Long ago, I saw someone offer the mathematics of the post-war baby boom/prosperity boom as the simple catalyst behind the decay of quality at universities. Suddenly, the number of students wishing to attend college exploded, and so there was a need to rapidly ramp up the number of faculty and administrators. Pre-boom, professors were a cognitive elite, and filling the post-boom faculty slots necessitated drawing from intellectual mediocrities. The metaphor that the author used was to ask what would happen to the quality of football if the NFL expanded to 100 or 200 teams overnight. Adding diversity requirements amplified the problem, but simple arithmetic and the limited numbers of true scholars sealed the demise of quality before those diversity imperatives permeated academe.
Albert J Nock gave a lecture series at the University of Virginia in 1931 that are collected in "The Theory of Education in the United States" that anticipated many subsequent developments via his insight into the underlying attitudes and mechanisms and, impressively, over a decade prior to the sudden huge influx of veteran students subsidized by the G.I. Bill.
One of the more bizarre things in my life was watching the NFL referee strike some years back. As a layman I never would have thought that the referee talent in the NFL was so much more elite then that in college or wherever that it would matter. And yet it basically caused a national debacle that the league had to humiliatingly cave on. I guess talent falls off faster then we think even in the oddest of places.
I suspect it's more likely to be training and experience than elite talent, but the opportunity cost of waiting 2 years for a new group of NFL referees to reach the same levels was way higher than the referees wage demands.
One referee can be consistently a few feet further than another from where the long pass is thrown and still make the pass interference call if he has a good angle. For the players, being a few feet further away makes a big difference.
I'm sure there's some truth in what you say but maybe not emough to be important. Surely the NFL teams are better but if names, faces, and any rules differences were avoided, I suspect very few people would see a difference in NFL and ufl.
Melanie Phillips' 1996 book 'All Must Have Prizes' is a good (and prophetic) read on the roots of our over-expansion of 'education' in recent decades - even though its focus is on the school sector. As (though I say it myself) is my own review of Heather Mac Donald's 2018 'The Diversity Delusion': https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/how-diversity-narrows-the-mind
I would say that the number of subjects covered is also bloated. Is it really necessary to have whole departments for Gender Studies, Black Studies, Women's Studies, etc? Really, these are all thinly disguised political operations rather than academic fields. They soak up resources while reducing the overall quality of scholarship. Not a good thing.
Bryan Caplan says that no more than 10% of high-school grads should go to college.
My intuition: Youths at college spend too much time with peer youths, and spend too much time "signaling" smarts and conformity to the real world, rather than producing. It would be much healthier if most youths spent much more time in productive settings with adults. And it would be much healthier if most youths had opportunities to stand on their own two feet by age 18. The trick is how to enable youths to enter the labor market early, in jobs that have opportunities for growth.
Caplan is right that only the smartest 10 percent are capable of college level work, but he is wrong if he says the top 10% should go to college. Instead, the top 10% should be prohibited from attending college until they are in their 30s, and only the 89th percentile and below should be allowed to attend younger than that. The problem is that college is too good of a signal for smart and likely future status and success, so everybody wants to pile in, and if you don't, people will reasonably think you're not very bright or that there is something wrong with you. This has to be killed, and the only way to kill it is to keep lots of smart, successful people out of academics for a decade and "force" them into the private sector where their employers will happily pay to efficiently educate fresh minds on how to be most productive in their work. After they get used to accomplishing things in the real marketplace and earning good incomes, then, if they really want to, they can quit and pay to go back to traditional schooling, but my guess is that most of the smartest and most successful people will opt not to, and that will be all for the best.
I had a conversation with my wife last night along similar lines: there are people who can adapt themselves to what institutions are looking for, and that isn’t necessarily highly correlated to “smart”. There are also people who just happen to be correlated to what institutions are looking for, who aren’t smart.
Smart people – I’d characterize “smart” as something like “creative thinkers with enough discipline to be productive” – are oftentimes difficult personalities and are disfavored in institutions that prioritize conformity. But, as you point out, that’s only part of the problem. It seems that institutions aren’t even looking for people on the basis of “smarts”, but rather people who either fit into some preconceived notion of diversity or people, who are very good at playing the games that they’re supposed to play to get the jobs at these institutions (e.g., DEI statements).
I contend that most, or maybe all?, of the problem of the campus demonstrations – the “tentifada” as I’ve heard it called – have to do not with *what* teachers are teaching at colleges, per se, but at *who* the administration is letting in.
Is there a solution? I don’t know. I think that the George Floyd / pandemic era, rolling into the Gaza protest movement, have set the universities back quite a bit. Certainly they are unlikely to reform themselves from within.
The answer is for the government to stop underwriting student fees.
Administration would be cut to the bone.
Subsidised places for poor people would have to be paid for by the universities themselves, presumably meaning they would become much more selective.
Universities would stop putting on stupid courses to attract stupid people (because they wouldn't have a big lump of free money to hand over) and so wouldn't need stupid faculty to run them.
Courses would become much cheaper.
This all assumes that universities aren't just manufacturing centres for 'expert' opinion as a cat's paw for legitimisation for expansion and encroachment of state power, and that government underwriting for student loans isn't just a funding mechanism for this function of government.
So the actual question is, what are universities for?
The paramount problem with academia is state (government) interference. If this were stopped, then all the other problems would soon be resolved (insofar as they are real problems, at least).
I’m reading “Scientific Knowledge and its Social Problems” by Jerome Ravetz (1971).
A slice -
“The increasing power of natural science thus threatens the destruction of a humane understanding among educated people as the humane studies are increasingly deprived of prestige, of time in university teaching programmes, and of resources for research. As a result, our thinking about ourselves and the world around us becomes grossly material and quantitative; the higher sensibilities and values are crushed beneath the machine.’’
And much more keen insight.
Another gem -
“Partly because of its indubitable successes natural science has seemed for many decades to be the paradigm of genuine knowledge. In a variety of ways, the pursuit of science, or a popularized image of scientific work or scientific knowledge, has functioned as a religion in substitution for, or in opposition to, the accepted religion of a society.’’
Alternative religion indeed!
And this may explain much.
This from five decades ago.
My thoughts . . .
The utilitarian ethos doesn’t produce sacred ideas. Just effective ones.
As John Henry Newman observed . . .
‘No one will die for a conclusion, many will die for a belief.’’
People search for meaning, something for live for.
Lorenzo Warby notes - ‘we live in a world with a God shaped hole.’
Can fill it with straw or gold. It will be filled.
This really challenged my thinking on the need to get more conservatives into universities. Is that just going to lead to less qualified people getting hired because they fit some ideological slot? Good point. Although I support AA for institutions that have demonstrated an active bias against some group. That means not just outcomes but explicit actions to prevent some group from getting hired. I’d guess most universities would currently be guilty of that kind of explicit action. It’s possible that just inevitably leads to some implied quote system to make sure you can’t get sued. And fully agree that just reducing the importance of universities overall is crucial.
What it would lead to is just a lot of progressives wanting faculty positions faking being conservative with the hiring panels knowing they were hiring a fake conservative.
There are already thousands of GOP establishment politicians who are the world's experts in faking being conservative, so those smart progressives will finally have some real competition.
>>"His idea of the solution is adjacent to my idea of the problem."
I read this sentence out to my companion, who murmured, "That's really good. I don't even know what the problem is ... and I certainly don't need to know the solution."
If we assume Mary Muphy is right, it seems to me your post suggests you are on the wrong side of who belongs in college.
I hesitate to include what is more or less a concluding remark without the earlier context but maybe it will prompt you to listen to a very interesting podcast episode.
"I do hear that we are, quote unquote, lowering standards when we are creating these cultures of growth. But actually, our research shows just the opposite, that actually high performers perform better in cultures of growth because these environments are more rigorous and more supportive. They expect more from individuals, right? And they expect more from a broader swath of individuals than a culture of genius does. We see, if you imagine this in a classroom context, right, what we see in the data from very large introductory STEM classes is that when students perceive their instructor to have more of a growth mindset, it's not that it's rainbows and sunshine, right, and unicorns all day long. Students actually report a good amount of frustration and a good amount of annoyance sometimes in those classes because the instructor holds everyone to such high standards of continuous growth and development. So even if you're already doing well, even those individuals should show some growth and development in their trajectory. And it can be really rigorous and difficult in these environments. And so this is one of those myths about mindset culture, that cultures of growth are soft and always affirming and less rigorous, dumbing down the standards. And actually we see just the opposite in the data."
I join with J.C. Lester and Steve the builder in trying to focus everyone on the more fundamental problem: free taxpayer money. Without it, some universities might still produce ideological garbage for big donors, but most of them would be required by reality to stick to pursuing the truth - I hope. At least, employers would more easily be able to see the difference between them.
"I gather that in the past female economics graduate students were mistreated." Mistreated how? Are we talking unequal treatment relative to their male peers (eg. with regard to grades, course access, mentorship, career advancement, job market), or perhaps something more sinister like sexual harassment? When you say you 'gather' this, is it a general excuse you've heard as a justification for 'mass recruitment of mediocre female economists,' or is it something you've heard directly from female economics graduate students or indirectly through the economics grapevine? For the record, I've never known or heard of any female economics graduate students being mistreated, at least nothing that was unambiguously the result of their being female.
For the record, it's not at all clear to me that it is a bad thing to send mediocre students to college. I am aware of no evidence this is a net negative.
I guess we should also ask what we lose by not allowing as many to go to college. How many people who go on to great things would it exclude and how much would we lose not having them college educated?
Doesn't city college of NY have a record decades past of taking poor, marginal students and turning out some people who went on to great accomplishments?
I know two people who worked blue collar until going to college in their thirties. The one did shop classes in high school but eventually went back for a degree in engineering. He got his MS from Berkeley and currently works for a specialty construction firm that works on very large scale projects. He does their design work. He was also recently named engineer of the year for his state. I guess that means he knows how to play the game too,, though I don't think that is his motivation for mentoring and other volunteer work.
The other coincidentally also went to Berkeley. As a prof in a top 5 mechanical dept, he was a named chair prof in 12 years and had many accomplishments before his career was cut short by ALS.
At my community college, the average student reads at a 5th grade level, and (partly because of this) is woefully unprepared to learn at the college level. They graduate, typically with GPAs over 3.0, not understanding the basics of their field. It is not useful to society to have a lot of people with degrees who are uneducated in their field.
Long ago, I saw someone offer the mathematics of the post-war baby boom/prosperity boom as the simple catalyst behind the decay of quality at universities. Suddenly, the number of students wishing to attend college exploded, and so there was a need to rapidly ramp up the number of faculty and administrators. Pre-boom, professors were a cognitive elite, and filling the post-boom faculty slots necessitated drawing from intellectual mediocrities. The metaphor that the author used was to ask what would happen to the quality of football if the NFL expanded to 100 or 200 teams overnight. Adding diversity requirements amplified the problem, but simple arithmetic and the limited numbers of true scholars sealed the demise of quality before those diversity imperatives permeated academe.
Quality of sports due to league expansion has already suffered!
Albert J Nock gave a lecture series at the University of Virginia in 1931 that are collected in "The Theory of Education in the United States" that anticipated many subsequent developments via his insight into the underlying attitudes and mechanisms and, impressively, over a decade prior to the sudden huge influx of veteran students subsidized by the G.I. Bill.
I was an undergraduate there and then an adjunct professor for a decade. I never knew that Nock had a UVa connection.
One of the more bizarre things in my life was watching the NFL referee strike some years back. As a layman I never would have thought that the referee talent in the NFL was so much more elite then that in college or wherever that it would matter. And yet it basically caused a national debacle that the league had to humiliatingly cave on. I guess talent falls off faster then we think even in the oddest of places.
I suspect it's more likely to be training and experience than elite talent, but the opportunity cost of waiting 2 years for a new group of NFL referees to reach the same levels was way higher than the referees wage demands.
One referee can be consistently a few feet further than another from where the long pass is thrown and still make the pass interference call if he has a good angle. For the players, being a few feet further away makes a big difference.
The magic of markets. :)
I'm sure there's some truth in what you say but maybe not emough to be important. Surely the NFL teams are better but if names, faces, and any rules differences were avoided, I suspect very few people would see a difference in NFL and ufl.
Agree with you
Melanie Phillips' 1996 book 'All Must Have Prizes' is a good (and prophetic) read on the roots of our over-expansion of 'education' in recent decades - even though its focus is on the school sector. As (though I say it myself) is my own review of Heather Mac Donald's 2018 'The Diversity Delusion': https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/how-diversity-narrows-the-mind
I would say that the number of subjects covered is also bloated. Is it really necessary to have whole departments for Gender Studies, Black Studies, Women's Studies, etc? Really, these are all thinly disguised political operations rather than academic fields. They soak up resources while reducing the overall quality of scholarship. Not a good thing.
Bryan Caplan says that no more than 10% of high-school grads should go to college.
My intuition: Youths at college spend too much time with peer youths, and spend too much time "signaling" smarts and conformity to the real world, rather than producing. It would be much healthier if most youths spent much more time in productive settings with adults. And it would be much healthier if most youths had opportunities to stand on their own two feet by age 18. The trick is how to enable youths to enter the labor market early, in jobs that have opportunities for growth.
Caplan is right that only the smartest 10 percent are capable of college level work, but he is wrong if he says the top 10% should go to college. Instead, the top 10% should be prohibited from attending college until they are in their 30s, and only the 89th percentile and below should be allowed to attend younger than that. The problem is that college is too good of a signal for smart and likely future status and success, so everybody wants to pile in, and if you don't, people will reasonably think you're not very bright or that there is something wrong with you. This has to be killed, and the only way to kill it is to keep lots of smart, successful people out of academics for a decade and "force" them into the private sector where their employers will happily pay to efficiently educate fresh minds on how to be most productive in their work. After they get used to accomplishing things in the real marketplace and earning good incomes, then, if they really want to, they can quit and pay to go back to traditional schooling, but my guess is that most of the smartest and most successful people will opt not to, and that will be all for the best.
I had a conversation with my wife last night along similar lines: there are people who can adapt themselves to what institutions are looking for, and that isn’t necessarily highly correlated to “smart”. There are also people who just happen to be correlated to what institutions are looking for, who aren’t smart.
Smart people – I’d characterize “smart” as something like “creative thinkers with enough discipline to be productive” – are oftentimes difficult personalities and are disfavored in institutions that prioritize conformity. But, as you point out, that’s only part of the problem. It seems that institutions aren’t even looking for people on the basis of “smarts”, but rather people who either fit into some preconceived notion of diversity or people, who are very good at playing the games that they’re supposed to play to get the jobs at these institutions (e.g., DEI statements).
I contend that most, or maybe all?, of the problem of the campus demonstrations – the “tentifada” as I’ve heard it called – have to do not with *what* teachers are teaching at colleges, per se, but at *who* the administration is letting in.
Is there a solution? I don’t know. I think that the George Floyd / pandemic era, rolling into the Gaza protest movement, have set the universities back quite a bit. Certainly they are unlikely to reform themselves from within.
The answer is for the government to stop underwriting student fees.
Administration would be cut to the bone.
Subsidised places for poor people would have to be paid for by the universities themselves, presumably meaning they would become much more selective.
Universities would stop putting on stupid courses to attract stupid people (because they wouldn't have a big lump of free money to hand over) and so wouldn't need stupid faculty to run them.
Courses would become much cheaper.
This all assumes that universities aren't just manufacturing centres for 'expert' opinion as a cat's paw for legitimisation for expansion and encroachment of state power, and that government underwriting for student loans isn't just a funding mechanism for this function of government.
So the actual question is, what are universities for?
The paramount problem with academia is state (government) interference. If this were stopped, then all the other problems would soon be resolved (insofar as they are real problems, at least).
https://jclester.substack.com/p/the-augean-stables-of-academe?utm_source=publication-search
This was quite a bold thing to say. I suppose the author enjoys tenure.
I'm certain he prefers independence from any university.
Arnold
I’m reading “Scientific Knowledge and its Social Problems” by Jerome Ravetz (1971).
A slice -
“The increasing power of natural science thus threatens the destruction of a humane understanding among educated people as the humane studies are increasingly deprived of prestige, of time in university teaching programmes, and of resources for research. As a result, our thinking about ourselves and the world around us becomes grossly material and quantitative; the higher sensibilities and values are crushed beneath the machine.’’
And much more keen insight.
Another gem -
“Partly because of its indubitable successes natural science has seemed for many decades to be the paradigm of genuine knowledge. In a variety of ways, the pursuit of science, or a popularized image of scientific work or scientific knowledge, has functioned as a religion in substitution for, or in opposition to, the accepted religion of a society.’’
Alternative religion indeed!
And this may explain much.
This from five decades ago.
My thoughts . . .
The utilitarian ethos doesn’t produce sacred ideas. Just effective ones.
As John Henry Newman observed . . .
‘No one will die for a conclusion, many will die for a belief.’’
People search for meaning, something for live for.
Lorenzo Warby notes - ‘we live in a world with a God shaped hole.’
Can fill it with straw or gold. It will be filled.
Recommend his book. Revised 1996.
Thanks
Clay
This really challenged my thinking on the need to get more conservatives into universities. Is that just going to lead to less qualified people getting hired because they fit some ideological slot? Good point. Although I support AA for institutions that have demonstrated an active bias against some group. That means not just outcomes but explicit actions to prevent some group from getting hired. I’d guess most universities would currently be guilty of that kind of explicit action. It’s possible that just inevitably leads to some implied quote system to make sure you can’t get sued. And fully agree that just reducing the importance of universities overall is crucial.
What it would lead to is just a lot of progressives wanting faculty positions faking being conservative with the hiring panels knowing they were hiring a fake conservative.
There are already thousands of GOP establishment politicians who are the world's experts in faking being conservative, so those smart progressives will finally have some real competition.
>>"His idea of the solution is adjacent to my idea of the problem."
I read this sentence out to my companion, who murmured, "That's really good. I don't even know what the problem is ... and I certainly don't need to know the solution."
https://hiddenbrain.org/podcast/innovation-2-0-multiplying-the-growth-mindset/
If we assume Mary Muphy is right, it seems to me your post suggests you are on the wrong side of who belongs in college.
I hesitate to include what is more or less a concluding remark without the earlier context but maybe it will prompt you to listen to a very interesting podcast episode.
"I do hear that we are, quote unquote, lowering standards when we are creating these cultures of growth. But actually, our research shows just the opposite, that actually high performers perform better in cultures of growth because these environments are more rigorous and more supportive. They expect more from individuals, right? And they expect more from a broader swath of individuals than a culture of genius does. We see, if you imagine this in a classroom context, right, what we see in the data from very large introductory STEM classes is that when students perceive their instructor to have more of a growth mindset, it's not that it's rainbows and sunshine, right, and unicorns all day long. Students actually report a good amount of frustration and a good amount of annoyance sometimes in those classes because the instructor holds everyone to such high standards of continuous growth and development. So even if you're already doing well, even those individuals should show some growth and development in their trajectory. And it can be really rigorous and difficult in these environments. And so this is one of those myths about mindset culture, that cultures of growth are soft and always affirming and less rigorous, dumbing down the standards. And actually we see just the opposite in the data."
I join with J.C. Lester and Steve the builder in trying to focus everyone on the more fundamental problem: free taxpayer money. Without it, some universities might still produce ideological garbage for big donors, but most of them would be required by reality to stick to pursuing the truth - I hope. At least, employers would more easily be able to see the difference between them.
"I gather that in the past female economics graduate students were mistreated." Mistreated how? Are we talking unequal treatment relative to their male peers (eg. with regard to grades, course access, mentorship, career advancement, job market), or perhaps something more sinister like sexual harassment? When you say you 'gather' this, is it a general excuse you've heard as a justification for 'mass recruitment of mediocre female economists,' or is it something you've heard directly from female economics graduate students or indirectly through the economics grapevine? For the record, I've never known or heard of any female economics graduate students being mistreated, at least nothing that was unambiguously the result of their being female.
For the record, it's not at all clear to me that it is a bad thing to send mediocre students to college. I am aware of no evidence this is a net negative.
I guess we should also ask what we lose by not allowing as many to go to college. How many people who go on to great things would it exclude and how much would we lose not having them college educated?
Doesn't city college of NY have a record decades past of taking poor, marginal students and turning out some people who went on to great accomplishments?
I know two people who worked blue collar until going to college in their thirties. The one did shop classes in high school but eventually went back for a degree in engineering. He got his MS from Berkeley and currently works for a specialty construction firm that works on very large scale projects. He does their design work. He was also recently named engineer of the year for his state. I guess that means he knows how to play the game too,, though I don't think that is his motivation for mentoring and other volunteer work.
The other coincidentally also went to Berkeley. As a prof in a top 5 mechanical dept, he was a named chair prof in 12 years and had many accomplishments before his career was cut short by ALS.
At my community college, the average student reads at a 5th grade level, and (partly because of this) is woefully unprepared to learn at the college level. They graduate, typically with GPAs over 3.0, not understanding the basics of their field. It is not useful to society to have a lot of people with degrees who are uneducated in their field.