another area of bloat is people employed to handle compliance with federal and state regulations of universities - I teach at a large state university and we are accredited by dozens of bodies for our various degree programs, plus state oversight, regional accreditors, and DOE. Most of what our Vice President for Research office does is grant compliance. Then there's the office that carefully checks I am not taking anything not allowed to be exported (I'm a lawyer and economist, so the answer there is "no" no matter what I am doing) every time I leave the country. And so on!
The Humanities end of academia has been a magnet for a malcontent intelligentsia since the 1920s -one that wanted to see itself as more sophisticated than thou by unpicking our culture's moral compass. The post 1980s rampant expansion has been probably the greatest political mistake of our era. University humanities and social sciences are fundamentally incapable of self-rehabilitation. They would need to be rehabilitated by forces external to themselves which would involve ridding them of - What?.....60% of their current non-STEM staff and students?.......70%?......90%?
Everything interesting in the arts is happening outside of official institutions and migrating to places like Substack, Passage Press, your own website. After almost a decade or so of top-down racial/sexual reckonings, counter culture has established infrastructure and is no longer flat footed—dynamism is here. No one with taste is looking to universities for it.
I don’t know about the USA, but here in Canada the universities are heavily subsidized by government. This distorts the market, in that students are not paying the full cost of their education. In other words, subsidies make it easier to waste your money buying a degree that won’t actually be of use to you in the employment marketplace. It also means that universities keep popular programs going, and/or add programs based on popularity rather than need, because the higher enrolment numbers drive up their subsidies. They also don’t want to fail or expel substandard students, because that’s bad for the financial bottom line. Somewhere along the line, the universities discovered foreign students as a way to drive up revenues, and that led to a whole new category of useless degrees and lowered standards, while driving up enrolment even further.
My vote would be that we eliminate government subsidies to the universities. Perhaps the dollars could go into scholarship programs, supporting students who are motivated and talented, taking degrees in fields that are beneficial to themselves and society. Those who perform poorly or break laws lose their scholarship. Students choose their school based on price and quality, so schools have to compete for students and deliver a quality educational product. Lowering price and improving quality means getting rid of deadwood in the system, like the DIE administrators. The free market, in other words!
Similarly, if you want more people in the trades, then offer scholarships there.
As for foreign students, it’s become apparent that people are using this as a back door to immigration. We need to severely limit educational visas.
Actually, in one elite college I am familiar with, faculty bloat is pretty much confined to the addition of the grievance studies departments. Apart from that, faculty student ratio hasn't changed much, while administrative bloat has been huge. There are now excess faculty in the traditional disciplines which have gone woke because they have lost students. Other departments (Economics, Government, etc.) which have not gone woke are flooded with students and are short faculty. They have responded by increasing the rigor of their courses, a salutary move.
Yes, obviously college isn't the most effective way to simply train most people for a job. However, that seems like the wrong way to evaluate it.
A very important thing college offers is a chance for young people to leave home and enter the wider world with guiderails not to mention make friends and decide what they want to do away from their parents. It also mixes people from different parts of the country and backgrounds.
True, college isn't the only way this can be done. In some generations this role was played by military service and nothing stops it from being played by technical schools where students learn nursing or welding or whatever (and should be) provided we can convince people to pay that cost.
But ultimately, the point of having a wealthy society is to have better lives and I think a period of time between living at home and starting your own family with diminished consequences and a social environment that encourages meeting people your own age who you haven't known since childhood is very valuable. Until you can convince people to pay for non-college versions of that it seems like a worthwhile expense.
After all, societies often invest very heavily in coming of age rituals or similar stuff so why not us?
--
Having said all that, I think part of the problem here is colleges started drinking their own koolaid. They started believing it was their programs and faculty which added the value not merely the selection of the students and bringing them together (with the minor direction thaf they should take classes and do well).
The other half of that problem is parental and regulatory. Colleges are caught between concerns that they can't just declare they are hands off lest more protective parents freak out but the greater role they play the more they are subject to pretty extensive regulation -- regulation of the kind that resembles the CA AI bill, vague requirements that in effect can be met by showing they've matched the same administrative initiatives that other colleges offer creating a ratchet effect.
This "college is valuable for the experience" idea would be great if it was affordable and producing young people with oats sown, all ready to grow up.
But it's not. It's fleecing taxpayers while producing still indebted young people who have contempt for our society and for their fellow working class citizens, and who have no interest in growing up but feel entitled to have the party last forever.
Not to mention all the valuable days of childhood and free play - an "experience" that is central to human development, not just intellectually, but socially and emotionally, that are sacrificed for the intense "activities" that children must do so they can win scholarships and acceptance into the "best" "college experience.".
Yes, I agree that it's unfortunate both the extra costs added to college and the activities spiral. But the activities thing is less the result of college and more a result of the pushback against using test scores and the unwillingness of parents to let children engage in unsupervised play. Eliminating college wouldn't eliminate the need to compete to get into the highest paying jobs and I fear that would end up looking very similar (it's not that the activities matter but selecting for the kind of person willing to jump through hoops does).
Indeed, that's also a big part of the increase in costs of college -- the demand from parents that students are treated like they are still children with a billion different offices and programs there to care for them plus the koolaid effect I mentioned above.
-
Ultimately, my view is that most of the downsides you mention aren't about college per se but about expensive honest signalling that would exist in most viable alternative systems.
Found out from a German guy in a forum that the German Education System has imploded. "It used to be 20% unskilled labor/60% apprenticeship/20% university. In the last 20 years it's become 50% unskilled/ welfare, and 50% university. As a result there's a shortage occurring in skilled trades".
Hear, hear! To chip in, an experienced, deep Blue educator, principal, and adjunct professor told me regretfully that in the early 2000s the policy was "Everyone must go to college" and vocational options were shut down in high schools. Dynamic marginal thinking seems to be beyond the Ed establishment.
So true. Measuring high school success by the % of graduates that go to college is still the main religion. I saw it with all of my students. It's shifting slowly though.
I ran across an acquaintance, father to a child that was in the same grades as mine, who has a Mercedes repair shop. I asked him how business was going: "I can't find any good mechanics! They shut down all the high school auto shops in our county and our town is so expensive, no one's going to move here." He then told me the story of a young man he'd interviewed who had studied at our local Community College: the candidate told him he'd had the top grades of anyone in the cohort, he wouldn't start work before 9am, and expected a 1.5 hr lunch break. So, few mechanics, and those he can find are extremely entitled and have no concept of what a job is or what a business owner actually does.
Can't really blame in-demand candidates for negotiating the best deal possible!
Which is no longer necessarily about more pay & opportunities for advancement, but "work-life" balance, flexibility & productivity measured by output, not hours on the job. That's going to be a difficult meet for the hands-on service industries.
I am largely in favor of reducing the "College Experience" - which all too many students expect to resemble some 'Animal House' variant. I would have the bulk of students do their first two years of college - and for many of them, their last two years of college - at community and technical colleges, preferably while still living at home. And for the harder working of them, while still in high school. The vast majority of students could get their general education courses completed and hopefully discover what fields of work do, and do not suit them before they incur great time and financial obligations.
Note that a term in the services can give young men and women time to mature as well as an opportunity to learn useful skills and they can then enter the educational / training system with greater maturity when they leave the service.
Frankly, a significant fraction of the student body will not pass a reasonable Community / Technical college bar and need to find their place in the labor market immediately - preferably without significant debt.
Another significan fraction should terminate their education / training at the community / technical college level, having acquired marketable skills while there.
It is my understanding that the liberal arts, humanities, and non-mathematical social sciences have experienced a great reduction in expectations and demands over the past half century. This should be reversed. I would suggest that the work to earn a college degree should require an IQ of ~ 110 (~ + .7 SD over mean) combined with a decent work ethic. Some specialties / fields have always been well in excess of this. Note that I do NOT expect a restandardization of educational expectations in the debased fields.
And like others, I see no need for so many administrators in the educational institutions. We certainly got by without so many of them 50 years ago.
"I would have the bulk of students do their first two years of college - and for many of them, their last two years of college - at community and technical colleges,"
A problem I see is that the courses would have to be at a fairly low level, essentially two more years of high school. Good students will not be well prepared to go on to two years of high level work.
I suppose one way to deal with that would be separate tiers. The better students take more challenging versions of the courses.
One of the hypocrisies of our present educational system is that "tracking" is considered immoral in K-12 but after that we have hyper-tracking. Only a very few people get into Harvard/Yale/Stanford and they compete for admission in ways that are almost inhuman. The next tier down is slightly less selective. And so on, down to the community colleges that admit anyone with a pulse.
The community colleges would need to offer both "full strength" and "diluted" course offerings. The "full strength" offerings are the mandated prerequisites that adequately prepare the students for appropriate courses in STEM... When my son did this he carefully registered only for the "full strength" classes that were accepted for prerequisite transfer credit by the University college he was going to major in.
And yes, the classes are tracked. For each transfer level class he took, there was a less demanding class that would transfer college credits, but would not transfer for prerequisites. These easier classes would be used by students for non-major general education credits.
And the super hard physics for physcists, math for mathematicians classes can only be offered on the main campus. There are never enough students with both the ability and interest in a community college - and these students probably need a much different educational environment as well.
This is a hundred percent true. I have helped foreign students who had tutors take entire classes for them. Also, we need more people in trades. Lastly, students getting their Bachelor's degree are required to take almost 2 years of general education before they can even get to their field. This can easily be cut down to one year, which would also help with student loans.
Oh hundred percent. Sometimes the parents pay for the degree or they get a scholarship, and the only purpose of getting the degree is to return to their country and show it off. They do sometimes use it to help in their job search, but often unrelated to the field in which they studied.
Can't help but agree, and it touches on one of my own hobby horses - the deliberate marginalisation, denigration and bypassing of what are generally known as "trades" (which you mention) and (in the Australian experience) apprenticeships (https://tonymartyr.substack.com/p/apprentices).
Isn't much of this downstream of the use of college as a signaling mechanism, both for attributes employers value and for social status? It's easy to say "get rid of the students who shouldn't be there" but there are individually sound, even if socially costly, reasons for them to want to be there. If you don't address those reasons-- sadly I can't think of any surefire ways to do so off the top of my head!-- then the demand for credentials and belonging will continue to cause this bloat.
Isn’t the market already steering towards your desired outcome? Everything I’m reading indicates humanities have experienced significant enrollment declines, while STEM is growing. Won’t administration and faculty numbers have to adjust? Or is the situation similar to what Morpheus described, “You have to understand, most of these people are not ready to be unplugged. And many of them are so inert, so hopelessly dependent on the system that they will fight to protect it.”
I've been wondering if we would have been struggling with the DEI movement had we not had gender studies, etc., 10-20 years ago. The problem with educating lots of people is that you could end up with a group of educated people who know how to work systems and blackmail society for jobs.
As a former college administrator, my motto has long been "There is nothing wrong with higher Ed that a 50% budget cut wouldn't solve."
This is clearly the right answer, to which we can add that the best way to cut budgets is to drastically reduce subsidies.
another area of bloat is people employed to handle compliance with federal and state regulations of universities - I teach at a large state university and we are accredited by dozens of bodies for our various degree programs, plus state oversight, regional accreditors, and DOE. Most of what our Vice President for Research office does is grant compliance. Then there's the office that carefully checks I am not taking anything not allowed to be exported (I'm a lawyer and economist, so the answer there is "no" no matter what I am doing) every time I leave the country. And so on!
The Humanities end of academia has been a magnet for a malcontent intelligentsia since the 1920s -one that wanted to see itself as more sophisticated than thou by unpicking our culture's moral compass. The post 1980s rampant expansion has been probably the greatest political mistake of our era. University humanities and social sciences are fundamentally incapable of self-rehabilitation. They would need to be rehabilitated by forces external to themselves which would involve ridding them of - What?.....60% of their current non-STEM staff and students?.......70%?......90%?
Everything interesting in the arts is happening outside of official institutions and migrating to places like Substack, Passage Press, your own website. After almost a decade or so of top-down racial/sexual reckonings, counter culture has established infrastructure and is no longer flat footed—dynamism is here. No one with taste is looking to universities for it.
You've given me a breath of optimism with this comment (and I'm a dyed-in-the-wool pessimist)....so Well Said!
As John Derbyshire prescribes, exile all the faculty and administrators, bulldoze the buildings, bury the rubble, and salt the soil.
likely should make an effort to keep the great libraries, however.
I don’t know about the USA, but here in Canada the universities are heavily subsidized by government. This distorts the market, in that students are not paying the full cost of their education. In other words, subsidies make it easier to waste your money buying a degree that won’t actually be of use to you in the employment marketplace. It also means that universities keep popular programs going, and/or add programs based on popularity rather than need, because the higher enrolment numbers drive up their subsidies. They also don’t want to fail or expel substandard students, because that’s bad for the financial bottom line. Somewhere along the line, the universities discovered foreign students as a way to drive up revenues, and that led to a whole new category of useless degrees and lowered standards, while driving up enrolment even further.
My vote would be that we eliminate government subsidies to the universities. Perhaps the dollars could go into scholarship programs, supporting students who are motivated and talented, taking degrees in fields that are beneficial to themselves and society. Those who perform poorly or break laws lose their scholarship. Students choose their school based on price and quality, so schools have to compete for students and deliver a quality educational product. Lowering price and improving quality means getting rid of deadwood in the system, like the DIE administrators. The free market, in other words!
Similarly, if you want more people in the trades, then offer scholarships there.
As for foreign students, it’s become apparent that people are using this as a back door to immigration. We need to severely limit educational visas.
Actually, in one elite college I am familiar with, faculty bloat is pretty much confined to the addition of the grievance studies departments. Apart from that, faculty student ratio hasn't changed much, while administrative bloat has been huge. There are now excess faculty in the traditional disciplines which have gone woke because they have lost students. Other departments (Economics, Government, etc.) which have not gone woke are flooded with students and are short faculty. They have responded by increasing the rigor of their courses, a salutary move.
Yes, obviously college isn't the most effective way to simply train most people for a job. However, that seems like the wrong way to evaluate it.
A very important thing college offers is a chance for young people to leave home and enter the wider world with guiderails not to mention make friends and decide what they want to do away from their parents. It also mixes people from different parts of the country and backgrounds.
True, college isn't the only way this can be done. In some generations this role was played by military service and nothing stops it from being played by technical schools where students learn nursing or welding or whatever (and should be) provided we can convince people to pay that cost.
But ultimately, the point of having a wealthy society is to have better lives and I think a period of time between living at home and starting your own family with diminished consequences and a social environment that encourages meeting people your own age who you haven't known since childhood is very valuable. Until you can convince people to pay for non-college versions of that it seems like a worthwhile expense.
After all, societies often invest very heavily in coming of age rituals or similar stuff so why not us?
--
Having said all that, I think part of the problem here is colleges started drinking their own koolaid. They started believing it was their programs and faculty which added the value not merely the selection of the students and bringing them together (with the minor direction thaf they should take classes and do well).
The other half of that problem is parental and regulatory. Colleges are caught between concerns that they can't just declare they are hands off lest more protective parents freak out but the greater role they play the more they are subject to pretty extensive regulation -- regulation of the kind that resembles the CA AI bill, vague requirements that in effect can be met by showing they've matched the same administrative initiatives that other colleges offer creating a ratchet effect.
This "college is valuable for the experience" idea would be great if it was affordable and producing young people with oats sown, all ready to grow up.
But it's not. It's fleecing taxpayers while producing still indebted young people who have contempt for our society and for their fellow working class citizens, and who have no interest in growing up but feel entitled to have the party last forever.
Not to mention all the valuable days of childhood and free play - an "experience" that is central to human development, not just intellectually, but socially and emotionally, that are sacrificed for the intense "activities" that children must do so they can win scholarships and acceptance into the "best" "college experience.".
Yes, I agree that it's unfortunate both the extra costs added to college and the activities spiral. But the activities thing is less the result of college and more a result of the pushback against using test scores and the unwillingness of parents to let children engage in unsupervised play. Eliminating college wouldn't eliminate the need to compete to get into the highest paying jobs and I fear that would end up looking very similar (it's not that the activities matter but selecting for the kind of person willing to jump through hoops does).
Indeed, that's also a big part of the increase in costs of college -- the demand from parents that students are treated like they are still children with a billion different offices and programs there to care for them plus the koolaid effect I mentioned above.
-
Ultimately, my view is that most of the downsides you mention aren't about college per se but about expensive honest signalling that would exist in most viable alternative systems.
Found out from a German guy in a forum that the German Education System has imploded. "It used to be 20% unskilled labor/60% apprenticeship/20% university. In the last 20 years it's become 50% unskilled/ welfare, and 50% university. As a result there's a shortage occurring in skilled trades".
Hear, hear! To chip in, an experienced, deep Blue educator, principal, and adjunct professor told me regretfully that in the early 2000s the policy was "Everyone must go to college" and vocational options were shut down in high schools. Dynamic marginal thinking seems to be beyond the Ed establishment.
So true. Measuring high school success by the % of graduates that go to college is still the main religion. I saw it with all of my students. It's shifting slowly though.
I ran across an acquaintance, father to a child that was in the same grades as mine, who has a Mercedes repair shop. I asked him how business was going: "I can't find any good mechanics! They shut down all the high school auto shops in our county and our town is so expensive, no one's going to move here." He then told me the story of a young man he'd interviewed who had studied at our local Community College: the candidate told him he'd had the top grades of anyone in the cohort, he wouldn't start work before 9am, and expected a 1.5 hr lunch break. So, few mechanics, and those he can find are extremely entitled and have no concept of what a job is or what a business owner actually does.
Can't really blame in-demand candidates for negotiating the best deal possible!
Which is no longer necessarily about more pay & opportunities for advancement, but "work-life" balance, flexibility & productivity measured by output, not hours on the job. That's going to be a difficult meet for the hands-on service industries.
I am largely in favor of reducing the "College Experience" - which all too many students expect to resemble some 'Animal House' variant. I would have the bulk of students do their first two years of college - and for many of them, their last two years of college - at community and technical colleges, preferably while still living at home. And for the harder working of them, while still in high school. The vast majority of students could get their general education courses completed and hopefully discover what fields of work do, and do not suit them before they incur great time and financial obligations.
Note that a term in the services can give young men and women time to mature as well as an opportunity to learn useful skills and they can then enter the educational / training system with greater maturity when they leave the service.
Frankly, a significant fraction of the student body will not pass a reasonable Community / Technical college bar and need to find their place in the labor market immediately - preferably without significant debt.
Another significan fraction should terminate their education / training at the community / technical college level, having acquired marketable skills while there.
It is my understanding that the liberal arts, humanities, and non-mathematical social sciences have experienced a great reduction in expectations and demands over the past half century. This should be reversed. I would suggest that the work to earn a college degree should require an IQ of ~ 110 (~ + .7 SD over mean) combined with a decent work ethic. Some specialties / fields have always been well in excess of this. Note that I do NOT expect a restandardization of educational expectations in the debased fields.
And like others, I see no need for so many administrators in the educational institutions. We certainly got by without so many of them 50 years ago.
"I would have the bulk of students do their first two years of college - and for many of them, their last two years of college - at community and technical colleges,"
A problem I see is that the courses would have to be at a fairly low level, essentially two more years of high school. Good students will not be well prepared to go on to two years of high level work.
I suppose one way to deal with that would be separate tiers. The better students take more challenging versions of the courses.
One of the hypocrisies of our present educational system is that "tracking" is considered immoral in K-12 but after that we have hyper-tracking. Only a very few people get into Harvard/Yale/Stanford and they compete for admission in ways that are almost inhuman. The next tier down is slightly less selective. And so on, down to the community colleges that admit anyone with a pulse.
The community colleges would need to offer both "full strength" and "diluted" course offerings. The "full strength" offerings are the mandated prerequisites that adequately prepare the students for appropriate courses in STEM... When my son did this he carefully registered only for the "full strength" classes that were accepted for prerequisite transfer credit by the University college he was going to major in.
And yes, the classes are tracked. For each transfer level class he took, there was a less demanding class that would transfer college credits, but would not transfer for prerequisites. These easier classes would be used by students for non-major general education credits.
And the super hard physics for physcists, math for mathematicians classes can only be offered on the main campus. There are never enough students with both the ability and interest in a community college - and these students probably need a much different educational environment as well.
This is a hundred percent true. I have helped foreign students who had tutors take entire classes for them. Also, we need more people in trades. Lastly, students getting their Bachelor's degree are required to take almost 2 years of general education before they can even get to their field. This can easily be cut down to one year, which would also help with student loans.
that's just awful. So it's all about signal value of the degree, not about acquiring any knowledge or skills.
Oh hundred percent. Sometimes the parents pay for the degree or they get a scholarship, and the only purpose of getting the degree is to return to their country and show it off. They do sometimes use it to help in their job search, but often unrelated to the field in which they studied.
Are the extra classes indoctrination or remediation?
Can't help but agree, and it touches on one of my own hobby horses - the deliberate marginalisation, denigration and bypassing of what are generally known as "trades" (which you mention) and (in the Australian experience) apprenticeships (https://tonymartyr.substack.com/p/apprentices).
Re bloat: And yet you still refuse to point out WHY the bloat exists: free taxpayer money.
Plus the strings attached to it.
Isn't much of this downstream of the use of college as a signaling mechanism, both for attributes employers value and for social status? It's easy to say "get rid of the students who shouldn't be there" but there are individually sound, even if socially costly, reasons for them to want to be there. If you don't address those reasons-- sadly I can't think of any surefire ways to do so off the top of my head!-- then the demand for credentials and belonging will continue to cause this bloat.
Isn’t the market already steering towards your desired outcome? Everything I’m reading indicates humanities have experienced significant enrollment declines, while STEM is growing. Won’t administration and faculty numbers have to adjust? Or is the situation similar to what Morpheus described, “You have to understand, most of these people are not ready to be unplugged. And many of them are so inert, so hopelessly dependent on the system that they will fight to protect it.”
As long as STEM courses keep their standards, there is a hard limit on how much they can grow.
I've been wondering if we would have been struggling with the DEI movement had we not had gender studies, etc., 10-20 years ago. The problem with educating lots of people is that you could end up with a group of educated people who know how to work systems and blackmail society for jobs.
But the academy, both K-12 and higher ed, are overwhelmingly deep Blue. The Democrats will never consent to reducing their numbers.
Amen. Thought the exact same thing after reading his piece.
The entire Slow Boring model is interior design—what if we just told everyone all the cool ways we are going to spend their money for them?