail %. Per professor.
Those in classes of under 20 starting students (30? 10? ) all students are ranked, 1- 20 (# students), ties give all tied the lower rank (maybe 2 are ranked second, both, or three ranked third, never 2 ranked first.)
The problem with these metrics is, I think it's very likely that most of the impact from a given instructor comes from a handful of their top students, rather than the average student they have. Most students don't learn a ton in a typical class, for reasons that are the students' fault (just like most people with a gym membership don't get very fit). But good instructors are very valuable to the sort of student who will go on to be the next Stephen Hawking, HR McMaster, etc.
I don’t know how to say this: nobody cares. Employers can complain all they want about the skills of college grads, but they’d like the skills of college dropouts or high school graduates even less, on average. I work at one of the “college for all” colleges and am not fond of it, but the reason we have it is that parent-voters noticed that college grads have nicer lives than non-grads and assumed the degree was a causal effect. You can Bryan Caplan it all you want—parents see who has the nicer lives, and they want that for their kids. And employers can bitch that grads aren’t what they expected, but non grads have, on average, even worse skills. And whatever shenanigans you want to ascribe to admissions, there is still plenty of sorting on ability between college and non college and across colleges.
I don’t know what I’d pick to work on if I weren’t a prof, but I stopped working in for profits and government because decision makers didn’t want my analysis; they wanted me to justify someone’s position. I have been disappointed that, at the institutional level, my university is no different. And I didn’t get into academia for the research—I’ve always thought of it as a silly parlor game, and besides I’m not playing at the level where it might matter. So I’d shoot myself before I gave up my favorite part of the job: that I get to decide how to run my classes. I suspect where this will be easier is at research schools, where admin can pull the research faculty out of the classroom altogether and order adjuncts and GAs to follow a script.
I don't think that the choice is between 100 % autonomy for professors and 0 % autonomy. But some coordination among professors would be better than what exists today. Also, some collective thinking about how to respond to the AI challenge.
"...what universities badly need, and will not get, is much better leadership (bureaucracy, if you will) and way less autonomy for professors." I'm not an academic and it's been years since I took graduate courses, so my viewpoint is miles away from the action. Yet my sense is that autonomy thing is a revolution not ever happening from within the institution. The current stasis will be disrupted from the outside and the current model will be replaced.
Very talented youths will find their ways to productivity in the wild in any case.
I worry less about very imperfect Ivy faculty, and more about the total institution that is the residential college, which, at selective and non-selective four-year colleges alike, delays adulthood, by secluding youths from the workplace and by channeling their interactions almost wholly within their age group.
There are two kinds of universities, broadly speaking. There are universities whose main purpose is teaching -- teaching new things and teaching-and-preserving the old. And there are research institutions that do a certain amount of teaching. There is considerable overlap -- some of the teaching at the latter is much better than at the former. The focus of the discussion often seems to be on the teaching. But in addition to some, often small, teaching institutions, the jewels of the American system are institutions such as Yale and Michigan. AI will change a lot of research, of course.
Also, teaching (and research) are multi-attributive activities. This complicates evaluation considerably (Arrow's theorem). Socrates stumbled on the best form of teaching a few thousand years ago, but institutions can't for the most part have many tutorials. Teachers often are in charge of fifty to several hundred students. AI will help, but success doesn't mean doing well on one particular (and measurable) dimension. There's a reason why the field of Education, as important as it may be, is not very successful.
Agree entirely that what McArdle is talking about has become a problem. Lazy coasters who don't want to alter their syllabi, and woke profs who are overly worried about accommodations for in-person tests, will keep having too many of their assignments as take-home essays.
At many universities, though, I don't think the administration *wants* people to make their assignments AI-proof. They are cowed by accommodation administrators who subscribe to bizarre legal theories about ADA requirements, and so they think in-person assignments are too difficult to make safe for disabled students.
I don’t follow why universities’ outcomes would be better off with less autonomy for professors. Where would innovation come from?
The reduction in autonomy would only have to be very mild in order to accomplish the goal McArdle has in mind: just require profs to use an assignment structure that makes it hard to cheat with AI.
The work of rooting out recent vibe coded products, mostly apps, will have very little cost. There was little cost in replacing Ask Jeeves search with Google, nor My Space with Facebook.
Plus, the ISO requirements themselves will soon be incorporated in Claude & all major AI models, so then all vibe coding will automatically have ISO compliance (opt-out default? Or opt-in, cheaper?).
The human+aigent vibe coded apps of 2026 will all be candidates for aigent total substitution with same inputs & outputs but optimized, & compliant (to any compliant level).
Your points about the need for testing students echo my own, so I fully agree.
The increased ability of aigents to cheaply comply with regulations seems a hugely underreported & unappreciated capability. Likely will undercut many big company regulation based moat protection from competition.
The fact that "the ISO requirements themselves will soon be incorporated in Claude & all major AI models" sets off all sorts of alarm bells for me. It seems way too easy for that to turn into censorship of contrary opinions and inconvenient facts, along with a general "this is how you should view the world."
The last decade has seen how seemingly benign standards--e.g., "don't hate"--have been used to impose orthodoxy in universities.
If you wish to reach people, you have to meet them where they are, and most of them are not reading long AI-generated prose.
If somebody leaves a very long comment and nobody reads it, does it make a noise? I stopped halfway through.
Maybe I'm too simplistic, but it seems to me that a comment will be read and taken seriously if the main idea is stated clearly early on (hook the reader), with details to develop the idea later on. And only the details that are relevant and don't make the comment too long. "Too long" can be simply length but it can also be "oh, it looks like he just copy-and-pasted something from AI and I'll bet some of it isn't on point, so I'm not going to invest any more time reading."