Apprenticeships and other on the job vocational training might be worthwhile?
Right now that's not very high status, so talented people don't do it. But image eg Google hiring for programming apprentices for the age range you suggested: they (and some others) have enough prestige to pull it off.
I am strongly STEM oriented, but ended up doing my own thing based upon my own innovation (graduated wrong time, wrong place, wrong field for an academic pathway). I found the greatest value of a Ph.D. and a P.E. was not getting a load of manure from academics in committees dealing with grants and research proposals. I did get an excellent formal education back in the late 50s through 1970 living in Berkeley (interesting times) while avoiding the draft without having "bone spurs" or political connections. However, continual learning is the key and with todays access to knowledge being much better than university libraries, learning is even easier.
At least my children also got excellent formal educations before 2012 and before the contamination of STEM by the Woke beliefs. They did learn how to think and do research and only got some of the academic "cool-aid" we now see. However, I believe being a "white male" has harmed the academic progression of my son in academic computer science as I observed my friends as "department chairmen" having problems hiring new faculty that met DEI mandates at a major university, with effective criteria of not being a White or Asian male. I also know academics in my field that have retired early when the DEI mandates spread into Engineering and Agricultural Sciences, with a great loss of the most innovative researchers of my generation.
The point about lack of self-awareness of mediocrity is spot on. Brian Chau’s term midwit (I don’t know whether he invented or just is instrumental in popularizing it) is my favorite new word of the last 5 years.
My one quibble is with “I have come to see this as the end result of the over-expansion of higher education, in terms of the number of students, the number of faculty and, above all, the number of administrators.”
I too decry the number of administrators as a bad, indefensible thing. But it seems to me to not be anywhere close to the primary cause of the anti-whiteness, oppressor-oppressed ideology, etc, but mostly just correlated with, sharing many but not all of the same underlying causes.
The oppressor-oppressed ideology on campus is dominant because of decades of colleges discriminating against Republicans.
Like racism if Reps were a different race—and kinda similar willingness to believe the worst about Reps now, just as racist Dems used to be willing to believe the worst about Blacks, and like so many Jew-haters, before & after Nazis, believe the worst about Jews.
Arnold - I’ve been working on a reply to this post for a couple of hours, but since this is your number one issue and it lines up closely with my number one issue, I’m going to spend even more time on my reply. Might be a while, but for now I’ll just point out that this post doesn’t even use the words “government,” “public,” or “funding.” Any thoughts on this observation?
The most memorable example of out-of-touch wokeness that I remember from college was during a normal Spanish 2 class as a freshman about a decade ago. Our professor was a Venezuelan refugee who came to the U.S. when Chavez was in power. She occasionally told us about the difficulties that compelled her to leave and the troubles her family experienced back home under Maduro. Every time she did, this white guy in the class, who I assume self-identified as a socialist, would get into a debate with her, arguing that the Venezuelan government hadn't done anything wrong and the humanitarian crisis in the country was caused by U.S. sanctions or U.S. intelligence agencies wreaking havoc. Everyone in the class would groan and sit through this Chomskyite narrative he vociferously argued until, eventually, our professor just never brought up Venezuela again.
The two-part problem is even if you were to de-emphasize college education somehow and drain the woke rot or mediocrity, as you put it, there is still at least one generation of students who have been brainwashed and are now out in the world institutionalizing this ideology beyond universities.
Aside from TikTok screaming, how long does this wokeness survive contact with reality? Woke colleges can only hire so many woke admins and faculty. When a business bows to wokeness, their finances suffer. As Bud Light, Harley Davidson, and others who became famous for backtracking and firing their DEI staff. At some point, financial reality sinks wokeness. It may take a generation, but reality always wins.
Maybe, but Bud Light and Harley Davidson's primary consumer market is not white college-educated urban dwellers. Those companies are financially interested in having a corporate structure that understands and can appeal to the people they sell products to. Those companies also have very little institutional power in broader society. They produce products that could easily be replicated by competitors lacking brand recognition.
Woke college graduates applying their belief systems has more significant implications at big tech companies, financial institutions, media conglomerates, lobbying firms, or any industry dealing with information or cooperating with the government.
Not when the financials hurt. Businesses are always looking for an edge, and if they can cut unproductive staff, they will. DEI staff were only hired for the optics, and they will be fired for both the optics and the financial reality. The optics change all the time, but profits and markets always exist.
As for Bud Light and Harley Davidson, if their market was not ready for woke, why did they do it? Do you think that kind of mistake goes in only one direction?
It goes beyond staff who are specifically hired out for DEI reasons. I think of it in terms of what these people can do in their positions with their ideology. Bud Light and Harley Davidson went woke because their marketing and corporate staff were out of touch with their clientele. Those businesses exist only to sell beer and motorcycles. That is the only thing they do, so heads will roll when there is a consumer backlash in that type of business.
An information-based corporation like Google, on the other hand, has much more gray area. People will not stop using Google because it filters and sorts search results ideologically or because it posts some woke cartoon for a holiday on its main search page.
An almost total lack of brainstorm ideas, with some positives & negatives, makes me think it's NOT an issue Arnold spends much effort on actually solving.
"But my number one issue is the over-expansion of higher education. I take the view that the colleges and universities are beyond salvation. ..."
It was not just the over-expansion of higher ed, worse was the open secret discrimination by colleges against hiring Republicans & conservatives as professors, or serving as Trustees. Illegal? Many claim it wasn't conscious, thus not illegal -- and certainly illegality can't be proven beyond doubt, yet it's true.
Requiring at least 30% of professors being Republican (Registered 2024 or before) to get tax & govt benefits would save higher ed, Govt can insure most elite colleges do what govt wants thru making tax exemptions contingent on fulfilling the govt desires -- or else allowing the rich college org to "pay its fair share".
Yes, the overproduction of elite wannabes won't be solved -- but that problem is being reduced as more 120-ish IQ men figure out it's smarter to become a plumber or welder than to take on student debt for 4 years of indoctrination.
The over-expansion of govt cash flowing to colleges insured there would be some distortion: just as no system allows all to be Above Average,
"...To preserve our civilization, we need new social institutions for people aged 16-22. I have suggested network-based higher education. But other ideas belong in the mix."
Network-based ed is good.
Peterson Academy. Other alternative colleges.
More specific credentials.
More trade schools, for plumbers, welders, nurses, and aiBot assisted care-givers.\
More ai-based testing of what students claim to know.
Yep, see below. It will only be Trump’s GOP thru 2026, then there will be the next set of personnel is policy Rep leadership moves.
Liz can easily apologize about being wrong about Trump, after something good happens, and claim to support Rep policies w/o needing to support Trump the man.
Most current conservative professors are probably not registered Republicans, so they wouldn’t count.
I agree with you re: getting the government out, and that mandates would do very little.
I disagree with you that at this point just getting the government out entirely would solve the university issue all that much. Though it would help (and have other positive effects).
But getting the government out of providing K-12 education *would* (even if taxpayers still paid for it, via vouchers, which I support).
Likely the best long term solution, but politically unlikely, requiring first Feds leaving, then each state.
Easy slogan, but like Arnold’s beyond salvation, empty. Folk want respected, elite, colleges. Govt can be used to get more Reps.
Registered Reps who have publicly supported at least 2 of the last 3 Rep candidates for President, or 4 of the last 6. If Liz remains a registered Rep, her support of Romney & McCain means she would count. Yes, lots of Rep never-Trumpers would count. But he won’t be candidate in 2028, so will the never Trumpers support the new guy, Vance or DeSantis or ???
Reps should USE the Department of Education to bully the elite colleges who have inculcated hatred for Trump, the Hitler Demon. Take away those tax exemptions and student loans and research grants.
I wonder if the problem is more than just higher education and doesn’t include at least some part of K-12 also. Our son’s high school history classes from twenty-plus years ago seemed somewhat problematic to me at the time. I assume they are even worse now, in terms of content and approach. If that is true, the problem is bigger than just college and will be harder to solve.
I'm sorry. I just don't understand. Yes, Wokeness is objectionable and far too influential. But my daughter just graduated from famed Woke school NYU with a degree in psychology. No one ever tried to force her to change her gender or to hate Jews.
While you complain about Wokeness, we just elected a president who is dedicated to shredding the constitution, destroying the Republic, executing former generals, killing political opponents, worshipping muderous dictators, imposing prohibitive tariffs, repressing the free press, selling Ukraine down the river, and who know what other actions to satisfy his insane vanity. There is a clear and present danger to our freedoms, and it ain't coming from the Woke.
I know this will sound naive but it might be useful to write down a list of bad things you think Trump will do, reasonably specific and objective, and then check it at intervals. For example, you might have "execute at least one former general" and check on January 20, 2026 (and then 1/20/27 and 1/20/28) whether it has happened.
I say "specific and objective" because everyone has motivated reasoning. A Trump supporter who predicted that "Trump will be persecuted" after Biden was inaugurated would say that did indeed happen. Someone who said that the constitution would be shredded after Trump's inauguration might think that had happened because there were several Supreme Court decisions that he strongly disagreed with.
By the way, I really hope I am wrong and Trump turns out to be the honest, wise, reasonable, compassionate, tolerant, modulated, humble person you believe him to be. That would be terrific and if it happens I will happily retract everything I've written and write him a note of apology. I don't think that is likely.
If you want to understand my political opinions in more depth, please read
Oh, my God. I do not believe Trump to be modulated or humble. He is a performer, given to wild exaggeration and crazy things said off the cuff. A cross between Robin Williams and George Carlin. Like Clinton and Obama, he has a way of sensing what people want to hear and saying it. That does not lead to self-consistent honesty. You need not worry about having to write a note :)
I found myself agreeing with most of your post. Though I didn't like the phrase "The revolt against the objective truth of expertise". I think there was never as much objective truth in what experts said and believed as people thought there was. A lot of it was always "I am smart and have studied this and have a degree so I know what I am talking about." I recently read a 1960s book about city and regional planning and many of the assertions were ridiculous.
Even science has major problems because it was never the pollyanna story told in text books. "Science" is not a machine. Scientists are human and do lots of things that in a perfect world they wouldn't. I noticed you wrote before COVID and I think that was a breaking point for many people. Scientists did not cover themselves in glory, too often pulling rank and acting obviously politically, pretending to know more than they did.
HA! A man after my own heart. It sounds like you are reading Jane Jacobs. She is one of the all time great thinkers and a great writer to boot. Economist Robert Lucas thought her "Death and Life of American Cities" was one of the most important books of economics. Her argument, with which I agree fervently is that emergent systems like cities, and economies, and our bodies are far too complex and protean for us to understand. Attempts at wholesale change of these systems will almost always backfire and make things worse. We can tinker around the edges but we must always be humble about our ability to effectively improve things. To me, this is almost the definition of "Conservative." On science you might enjoy this brief post in which I team up with Friedrich Hayek to figure out what's gone so terribly wrong with economics.
I read The Death and Life of Great American Cities long ago in college during an urban studies program. It was one of those books that "changed my life". (I have since read several of her later books and, alas, did not think they were nearly as good.) Reading the linked post, I thought you might be interested in Hayek's Counter-Revolution of Science, which is about much of the same thing. Though you may well have already read it :)
Hayek's example of the impossibility of predicting the outcome of a particular sporting event made me think of sports betting. Nobody can reliably predict the outcome of a National Football League game. But odds-makers make their best guess and dare everyone in the world, "If you think you can do better, bet against us." The odds-makers often lose those bets but over the course of time, they come out ahead. Kind of an "efficient market hypothesis" for sports betting. (Interestingly, the ads for sports betting sites are now downplaying the possibility of the bettor's winning. It is now about "make every moment more." Putting down a bet makes watching the event more exciting. It is in effect paying a premium for a better product.)
The fact that we seem to agree on so much made me wonder why we have such different attitudes towards Donald Trump. Perhaps ... Progressive Democrats control the "commanding heights" of the society: the traditional media, the universities, the federal bureaucracy, and most cultural institutions. Which means they will overreach and do lots of bad things. Trump may stop some of that. If loyal, emotional Trump supporters controlled them instead, he would scare me sh*tless. But they won't and he doesn't.
A couple of days ago you asked why I hate Trump. Today Trump appointed Matt Gaetz as attorney general. Do you think he is the best possible pick? Matt Gaetz will do nothing but attack Trump's enemies and pack the Justice Department with incompetent Trump cronies. And so it begins.
I don't know your story but I lived in Manhattan for 20 years and worked at Goldman Sach for five of them. Trump was regarded as a bad joke. In 1991 I testified before the House Banking committee regarding Trump's real estate loans. That's when I learned about his odious business practices. I've been watching his career since with a mix of amusement and horror. He will do anything - literally anything - to flatter his own vanity. He is the definition of fascist. Why other people can't see this I don't understand. I'll be pleasantly surprised if we have midterm elections in 2 years.
Is that list of things likely enough to happen to where you would bet a significant amount of money on it in a prediction market? Tariffs, perhaps, but otherwise, I somehow doubt it.
He will do all of that, or at least try to. Who will stop him? Senate and House Republicans are all craven suck ups, as is the supreme court. You want a prediction? Early in his presidency he will call out the military to suppress a domestic protest. What the military does then is anybody's guess. There is a reason why all of his former military advisors consider him dangerously incompetent. All of them that is, except Flynn who is the exception that proves the rule.
The Posse Comitatus Act now applies to every military branch, so that scenario is less likely to happen than ever unless you believe, baselessly, that the federal judiciary will be slavishly loyal to Trump despite there being no indication of that in the past.
I'd say if you actually believe all that about Trump, you have absorbed the woke mindset and just don't recognize it. He's not Hitler and half the country's not garbage racists who voted for Nazis. If that were true, as if this were 1930s Weimar Germany, that implies the other half is woke bigots who'd vote for Stalin. Is that really the parallel you want people to imagine?
Americans are pretty darned sane, overall. Trump barely beat Hillary, Biden barely beat Trump, and Trump barely beat Harris. That speaks of great gobs of sanity, not murderous dictators shredding the Constitution.
Woke mindset my tush. THESE ARE ALL THINGS THAT HE SAID HIMSELF. ARE YOU NOT PAYING ATTENTION? HE TRIED TO DESTROY THE COUNTRY ONCE ALREADY ON 1/6/21. WHAT MAKES YOU THINK HE WON'T DO EVERYTHING HE SAYS HE'LL DO?
Very, very strange comment on Germany. No one in Germany ever voted for Stalin. Hitler never got close to a majority in Germany.
You’re basically lying. Tho I agree Trump is vain, he probably thinks this comment’s about him.
Trump said none of the things you claim after the “is dedicated to”. He’s had hundreds of hours of speaking in videos. I challenge you, or Arnold, to find a clip of at least 30 seconds before & after the words you claim he said.
Instead, you’re repeating the dishonest distortions that so much Dem media practice of 1) taking a few words out of context. 2) rephrasing those words he did say into words he didn’t say by the “he means Bad Stuff, that’s what he’s saying.” Then other Dem woke mind virus spreaders, like you, claim, often with emphasis, that Trump said, in his own words, the Bad Stuff. Which he didn’t.
Not too long ago it was “bloodbath” if he wasn’t re-elected, and Dem media lied about Trump promising violence, when he’s talking about job destruction from auto imports. Now it’s lying about Trump wanting to execute Liz Cheney, when he was complaining about her as a warmonger, happy to send other folk to die, but how she wouldn’t feel that way if she was given a rifle and had 9 rifles pointed at her.
Dem lies, which you’re gullible enough to believe without checking, and arrogant about repeating Dem media lies as if they’re true.
I claim if you repeat the lies of others, because you believe them without checking, that’s a form of lying—tho stupidly believing a falsehood means you’re not quite saying stuff you know is false, a more clear lie. Like Obama when saying he wasn’t spying on Trump in 2016.
Multiple lies, repeated by multiple sources, don’t make the falsehoods true, tho they are effective at demonizing the target, whether Trump, or Bush, or Kavanaugh, or the Jews.
I don’t agree with Trump on Ukraine—the West should be sending far more weapons to the Ukrainians to fight the invading Russians. But peace is also good. Ending the war, even with loss of Crimea and possibly Donbas oblasts (counties), is very good for the men on both sides who have rifles pointed at them, and shooting.
In Weimar Germany many voted for commies, the international socialists, but more voted for national socialists, partly because they were most willing to fight the commies.
Most importantly, he's got a track record. He already tried to overthrow a fair and free election through armed insurrection. Whether he organized it or not I don't know but he certainly knew about it in advance and did nothing to stop it
No, he didn't. As far as I know, not a single j6er was carrying firearms, and none were convicted of it. And he did try to stop it, both by speech and by telling the military to send in the National Guard a day or two before, but the general in charge refused. No doubt I have some of those details wrong. Maybe it was a colonel not a general, etc. Maybe some j6ers later claimed to have carried guns.
Stop believing lies. Your blood pressure will thank you.
And if you want a track record, how about all the Biden/Harris censorship and lawfare?
Well, I think you are mistaken. Someone broke into the capital threatening to kill the Vice President. I was under the impression that they were Trump supporters. But maybe they really were Antifa or FBI plants. Many rioters had bear spray and other clever tools including flags. All this time Trump gloated. Plenty of his advisors testified to this in the hearings including Ivanka if I am not mistaken.
From the Atlantic (which I'm sure you consider a bunch of liberal liars "But Donald Trump, on his social-media network, Truth Social, wrote that Mark Milley’s phone call to reassure China in the aftermath of the storming of the Capitol on January 6, 2021, was “an act so egregious that, in times gone by, the punishment would have been DEATH.” (The phone call was, in fact, explicitly authorized by Trump-administration officials.)"
Regarding the other quotes, everything that Trump learned about lying and plausible deniability he learned from his mentor, the most honorable Roy Cohn.
On some level all of the academic liberal arts is a grift and most undergraduate academics are grifters.
The value of the undergraduate liberal arts education, which is unique to America & absent from Europe, has been oversold and unjustly subsidized by the federal government.
Taking 120 credits in random or disconnected classes is not worth $200,000.
Ask undergraduate academics what is the actual long term value of their courses to their students.
Even when academics personal area of research has integrity and value, they doesn't mean that the institution where they teach or their teaching has integrity or value.
Given that the whole enterprise is a grift run by grifters, are you then surprised when the underlying rot is exposed?
Those are exactly the fields I believe would be appreciated and remembered much more by, say, 30 year old adults than kids and young adults. I know I learned all sorts of history in K-12, but I didn't take much interest in it until I saw a history of the American Revolution by a retired British general, and thought that could be interesting. It was; and it was so much not what I expected that I read several by Americans, which got me interested in other histories, then David D. Friedman's "Legal Systems Very Different From Ours" made me realize there are a lot of weird and wonderful ways to do everything. Even if K-12 schools had provided study of those two books, they wouldn't have interested me then. K-12 and even college mostly just throw everything they can at the wall and force students to spend way too much time cleaning it up, when they will find what they want on their own later.
“ If they recognized that they are lightweights, they would exhibit less class snobbery. But it is the opposite. They feel that their college credentials entitle them to lord it over everyone else.”
So I teach at a very nonselective public college, and my particular slice of the postsecondary market is not very arrogant. But inasmuch as the snobbery is true (and I think it is in general at all moderately selective places and up), I do wonder how much of it is due to an implicit awareness that it’s not that hard to go to college anymore. If one doesn’t see the many paths to a decent life outside of college but attends college themselves, I can see how they come to the conclusion that those who don’t go must be really out of it and beneath themselves.
(To be clear, I think that’s also an error. But kinda like the distractors I put in multiple choice questions, I see how one would fall for it.)
On the students we’re talking about: if we’re restricting “college students” to that narrow a list, that’s a very narrow list (I talk about that here—https://jaredpbarton.substack.com/p/one-definition-of-the-upper-class). And for those folks, I get why they see themselves as “better than” (even if I agree w you and Arnold that they oughtn’t).
But most colleges—including brick and mortar colleges filled with 18-to-24 year olds—are nonselective, and that’s where most of the growth in enrollment in 4-year colleges took place in Arnold’s adult lifetime (ie, my entire lifetime).
"As America involved more people in higher education, we reached lower down into the pool of intellectual ability."
I agree there are many problems with higher education. Our views aren't exactly the same on what the problems are but they don't seem contradictory except for on this one point.
- I don't think we are good enough at judging who will be successful that we should exclude anyone from trying and we should make at least a modest effort to help them be successful.
- Most universities have always been pretty close to open enrollment, maybe requiring high school equivalency but typically having exceptions to even that. The increase in students at these schools is not because they became less selective. It is entirely because more women and minorities decided to go. At the top end, the 2% most selective have only grown about 7% from 1992 to 2015. At the same time they admitted far more women. I'm pretty sure they have become more selective. The other 98% grew 60% but again, this isn't because the schools became less selective
- Faults and weaknesses as students and graduates in no way means the marginal students didn't more often than not gain from their college experience.
- While more people are going to college and more are graduating than many decades ago, it's not at all clear to me we are reaching "lower down into the pool of intellectual ability." No doubt more people lower in that pool are getting an opportunity but that is not the same as reaching lower. I think we've always reached as low among white males, just not women and minorities.
- while percentage of adult college graduates continues to rise, enrollment percentage has been dropping since 2010. Down about 11%. Percent enrolling out of high school has fallen more.
- More than a quarter of new college students start at two year schools. I don't know if that number has grown relative to four year schools (not in last decade) but I'd guess it has longer term. These schools have far lower total cost (tuition, subsidies, and opportunity cost). Most enrollees don't finish but I'd argue it is a good way to give more people a chance. I'd argue many who don't finish still gain something from the experience.
- Lots of successful people from the past probably wouldn't have been accepted to college if standards had been higher. People I can think of include Ruth Simmons, Roland Fryer, Al Roth, and at least one other economics Nobel who didn't finish high school. While maybe higher standards wouldn't have kept Thaler from college, he has noted his weakness academically in economics. For that matter, so has Levitt, who is clearly extremely high IQ.
"As America involved more people in higher education, we reached lower down into the pool of intellectual ability." I wrote a long response to Arnold starting with this same quote. I started at 7:30am and it's now 12:15pm. Going to take a break. Glad we're on the same page stu.
Research Question: Can one reform institutions or do replacements need to be built?
The University of Austin is a vote for the latter. Also, look at how Hillsdale College punches way above its weight exactly because it takes zero money from the Feds. Clayton Christensen wrote that "innovation happens amongst the unserved."
It seems the Feds have almost direct regulatory control over higher Ed so we'll see if anything actually happens at the Dept of Ed. If other people want to fund nonsense, that's up to them.
A fellow large organization CEO and I are working on innovating in K-12. He argues we need to leverage the scale of the public schools to implement something like the vision in Sal Khan's first book. I'm not so sure on the System as the target market (vs. Education entrepreneurs), but we'll cross that bridge if and when we get to it. Erring entrepreneurs beat bungling bureaucrats because entrepreneurs know they must learn or die.
I think only when replacement/ alternatives are available will the institution be reformed. Or even be reformable. Business competition/ alternative.
Exit, not just voice.
The Christian Reformation.
Thinking of US edu system a bit like the Catholic Church, vouchers & homeschool options, allowing exit, are necessary for the edu system to change, but not quite sufficient. They are govt schools, and Government Choice Theory was misnamed Public Choice.
Great point, Tom! Competition keeps people focused and honest. The irony of taxpayers paying for the billboards promoting the public schools in my city does not escape me. Thanks!
I'm 65% sympathetic. To a considerable extent and depending on what process brings it about, that any particular institution becomes less "white," that's good. Of course getting to the point where being Blank is no more remarkable than being Irish is the goal.
The specific content of the fall in average intellectual level of Colleges and Universities is contingent. One could have "gut" courses in business administration instead of gender studies.
If you love academia and science you can empathize with a divorced parent whose spouse transes their child out of spite.
Apprenticeships and other on the job vocational training might be worthwhile?
Right now that's not very high status, so talented people don't do it. But image eg Google hiring for programming apprentices for the age range you suggested: they (and some others) have enough prestige to pull it off.
Wow! You hit the nail on the head.
I am strongly STEM oriented, but ended up doing my own thing based upon my own innovation (graduated wrong time, wrong place, wrong field for an academic pathway). I found the greatest value of a Ph.D. and a P.E. was not getting a load of manure from academics in committees dealing with grants and research proposals. I did get an excellent formal education back in the late 50s through 1970 living in Berkeley (interesting times) while avoiding the draft without having "bone spurs" or political connections. However, continual learning is the key and with todays access to knowledge being much better than university libraries, learning is even easier.
At least my children also got excellent formal educations before 2012 and before the contamination of STEM by the Woke beliefs. They did learn how to think and do research and only got some of the academic "cool-aid" we now see. However, I believe being a "white male" has harmed the academic progression of my son in academic computer science as I observed my friends as "department chairmen" having problems hiring new faculty that met DEI mandates at a major university, with effective criteria of not being a White or Asian male. I also know academics in my field that have retired early when the DEI mandates spread into Engineering and Agricultural Sciences, with a great loss of the most innovative researchers of my generation.
Here's my response to this post. https://scottgibb.substack.com/p/arnold-klings-number-one-issue
A great essay.
The point about lack of self-awareness of mediocrity is spot on. Brian Chau’s term midwit (I don’t know whether he invented or just is instrumental in popularizing it) is my favorite new word of the last 5 years.
My one quibble is with “I have come to see this as the end result of the over-expansion of higher education, in terms of the number of students, the number of faculty and, above all, the number of administrators.”
I too decry the number of administrators as a bad, indefensible thing. But it seems to me to not be anywhere close to the primary cause of the anti-whiteness, oppressor-oppressed ideology, etc, but mostly just correlated with, sharing many but not all of the same underlying causes.
The oppressor-oppressed ideology on campus is dominant because of decades of colleges discriminating against Republicans.
Like racism if Reps were a different race—and kinda similar willingness to believe the worst about Reps now, just as racist Dems used to be willing to believe the worst about Blacks, and like so many Jew-haters, before & after Nazis, believe the worst about Jews.
Well said!
Arnold - I’ve been working on a reply to this post for a couple of hours, but since this is your number one issue and it lines up closely with my number one issue, I’m going to spend even more time on my reply. Might be a while, but for now I’ll just point out that this post doesn’t even use the words “government,” “public,” or “funding.” Any thoughts on this observation?
The most memorable example of out-of-touch wokeness that I remember from college was during a normal Spanish 2 class as a freshman about a decade ago. Our professor was a Venezuelan refugee who came to the U.S. when Chavez was in power. She occasionally told us about the difficulties that compelled her to leave and the troubles her family experienced back home under Maduro. Every time she did, this white guy in the class, who I assume self-identified as a socialist, would get into a debate with her, arguing that the Venezuelan government hadn't done anything wrong and the humanitarian crisis in the country was caused by U.S. sanctions or U.S. intelligence agencies wreaking havoc. Everyone in the class would groan and sit through this Chomskyite narrative he vociferously argued until, eventually, our professor just never brought up Venezuela again.
The two-part problem is even if you were to de-emphasize college education somehow and drain the woke rot or mediocrity, as you put it, there is still at least one generation of students who have been brainwashed and are now out in the world institutionalizing this ideology beyond universities.
Aside from TikTok screaming, how long does this wokeness survive contact with reality? Woke colleges can only hire so many woke admins and faculty. When a business bows to wokeness, their finances suffer. As Bud Light, Harley Davidson, and others who became famous for backtracking and firing their DEI staff. At some point, financial reality sinks wokeness. It may take a generation, but reality always wins.
“ It may take a generation, but reality always wins.”
You say this, and yet even before woke, progressive economic policies that don’t match reality have won about half the elections in this country.
And the woke believe not only are they right and compassionate, but that they are morally superior.
Given that the media, academia and Hollywood are firmly on Team Woke, imo you shouldn’t at all be confident that it will be gone in a generation.
Even if we have hit Peak Woke…
Maybe, but Bud Light and Harley Davidson's primary consumer market is not white college-educated urban dwellers. Those companies are financially interested in having a corporate structure that understands and can appeal to the people they sell products to. Those companies also have very little institutional power in broader society. They produce products that could easily be replicated by competitors lacking brand recognition.
Woke college graduates applying their belief systems has more significant implications at big tech companies, financial institutions, media conglomerates, lobbying firms, or any industry dealing with information or cooperating with the government.
Not when the financials hurt. Businesses are always looking for an edge, and if they can cut unproductive staff, they will. DEI staff were only hired for the optics, and they will be fired for both the optics and the financial reality. The optics change all the time, but profits and markets always exist.
As for Bud Light and Harley Davidson, if their market was not ready for woke, why did they do it? Do you think that kind of mistake goes in only one direction?
It goes beyond staff who are specifically hired out for DEI reasons. I think of it in terms of what these people can do in their positions with their ideology. Bud Light and Harley Davidson went woke because their marketing and corporate staff were out of touch with their clientele. Those businesses exist only to sell beer and motorcycles. That is the only thing they do, so heads will roll when there is a consumer backlash in that type of business.
An information-based corporation like Google, on the other hand, has much more gray area. People will not stop using Google because it filters and sorts search results ideologically or because it posts some woke cartoon for a holiday on its main search page.
An almost total lack of brainstorm ideas, with some positives & negatives, makes me think it's NOT an issue Arnold spends much effort on actually solving.
"But my number one issue is the over-expansion of higher education. I take the view that the colleges and universities are beyond salvation. ..."
It was not just the over-expansion of higher ed, worse was the open secret discrimination by colleges against hiring Republicans & conservatives as professors, or serving as Trustees. Illegal? Many claim it wasn't conscious, thus not illegal -- and certainly illegality can't be proven beyond doubt, yet it's true.
Requiring at least 30% of professors being Republican (Registered 2024 or before) to get tax & govt benefits would save higher ed, Govt can insure most elite colleges do what govt wants thru making tax exemptions contingent on fulfilling the govt desires -- or else allowing the rich college org to "pay its fair share".
Yes, the overproduction of elite wannabes won't be solved -- but that problem is being reduced as more 120-ish IQ men figure out it's smarter to become a plumber or welder than to take on student debt for 4 years of indoctrination.
The over-expansion of govt cash flowing to colleges insured there would be some distortion: just as no system allows all to be Above Average,
"...To preserve our civilization, we need new social institutions for people aged 16-22. I have suggested network-based higher education. But other ideas belong in the mix."
Network-based ed is good.
Peterson Academy. Other alternative colleges.
More specific credentials.
More trade schools, for plumbers, welders, nurses, and aiBot assisted care-givers.\
More ai-based testing of what students claim to know.
Would hiring Liz Cheney count as part of that 30% Republican quota?
Yep, see below. It will only be Trump’s GOP thru 2026, then there will be the next set of personnel is policy Rep leadership moves.
Liz can easily apologize about being wrong about Trump, after something good happens, and claim to support Rep policies w/o needing to support Trump the man.
Most current conservative professors are probably not registered Republicans, so they wouldn’t count.
My gut reaction is that if Liz Cheney will count in the quota, then it won't accomplish anything useful. It will just be played.
Having a Rep Liz would have been better than Claudine Gay type folk.
Vast majority of Reps better than most Dem professors.
More government mandates will do nothing. How do you distinguish 30% Republicans? I can think of several ways around that.
Get government out of it, entirely. Free the market, and the problem will sort itself out.
I agree with you re: getting the government out, and that mandates would do very little.
I disagree with you that at this point just getting the government out entirely would solve the university issue all that much. Though it would help (and have other positive effects).
But getting the government out of providing K-12 education *would* (even if taxpayers still paid for it, via vouchers, which I support).
Likely the best long term solution, but politically unlikely, requiring first Feds leaving, then each state.
Easy slogan, but like Arnold’s beyond salvation, empty. Folk want respected, elite, colleges. Govt can be used to get more Reps.
Registered Reps who have publicly supported at least 2 of the last 3 Rep candidates for President, or 4 of the last 6. If Liz remains a registered Rep, her support of Romney & McCain means she would count. Yes, lots of Rep never-Trumpers would count. But he won’t be candidate in 2028, so will the never Trumpers support the new guy, Vance or DeSantis or ???
Reps should USE the Department of Education to bully the elite colleges who have inculcated hatred for Trump, the Hitler Demon. Take away those tax exemptions and student loans and research grants.
I wonder if the problem is more than just higher education and doesn’t include at least some part of K-12 also. Our son’s high school history classes from twenty-plus years ago seemed somewhat problematic to me at the time. I assume they are even worse now, in terms of content and approach. If that is true, the problem is bigger than just college and will be harder to solve.
I'm sorry. I just don't understand. Yes, Wokeness is objectionable and far too influential. But my daughter just graduated from famed Woke school NYU with a degree in psychology. No one ever tried to force her to change her gender or to hate Jews.
While you complain about Wokeness, we just elected a president who is dedicated to shredding the constitution, destroying the Republic, executing former generals, killing political opponents, worshipping muderous dictators, imposing prohibitive tariffs, repressing the free press, selling Ukraine down the river, and who know what other actions to satisfy his insane vanity. There is a clear and present danger to our freedoms, and it ain't coming from the Woke.
I know this will sound naive but it might be useful to write down a list of bad things you think Trump will do, reasonably specific and objective, and then check it at intervals. For example, you might have "execute at least one former general" and check on January 20, 2026 (and then 1/20/27 and 1/20/28) whether it has happened.
I say "specific and objective" because everyone has motivated reasoning. A Trump supporter who predicted that "Trump will be persecuted" after Biden was inaugurated would say that did indeed happen. Someone who said that the constitution would be shredded after Trump's inauguration might think that had happened because there were several Supreme Court decisions that he strongly disagreed with.
The thought of that checklist made me smile.
Maybe we can add "Trump is old and grows tired and turns more and more responsibilities over to JD Vance".
Am I the only one who noticed that Kamala was whiter than Vance's wife?
Believe me, I've already got a little list.
By the way, I really hope I am wrong and Trump turns out to be the honest, wise, reasonable, compassionate, tolerant, modulated, humble person you believe him to be. That would be terrific and if it happens I will happily retract everything I've written and write him a note of apology. I don't think that is likely.
If you want to understand my political opinions in more depth, please read
https://charles72f.substack.com/p/the-tribe-has-spoken
Oh, my God. I do not believe Trump to be modulated or humble. He is a performer, given to wild exaggeration and crazy things said off the cuff. A cross between Robin Williams and George Carlin. Like Clinton and Obama, he has a way of sensing what people want to hear and saying it. That does not lead to self-consistent honesty. You need not worry about having to write a note :)
I found myself agreeing with most of your post. Though I didn't like the phrase "The revolt against the objective truth of expertise". I think there was never as much objective truth in what experts said and believed as people thought there was. A lot of it was always "I am smart and have studied this and have a degree so I know what I am talking about." I recently read a 1960s book about city and regional planning and many of the assertions were ridiculous.
Even science has major problems because it was never the pollyanna story told in text books. "Science" is not a machine. Scientists are human and do lots of things that in a perfect world they wouldn't. I noticed you wrote before COVID and I think that was a breaking point for many people. Scientists did not cover themselves in glory, too often pulling rank and acting obviously politically, pretending to know more than they did.
HA! A man after my own heart. It sounds like you are reading Jane Jacobs. She is one of the all time great thinkers and a great writer to boot. Economist Robert Lucas thought her "Death and Life of American Cities" was one of the most important books of economics. Her argument, with which I agree fervently is that emergent systems like cities, and economies, and our bodies are far too complex and protean for us to understand. Attempts at wholesale change of these systems will almost always backfire and make things worse. We can tinker around the edges but we must always be humble about our ability to effectively improve things. To me, this is almost the definition of "Conservative." On science you might enjoy this brief post in which I team up with Friedrich Hayek to figure out what's gone so terribly wrong with economics.
https://charles72f.substack.com/p/the-pretense-of-knowledge
I read The Death and Life of Great American Cities long ago in college during an urban studies program. It was one of those books that "changed my life". (I have since read several of her later books and, alas, did not think they were nearly as good.) Reading the linked post, I thought you might be interested in Hayek's Counter-Revolution of Science, which is about much of the same thing. Though you may well have already read it :)
Hayek's example of the impossibility of predicting the outcome of a particular sporting event made me think of sports betting. Nobody can reliably predict the outcome of a National Football League game. But odds-makers make their best guess and dare everyone in the world, "If you think you can do better, bet against us." The odds-makers often lose those bets but over the course of time, they come out ahead. Kind of an "efficient market hypothesis" for sports betting. (Interestingly, the ads for sports betting sites are now downplaying the possibility of the bettor's winning. It is now about "make every moment more." Putting down a bet makes watching the event more exciting. It is in effect paying a premium for a better product.)
The fact that we seem to agree on so much made me wonder why we have such different attitudes towards Donald Trump. Perhaps ... Progressive Democrats control the "commanding heights" of the society: the traditional media, the universities, the federal bureaucracy, and most cultural institutions. Which means they will overreach and do lots of bad things. Trump may stop some of that. If loyal, emotional Trump supporters controlled them instead, he would scare me sh*tless. But they won't and he doesn't.
A couple of days ago you asked why I hate Trump. Today Trump appointed Matt Gaetz as attorney general. Do you think he is the best possible pick? Matt Gaetz will do nothing but attack Trump's enemies and pack the Justice Department with incompetent Trump cronies. And so it begins.
I don't know your story but I lived in Manhattan for 20 years and worked at Goldman Sach for five of them. Trump was regarded as a bad joke. In 1991 I testified before the House Banking committee regarding Trump's real estate loans. That's when I learned about his odious business practices. I've been watching his career since with a mix of amusement and horror. He will do anything - literally anything - to flatter his own vanity. He is the definition of fascist. Why other people can't see this I don't understand. I'll be pleasantly surprised if we have midterm elections in 2 years.
Is that list of things likely enough to happen to where you would bet a significant amount of money on it in a prediction market? Tariffs, perhaps, but otherwise, I somehow doubt it.
He will do all of that, or at least try to. Who will stop him? Senate and House Republicans are all craven suck ups, as is the supreme court. You want a prediction? Early in his presidency he will call out the military to suppress a domestic protest. What the military does then is anybody's guess. There is a reason why all of his former military advisors consider him dangerously incompetent. All of them that is, except Flynn who is the exception that proves the rule.
The Posse Comitatus Act now applies to every military branch, so that scenario is less likely to happen than ever unless you believe, baselessly, that the federal judiciary will be slavishly loyal to Trump despite there being no indication of that in the past.
That's exactly what I think. It's all in the 2025 plan.
Want to bet? Seriously. I'll forward $10,000 to Arnold or some neutral third party if you'll do the same. "Early" means in the first six months.
There's already too much gambling in this country
I'd say if you actually believe all that about Trump, you have absorbed the woke mindset and just don't recognize it. He's not Hitler and half the country's not garbage racists who voted for Nazis. If that were true, as if this were 1930s Weimar Germany, that implies the other half is woke bigots who'd vote for Stalin. Is that really the parallel you want people to imagine?
Americans are pretty darned sane, overall. Trump barely beat Hillary, Biden barely beat Trump, and Trump barely beat Harris. That speaks of great gobs of sanity, not murderous dictators shredding the Constitution.
Woke mindset my tush. THESE ARE ALL THINGS THAT HE SAID HIMSELF. ARE YOU NOT PAYING ATTENTION? HE TRIED TO DESTROY THE COUNTRY ONCE ALREADY ON 1/6/21. WHAT MAKES YOU THINK HE WON'T DO EVERYTHING HE SAYS HE'LL DO?
Very, very strange comment on Germany. No one in Germany ever voted for Stalin. Hitler never got close to a majority in Germany.
Oh no- the Trump Hitler Demon is coming! Bah.
You’re basically lying. Tho I agree Trump is vain, he probably thinks this comment’s about him.
Trump said none of the things you claim after the “is dedicated to”. He’s had hundreds of hours of speaking in videos. I challenge you, or Arnold, to find a clip of at least 30 seconds before & after the words you claim he said.
Instead, you’re repeating the dishonest distortions that so much Dem media practice of 1) taking a few words out of context. 2) rephrasing those words he did say into words he didn’t say by the “he means Bad Stuff, that’s what he’s saying.” Then other Dem woke mind virus spreaders, like you, claim, often with emphasis, that Trump said, in his own words, the Bad Stuff. Which he didn’t.
Not too long ago it was “bloodbath” if he wasn’t re-elected, and Dem media lied about Trump promising violence, when he’s talking about job destruction from auto imports. Now it’s lying about Trump wanting to execute Liz Cheney, when he was complaining about her as a warmonger, happy to send other folk to die, but how she wouldn’t feel that way if she was given a rifle and had 9 rifles pointed at her.
Dem lies, which you’re gullible enough to believe without checking, and arrogant about repeating Dem media lies as if they’re true.
I claim if you repeat the lies of others, because you believe them without checking, that’s a form of lying—tho stupidly believing a falsehood means you’re not quite saying stuff you know is false, a more clear lie. Like Obama when saying he wasn’t spying on Trump in 2016.
Multiple lies, repeated by multiple sources, don’t make the falsehoods true, tho they are effective at demonizing the target, whether Trump, or Bush, or Kavanaugh, or the Jews.
I don’t agree with Trump on Ukraine—the West should be sending far more weapons to the Ukrainians to fight the invading Russians. But peace is also good. Ending the war, even with loss of Crimea and possibly Donbas oblasts (counties), is very good for the men on both sides who have rifles pointed at them, and shooting.
In Weimar Germany many voted for commies, the international socialists, but more voted for national socialists, partly because they were most willing to fight the commies.
Most importantly, he's got a track record. He already tried to overthrow a fair and free election through armed insurrection. Whether he organized it or not I don't know but he certainly knew about it in advance and did nothing to stop it
No, he didn't. As far as I know, not a single j6er was carrying firearms, and none were convicted of it. And he did try to stop it, both by speech and by telling the military to send in the National Guard a day or two before, but the general in charge refused. No doubt I have some of those details wrong. Maybe it was a colonel not a general, etc. Maybe some j6ers later claimed to have carried guns.
Stop believing lies. Your blood pressure will thank you.
And if you want a track record, how about all the Biden/Harris censorship and lawfare?
We've probably gone on long enough on this site. If you want to continue the discussion, read my posts on my Substack and comment there.
https://charles72f.substack.com/p/the-tribe-has-spoken
https://charles72f.substack.com/p/trumps-immigration-fatwa-807
Well, I think you are mistaken. Someone broke into the capital threatening to kill the Vice President. I was under the impression that they were Trump supporters. But maybe they really were Antifa or FBI plants. Many rioters had bear spray and other clever tools including flags. All this time Trump gloated. Plenty of his advisors testified to this in the hearings including Ivanka if I am not mistaken.
From the Atlantic (which I'm sure you consider a bunch of liberal liars "But Donald Trump, on his social-media network, Truth Social, wrote that Mark Milley’s phone call to reassure China in the aftermath of the storming of the Capitol on January 6, 2021, was “an act so egregious that, in times gone by, the punishment would have been DEATH.” (The phone call was, in fact, explicitly authorized by Trump-administration officials.)"
Regarding the other quotes, everything that Trump learned about lying and plausible deniability he learned from his mentor, the most honorable Roy Cohn.
Those who resort to shouting have run out of arguments.
That's not shouting. Those are called capital letters. For emphasis.
Yes. Like shouting at a foreigner who doesn't understand.
if you say so
On some level all of the academic liberal arts is a grift and most undergraduate academics are grifters.
The value of the undergraduate liberal arts education, which is unique to America & absent from Europe, has been oversold and unjustly subsidized by the federal government.
Taking 120 credits in random or disconnected classes is not worth $200,000.
Ask undergraduate academics what is the actual long term value of their courses to their students.
Even when academics personal area of research has integrity and value, they doesn't mean that the institution where they teach or their teaching has integrity or value.
Given that the whole enterprise is a grift run by grifters, are you then surprised when the underlying rot is exposed?
Those are exactly the fields I believe would be appreciated and remembered much more by, say, 30 year old adults than kids and young adults. I know I learned all sorts of history in K-12, but I didn't take much interest in it until I saw a history of the American Revolution by a retired British general, and thought that could be interesting. It was; and it was so much not what I expected that I read several by Americans, which got me interested in other histories, then David D. Friedman's "Legal Systems Very Different From Ours" made me realize there are a lot of weird and wonderful ways to do everything. Even if K-12 schools had provided study of those two books, they wouldn't have interested me then. K-12 and even college mostly just throw everything they can at the wall and force students to spend way too much time cleaning it up, when they will find what they want on their own later.
“ If they recognized that they are lightweights, they would exhibit less class snobbery. But it is the opposite. They feel that their college credentials entitle them to lord it over everyone else.”
So I teach at a very nonselective public college, and my particular slice of the postsecondary market is not very arrogant. But inasmuch as the snobbery is true (and I think it is in general at all moderately selective places and up), I do wonder how much of it is due to an implicit awareness that it’s not that hard to go to college anymore. If one doesn’t see the many paths to a decent life outside of college but attends college themselves, I can see how they come to the conclusion that those who don’t go must be really out of it and beneath themselves.
(To be clear, I think that’s also an error. But kinda like the distractors I put in multiple choice questions, I see how one would fall for it.)
Sorry to hear about your un/under employment.
On the students we’re talking about: if we’re restricting “college students” to that narrow a list, that’s a very narrow list (I talk about that here—https://jaredpbarton.substack.com/p/one-definition-of-the-upper-class). And for those folks, I get why they see themselves as “better than” (even if I agree w you and Arnold that they oughtn’t).
But most colleges—including brick and mortar colleges filled with 18-to-24 year olds—are nonselective, and that’s where most of the growth in enrollment in 4-year colleges took place in Arnold’s adult lifetime (ie, my entire lifetime).
"As America involved more people in higher education, we reached lower down into the pool of intellectual ability."
I agree there are many problems with higher education. Our views aren't exactly the same on what the problems are but they don't seem contradictory except for on this one point.
- I don't think we are good enough at judging who will be successful that we should exclude anyone from trying and we should make at least a modest effort to help them be successful.
- Most universities have always been pretty close to open enrollment, maybe requiring high school equivalency but typically having exceptions to even that. The increase in students at these schools is not because they became less selective. It is entirely because more women and minorities decided to go. At the top end, the 2% most selective have only grown about 7% from 1992 to 2015. At the same time they admitted far more women. I'm pretty sure they have become more selective. The other 98% grew 60% but again, this isn't because the schools became less selective
- Faults and weaknesses as students and graduates in no way means the marginal students didn't more often than not gain from their college experience.
- While more people are going to college and more are graduating than many decades ago, it's not at all clear to me we are reaching "lower down into the pool of intellectual ability." No doubt more people lower in that pool are getting an opportunity but that is not the same as reaching lower. I think we've always reached as low among white males, just not women and minorities.
- while percentage of adult college graduates continues to rise, enrollment percentage has been dropping since 2010. Down about 11%. Percent enrolling out of high school has fallen more.
- More than a quarter of new college students start at two year schools. I don't know if that number has grown relative to four year schools (not in last decade) but I'd guess it has longer term. These schools have far lower total cost (tuition, subsidies, and opportunity cost). Most enrollees don't finish but I'd argue it is a good way to give more people a chance. I'd argue many who don't finish still gain something from the experience.
- Lots of successful people from the past probably wouldn't have been accepted to college if standards had been higher. People I can think of include Ruth Simmons, Roland Fryer, Al Roth, and at least one other economics Nobel who didn't finish high school. While maybe higher standards wouldn't have kept Thaler from college, he has noted his weakness academically in economics. For that matter, so has Levitt, who is clearly extremely high IQ.
"As America involved more people in higher education, we reached lower down into the pool of intellectual ability." I wrote a long response to Arnold starting with this same quote. I started at 7:30am and it's now 12:15pm. Going to take a break. Glad we're on the same page stu.
Research Question: Can one reform institutions or do replacements need to be built?
The University of Austin is a vote for the latter. Also, look at how Hillsdale College punches way above its weight exactly because it takes zero money from the Feds. Clayton Christensen wrote that "innovation happens amongst the unserved."
It seems the Feds have almost direct regulatory control over higher Ed so we'll see if anything actually happens at the Dept of Ed. If other people want to fund nonsense, that's up to them.
A fellow large organization CEO and I are working on innovating in K-12. He argues we need to leverage the scale of the public schools to implement something like the vision in Sal Khan's first book. I'm not so sure on the System as the target market (vs. Education entrepreneurs), but we'll cross that bridge if and when we get to it. Erring entrepreneurs beat bungling bureaucrats because entrepreneurs know they must learn or die.
I think only when replacement/ alternatives are available will the institution be reformed. Or even be reformable. Business competition/ alternative.
Exit, not just voice.
The Christian Reformation.
Thinking of US edu system a bit like the Catholic Church, vouchers & homeschool options, allowing exit, are necessary for the edu system to change, but not quite sufficient. They are govt schools, and Government Choice Theory was misnamed Public Choice.
Great point, Tom! Competition keeps people focused and honest. The irony of taxpayers paying for the billboards promoting the public schools in my city does not escape me. Thanks!
I'm 65% sympathetic. To a considerable extent and depending on what process brings it about, that any particular institution becomes less "white," that's good. Of course getting to the point where being Blank is no more remarkable than being Irish is the goal.
The specific content of the fall in average intellectual level of Colleges and Universities is contingent. One could have "gut" courses in business administration instead of gender studies.