All the above are good ideas. But to happen and to stick, we also need changes to the marketplace that extends beyond the universities.
First, do away with the Department of Education and the subsidies it administers, and encourage states to wean their educational institutions off the taxpayer teat as well. And make universities liable if most of their admitted students don't graduate or if most graduates can't get or hold a job in a related field. This will create the needed incentives for universities to make the result-centric reforms you listed.
Then require schools to be up-front and uniform about rules of behavior (including such things as demonstrations and sexual behavior), and about where the schools get their cash, and where and how they recruit. They must no longer be allowed to bait-and-switch a student into wasting critical years and money on an institution that is going to turn on them.
And third, do away with woke labor laws, which ruin the job market.
"And make universities liable if most of their admitted students don't graduate"
At the risk of stating the obvious, this is trivially easy to game. It is, of course, why many states instituted "high stakes tests", tests that students had to pass before they could graduate high school. Schools were just passing kids on, because they couldn't bear to fail kids.
And then the cynical irony, because so many kids couldn't pass those tests, they were dumbed down, the passing scores were lowered, and many states just did away with them entirely.
I am all in favor of slashing universities by removing administrators, useless faculty and useless students.
I see no downside regarding intellectual output and I suspect the newly freed up luxury dorms and the like could be used as housing which is often in short supply in many places where universities are.
There's only one problem. What will the newly fired former bloat do? The most recent previous attempt to find a solution to this was in Cambodia and it is generally held as a mistake. You can perhaps say "learn to code" but that's probably simplistic in that many of the bloat don't have the intellect to do that successfully. I'm fairly sure OnlyFans only works for a relatively small minority. We do need a solution though because unemployed people like this are prime recruits for revolutionary forces. The revolution would probably fail but it would be messy
While administrative bloat is certainly a significant contributor to the high cost of college, reduced teaching loads and the amount spent on intercollegiate sports and research are also important factors. Stock market gains enable the wealthy to afford the high tuition charged. My podcast, Charging U, is a comprehensive, objective look at why college is so expensive.
I just finished listening to 4+ hrs of Marc Andreesen and Ben Horowitz discussing "Crisis in Higher Ed & Why Universities Still Matter" (problem analysis part 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7J2_G4oHRQ0&ab_channel=a16z ). They would agree with you!
It's worth a listen - they layout 12 stakeholders and the many, many roles universities now play: a) signal value (of the degree) for future employers, b) signal value of getting in (to top schools), c) actual knowledge transfer/skill acquisition, d) research, e) 'adult daycare' aka learning to look after yourself, f) dating, g) alumni fundraising, h) sports/athletic funnel, i) moral/ethics... I don't agree with all their solutions, but it was a great dive into the complexity and need for reform.
The bloat has been enabled by the 2005 change in the Bankruptcy Reform Act which prohibited discharge of student loans via personal bankruptcies. This made creditworthiness of the borrower irrelevant because if borrower defaulted the government would honor the loan. Student loans given out like candy on Halloween became the norm. Then in 2010 student loans were federalized making it worse. Restore creditworthiness of borrower to the market by eliminating or revamping the 2005 Bankruptcy Act to where future student loans are allowed to be discharged in personal bankruptcy and watch those going to college shrink when they are denied the loan. This will in turn eliminate the cash cow that student loans have become and require colleges to shrink their administrative staff.
Honestly, that kids are bypassing college for jobs and trade school or community colleges is one of the healthiest signs I’ve seen in years.
We don’t need more Social Sciences majors finding out, after graduation, that the number of jobs is pitiful, and that their chances of landing one is pretty much nonexistent, unless they are well-connected.
I have no problem with people pursuing a college degree. Just not on MY (taxpayers) dime.
It‘s certainly true that there are far too many students who go to college who don‘t belong there. IIRC from research back in the day, it takes an IQ of about 110 at a minimum to do what used to be understood as college level work. If only 16-1/3% of the population has an IQ > than 1 standard deviation above the mean (~115), then you get about 25% of the population who are capable of college work. Yet we send more than 50% of high school graduates to college… So, yeah, at least half overall should not be there. Perhaps it‘s better at elite colleges with highly selective admissions, but one wonders these days.
Similarly, the administrations are bloated beyond belief. I think 80-90% could be eliminated at most colleges and university.
Faculty bloat exists too…you point sensibly to the various ‘grievance’ departments, I’d include all of the “studies” departments…and I’d take a hatchet to parts of the social sciences and humanities, but highly selectively: good students have, sadly, been fleeing the humanities in recent years and many departments are shrinking or closing without help…the real problem lies in the rise of ‘practical’ majors like ‘business’ or ‘communications,’ which were not majors or departments at serious school 75 years ago and need to go wholesale.
The professional schools, too, need culling to remove all traces of woke, DEI, and leftist claptrap of all sorts.
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).
"This country is sending way too many young people to college. Instead, they should be going to training programs to become allied health professionals, or electricians, or solar panel installers, or SOMETING."
and that's the issue
there is no "something" for anyone to do
the number of real jobs that are suitable for midwits is much smaller than the number of young midwits
that's why universities have been turned into adult day care and why BS admin jobs have skyrocketed
I think the exact same problem is plaguing primary/secondary education. I saw a study a while back about administrator bloat where non-teaching positions at public schools has increased something like 700% since 1950. We need to tackle this head on in both public school and higher ed!
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.
"You know, he wasn't that great a student. I mean, this is the wild thing about it, though: The King biography won a Pulitzer Prize this year. And I remember reading it and thinking, 'Wait a minute. King went to college at 15. But he was a poor student at Morehouse.'
...
But, like, imagine, man: imagine that we would not have gotten King. We would not have gotten King if the conditions of the 1950s and the 1940s demanded that you breathe excellence before you learn what excellence means in the world you want to live in. "
All the above are good ideas. But to happen and to stick, we also need changes to the marketplace that extends beyond the universities.
First, do away with the Department of Education and the subsidies it administers, and encourage states to wean their educational institutions off the taxpayer teat as well. And make universities liable if most of their admitted students don't graduate or if most graduates can't get or hold a job in a related field. This will create the needed incentives for universities to make the result-centric reforms you listed.
Then require schools to be up-front and uniform about rules of behavior (including such things as demonstrations and sexual behavior), and about where the schools get their cash, and where and how they recruit. They must no longer be allowed to bait-and-switch a student into wasting critical years and money on an institution that is going to turn on them.
And third, do away with woke labor laws, which ruin the job market.
"And make universities liable if most of their admitted students don't graduate"
At the risk of stating the obvious, this is trivially easy to game. It is, of course, why many states instituted "high stakes tests", tests that students had to pass before they could graduate high school. Schools were just passing kids on, because they couldn't bear to fail kids.
And then the cynical irony, because so many kids couldn't pass those tests, they were dumbed down, the passing scores were lowered, and many states just did away with them entirely.
I am all in favor of slashing universities by removing administrators, useless faculty and useless students.
I see no downside regarding intellectual output and I suspect the newly freed up luxury dorms and the like could be used as housing which is often in short supply in many places where universities are.
There's only one problem. What will the newly fired former bloat do? The most recent previous attempt to find a solution to this was in Cambodia and it is generally held as a mistake. You can perhaps say "learn to code" but that's probably simplistic in that many of the bloat don't have the intellect to do that successfully. I'm fairly sure OnlyFans only works for a relatively small minority. We do need a solution though because unemployed people like this are prime recruits for revolutionary forces. The revolution would probably fail but it would be messy
While administrative bloat is certainly a significant contributor to the high cost of college, reduced teaching loads and the amount spent on intercollegiate sports and research are also important factors. Stock market gains enable the wealthy to afford the high tuition charged. My podcast, Charging U, is a comprehensive, objective look at why college is so expensive.
I just finished listening to 4+ hrs of Marc Andreesen and Ben Horowitz discussing "Crisis in Higher Ed & Why Universities Still Matter" (problem analysis part 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7J2_G4oHRQ0&ab_channel=a16z ). They would agree with you!
It's worth a listen - they layout 12 stakeholders and the many, many roles universities now play: a) signal value (of the degree) for future employers, b) signal value of getting in (to top schools), c) actual knowledge transfer/skill acquisition, d) research, e) 'adult daycare' aka learning to look after yourself, f) dating, g) alumni fundraising, h) sports/athletic funnel, i) moral/ethics... I don't agree with all their solutions, but it was a great dive into the complexity and need for reform.
The bloat has been enabled by the 2005 change in the Bankruptcy Reform Act which prohibited discharge of student loans via personal bankruptcies. This made creditworthiness of the borrower irrelevant because if borrower defaulted the government would honor the loan. Student loans given out like candy on Halloween became the norm. Then in 2010 student loans were federalized making it worse. Restore creditworthiness of borrower to the market by eliminating or revamping the 2005 Bankruptcy Act to where future student loans are allowed to be discharged in personal bankruptcy and watch those going to college shrink when they are denied the loan. This will in turn eliminate the cash cow that student loans have become and require colleges to shrink their administrative staff.
Honestly, that kids are bypassing college for jobs and trade school or community colleges is one of the healthiest signs I’ve seen in years.
We don’t need more Social Sciences majors finding out, after graduation, that the number of jobs is pitiful, and that their chances of landing one is pretty much nonexistent, unless they are well-connected.
I have no problem with people pursuing a college degree. Just not on MY (taxpayers) dime.
Scholarships for VERY qualified students? Sure.
Free ride for the marginal student? Uh-uh.
It‘s certainly true that there are far too many students who go to college who don‘t belong there. IIRC from research back in the day, it takes an IQ of about 110 at a minimum to do what used to be understood as college level work. If only 16-1/3% of the population has an IQ > than 1 standard deviation above the mean (~115), then you get about 25% of the population who are capable of college work. Yet we send more than 50% of high school graduates to college… So, yeah, at least half overall should not be there. Perhaps it‘s better at elite colleges with highly selective admissions, but one wonders these days.
Similarly, the administrations are bloated beyond belief. I think 80-90% could be eliminated at most colleges and university.
Faculty bloat exists too…you point sensibly to the various ‘grievance’ departments, I’d include all of the “studies” departments…and I’d take a hatchet to parts of the social sciences and humanities, but highly selectively: good students have, sadly, been fleeing the humanities in recent years and many departments are shrinking or closing without help…the real problem lies in the rise of ‘practical’ majors like ‘business’ or ‘communications,’ which were not majors or departments at serious school 75 years ago and need to go wholesale.
The professional schools, too, need culling to remove all traces of woke, DEI, and leftist claptrap of all sorts.
Aren't "studies" departments and "grievance" departments the same thing?
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).
"This country is sending way too many young people to college. Instead, they should be going to training programs to become allied health professionals, or electricians, or solar panel installers, or SOMETING."
and that's the issue
there is no "something" for anyone to do
the number of real jobs that are suitable for midwits is much smaller than the number of young midwits
that's why universities have been turned into adult day care and why BS admin jobs have skyrocketed
it's just managerial class UBI
I think the exact same problem is plaguing primary/secondary education. I saw a study a while back about administrator bloat where non-teaching positions at public schools has increased something like 700% since 1950. We need to tackle this head on in both public school and higher ed!
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.
Get the Feds out of funding. Much of the problem would correct itself.
This applies to primary, secondary and all college systems. Dump the Fed.
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?
From last Monday's Econtalk:
"You know, he wasn't that great a student. I mean, this is the wild thing about it, though: The King biography won a Pulitzer Prize this year. And I remember reading it and thinking, 'Wait a minute. King went to college at 15. But he was a poor student at Morehouse.'
...
But, like, imagine, man: imagine that we would not have gotten King. We would not have gotten King if the conditions of the 1950s and the 1940s demanded that you breathe excellence before you learn what excellence means in the world you want to live in. "
Re bloat: And yet you still refuse to point out WHY the bloat exists: free taxpayer money.