1. You get more of what you subsidize, and when governments subsidize colleges with research grants and student loans, it draws in more and more marginal students and researchers, people who would be be better off doing anything else. Since they can't hack STEM or traditional humanities, colleges and researchers invent new marginal fields, or new ways to dumb down existing fields. Of course, all the regulations and Title nonsense require new administrators, and where better to get them than all those new marginal graduates? And since all those marginal students and researchers and administrators know how marginal they are and how little of importance they actually do, they rise o the top; everyone else has better things to do.
2. There is something perverse about expecting kids to stay in school until age 22, learning stuff they will never use or remember, and then shift practically overnight to the boring world of working and raising a family. What would happen if governments had no say in education -- no funding, no regulation, no truancy, no nothing?
For one, prices would drop like a rock. The most important thing to learn is the three Rs, readin' writin' and 'rithmetic. With those, you can teach yourself anything at any time. I imagine day care schools where kids learn the three Rs, play, and go to work with their parents, family, neighbors, and friends out of curiosity, not to learn jobs, but to learn about the wide world of possible jobs and the reality of what adults do at jobs. At some point, kids would get old enough to actually get paid for part time work, whether it's stocking shelves and sweeping floors or fetching tools for mechanics. An hour or two a day, whatever they and their parents and job mentors feel is appropriate for them. Maybe they want to spend five hours a day reading histories or poetry. Maybe they mow lawns or deliver groceries. They and their parents choose, not governments.
They would learn independence and how to explore the world of knowledge. Especially now with the Internet, the world of knowledge has a zillion possibilities that don't involve dulling their brains with gender fluidentity studies. I don't think very many kids or adults would give two cents for all that woke nonsense if they had a choice, free or not. Kids are too naturally curious to accept such nonsense as gospel.
They would shift from day care play to part time school to part time work to full time adults, and then, only then, once they've started working for themselves and raising a family, would they dive into history of the Gauls or whatever floats their boat.
Some fields do require a lot of study. But it's an odd coincidence that almost all college degrees in the US require exactly four years of study. Building bridges, studying the stars, programming computers and gender fluidentity, all four years? How odd. Yes, all that would go away too. You'd learn what employers wanted; maybe work half time, study half time. If you wanted to teach advanced math or design pharmaceuticals or be a surgeon, yes, you'd spend lot of time just studying. But it would be up to you and employers, not governments.
Well, I agree with most of this. But not the last paragraph
The “4 years odd coincidence” is misplaced. College was OG designed as a place to create adults (men, at the time) who were well-rounded and able to think critically to best lead while in the world, *not* to develop skills for a specific field.
Even though no doubt STEM fields are more useful for more professional skills, the point of a university education even in STEM is still not solely technical “professional” skills to be used in a particular field. The other abilities gained from a well-rounded university education are also valuable for almost all professionals in STEM fields.
The main problems (and there are of course several more) with university education today is that they are doing indoctrination of political ideology rather than teaching critical thinking skills, and many majors (think grievance studies) are actively harmful rather than helpful.
I ain’t saying the 4 years is optimal for all - or even most, at this point - but if we eliminated the major problems I note in my paragraph above and reverted to what university education was about more than 15 years ago, that would imo solve more than half the problem.
Not that this is likely to occur at the overwhelming majority of institutions in the foreseeable future…
I'm very happy, in Germany we don't have well rounded university education. When you go and study math, they let you study math. No one forces you to sprinkle liberal arts nonsense in there (and vice versa).
J.S. Mill wrote: "He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that."
College grads constitute progressive elites. They *know little of their own side of the case* because they are 'partially' educated. They never had to reckon deeply with conservatives or populists at university because Faculty in history and in the social sciences are mostly progressive.
Even the best students get shortchanged in this way in their education at highly selective universities.
If they were merely ‘partially educated’ as you suggest - and as I agree they were simply that, say, 10 to 20 (and more?) years ago - it would still be a minus, but it wouldn’t be *that* bad.
The fact that they are now actively mis-educated with woke oppressor-oppressed ideology and other leftist propaganda is imo the far bigger problem.
Back in 2020 I moved to one of the most educated and high income areas of the country, thinking that Bell Curve style social trends meant it would be a good idea for my family. I had also seen quite a bit of the other end of that education/income pair in Baltimore (underclass) and wanted to get away from that.
While it's been a pleasant four years in many ways, man did I not realize that "smart" people had gone bonkers crazy. I moved just in time to watch them flip out over COVID and WOKE. A man I thought was a nice guy whose family we were making friends with insulted a man and his child in their driveway while trick or treating over his Trump flag.
We've been visiting places in Florida to move to as I think a nice ordinary middle class area with school choice, nice beaches, and low cost of living would be better. If they do decide to go to university it will only cost $6k a year, where their Hispanic classmates just voted majority Trump.
I'll make a prediction that will get me laughed off the page... In some relatively small number of years, Chinese institutions of higher education focusing on STEM will be considered equal to or better than American institutions. Not necessarily (and probably not) here, but the rest of the world (and a few folks here) are going to see it and act accordingly. Explaining that prediction requires several thousand words which I'm not going to write. Let the hooting begin....
It has already occurred in my STEM area of Aquaculture where the publications from China I review are better quality that from the US (technically not writing). It also show up in the fact we import most of our seafood and most is from aquaculture outside the US. China buys our soybeans and sells up fish/shrimp etc. In the US aquaculture has not grown in almost half a century while China and the rest of the world has increased by 50 times in production based upon solid science.
The number of educated Chinese that speak more than one language is remarkable. China has massive plans to accomplish my prediction. They’ll figure out the language part. It’s a small component of the big picture.
I never "claimed they would attract students from around the world", although they are. Few Americans nowadays, but lots of students from Africa, the Middle East, Pakistan, Russia.... If you've ever spent any time in China, you would understand that language isn't necessarily a primary barrier. Lots of signage has multiple languages, lots of people speak different languages, the campuses are full of students from other countries that don't yet speak Chinese, etc., etc. Campus administrators understand the issue and are providing solutions. I live on a campus and I am constantly amazed at how many non-Mandarin speakers are enrolled and doing great. Language isn't necessarily the roadblock. People misunderstanding of what's actually happening is the problem. If your primary information sources are Western based, you probably don't know what's going on....no offense intended, sorry if it sounds harsh, but it's true. The West has created an imaginary country for all the usual geopolitical reasons.
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.
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.
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 could not agree more. The universities are lost. In some respects they have returned to their medieval origins by focussing on training the next wave of woke priests and priestesses and their administrative support.
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.
I have two theories on this.
1. You get more of what you subsidize, and when governments subsidize colleges with research grants and student loans, it draws in more and more marginal students and researchers, people who would be be better off doing anything else. Since they can't hack STEM or traditional humanities, colleges and researchers invent new marginal fields, or new ways to dumb down existing fields. Of course, all the regulations and Title nonsense require new administrators, and where better to get them than all those new marginal graduates? And since all those marginal students and researchers and administrators know how marginal they are and how little of importance they actually do, they rise o the top; everyone else has better things to do.
2. There is something perverse about expecting kids to stay in school until age 22, learning stuff they will never use or remember, and then shift practically overnight to the boring world of working and raising a family. What would happen if governments had no say in education -- no funding, no regulation, no truancy, no nothing?
For one, prices would drop like a rock. The most important thing to learn is the three Rs, readin' writin' and 'rithmetic. With those, you can teach yourself anything at any time. I imagine day care schools where kids learn the three Rs, play, and go to work with their parents, family, neighbors, and friends out of curiosity, not to learn jobs, but to learn about the wide world of possible jobs and the reality of what adults do at jobs. At some point, kids would get old enough to actually get paid for part time work, whether it's stocking shelves and sweeping floors or fetching tools for mechanics. An hour or two a day, whatever they and their parents and job mentors feel is appropriate for them. Maybe they want to spend five hours a day reading histories or poetry. Maybe they mow lawns or deliver groceries. They and their parents choose, not governments.
They would learn independence and how to explore the world of knowledge. Especially now with the Internet, the world of knowledge has a zillion possibilities that don't involve dulling their brains with gender fluidentity studies. I don't think very many kids or adults would give two cents for all that woke nonsense if they had a choice, free or not. Kids are too naturally curious to accept such nonsense as gospel.
They would shift from day care play to part time school to part time work to full time adults, and then, only then, once they've started working for themselves and raising a family, would they dive into history of the Gauls or whatever floats their boat.
Some fields do require a lot of study. But it's an odd coincidence that almost all college degrees in the US require exactly four years of study. Building bridges, studying the stars, programming computers and gender fluidentity, all four years? How odd. Yes, all that would go away too. You'd learn what employers wanted; maybe work half time, study half time. If you wanted to teach advanced math or design pharmaceuticals or be a surgeon, yes, you'd spend lot of time just studying. But it would be up to you and employers, not governments.
Well, I agree with most of this. But not the last paragraph
The “4 years odd coincidence” is misplaced. College was OG designed as a place to create adults (men, at the time) who were well-rounded and able to think critically to best lead while in the world, *not* to develop skills for a specific field.
And then came STEM fields, much more directed at professional skills, forced into the same four years. That's my point.
And I respectfully disagree.
Even though no doubt STEM fields are more useful for more professional skills, the point of a university education even in STEM is still not solely technical “professional” skills to be used in a particular field. The other abilities gained from a well-rounded university education are also valuable for almost all professionals in STEM fields.
The main problems (and there are of course several more) with university education today is that they are doing indoctrination of political ideology rather than teaching critical thinking skills, and many majors (think grievance studies) are actively harmful rather than helpful.
I ain’t saying the 4 years is optimal for all - or even most, at this point - but if we eliminated the major problems I note in my paragraph above and reverted to what university education was about more than 15 years ago, that would imo solve more than half the problem.
Not that this is likely to occur at the overwhelming majority of institutions in the foreseeable future…
I'm very happy, in Germany we don't have well rounded university education. When you go and study math, they let you study math. No one forces you to sprinkle liberal arts nonsense in there (and vice versa).
Super comment
Some gems in this comment. Thank you.
J.S. Mill wrote: "He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that."
College grads constitute progressive elites. They *know little of their own side of the case* because they are 'partially' educated. They never had to reckon deeply with conservatives or populists at university because Faculty in history and in the social sciences are mostly progressive.
Even the best students get shortchanged in this way in their education at highly selective universities.
If they were merely ‘partially educated’ as you suggest - and as I agree they were simply that, say, 10 to 20 (and more?) years ago - it would still be a minus, but it wouldn’t be *that* bad.
The fact that they are now actively mis-educated with woke oppressor-oppressed ideology and other leftist propaganda is imo the far bigger problem.
I agree that would help but I doubt it would result in much, if any, improvement for most students.
Back in 2020 I moved to one of the most educated and high income areas of the country, thinking that Bell Curve style social trends meant it would be a good idea for my family. I had also seen quite a bit of the other end of that education/income pair in Baltimore (underclass) and wanted to get away from that.
While it's been a pleasant four years in many ways, man did I not realize that "smart" people had gone bonkers crazy. I moved just in time to watch them flip out over COVID and WOKE. A man I thought was a nice guy whose family we were making friends with insulted a man and his child in their driveway while trick or treating over his Trump flag.
We've been visiting places in Florida to move to as I think a nice ordinary middle class area with school choice, nice beaches, and low cost of living would be better. If they do decide to go to university it will only cost $6k a year, where their Hispanic classmates just voted majority Trump.
Daytona Beach is nice, especially on beachside
That the Great Replacement doesn't appear to be working out the way the planners intended doesn't mean it wasn't their goal.
…nor does it mean that *illegal* Hispanic immigrants will vote the same way as *legal* immigrants.
Very good post. Made me want to copy-and-paste bits of it and post them...somewhere, anywhere they would be more widely read.
I'll make a prediction that will get me laughed off the page... In some relatively small number of years, Chinese institutions of higher education focusing on STEM will be considered equal to or better than American institutions. Not necessarily (and probably not) here, but the rest of the world (and a few folks here) are going to see it and act accordingly. Explaining that prediction requires several thousand words which I'm not going to write. Let the hooting begin....
It has already occurred in my STEM area of Aquaculture where the publications from China I review are better quality that from the US (technically not writing). It also show up in the fact we import most of our seafood and most is from aquaculture outside the US. China buys our soybeans and sells up fish/shrimp etc. In the US aquaculture has not grown in almost half a century while China and the rest of the world has increased by 50 times in production based upon solid science.
Thank you.
It’s not crazy, even though it’s not very likely.
Curious, though - in your claim, in what language are classes taught? When and how are “the rest of the world” gonna learn Chinese?
The number of educated Chinese that speak more than one language is remarkable. China has massive plans to accomplish my prediction. They’ll figure out the language part. It’s a small component of the big picture.
If foreign student are coming to China, that is the language issue. Hence my question.
That many Chinese speaking English in not the question. How many non-Chinese speak and can read and write in a Chinese dialect is the question.
If the universities are primarily for Chinese natives, you are right.
But you claimed they would attract students from around the world / that they would be considered equal and even superior; hence my question.
I never "claimed they would attract students from around the world", although they are. Few Americans nowadays, but lots of students from Africa, the Middle East, Pakistan, Russia.... If you've ever spent any time in China, you would understand that language isn't necessarily a primary barrier. Lots of signage has multiple languages, lots of people speak different languages, the campuses are full of students from other countries that don't yet speak Chinese, etc., etc. Campus administrators understand the issue and are providing solutions. I live on a campus and I am constantly amazed at how many non-Mandarin speakers are enrolled and doing great. Language isn't necessarily the roadblock. People misunderstanding of what's actually happening is the problem. If your primary information sources are Western based, you probably don't know what's going on....no offense intended, sorry if it sounds harsh, but it's true. The West has created an imaginary country for all the usual geopolitical reasons.
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.
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.
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 could not agree more. The universities are lost. In some respects they have returned to their medieval origins by focussing on training the next wave of woke priests and priestesses and their administrative support.
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.