You get more of what you subsidize. In the case of students, subsidies draw in more marginal students and more marginal teachers who need easier classes to survive four years. In the case of science, more marginal fields and more marginal researchers.
The solution is obvious, to me: get government out of both. It's one thing for government to pay for the R&D it needs, such as better weapons and radar and so on. It should not be funding anything else. And I do include Mars rovers, the space station, the Hubble and Jack Webb telescopes, the Antarctica stations, and everything else NASA does. The military can fund what it needs, private industry can fund what it needs. Why is NASA paying for research into making supersonic business and passenger planes quieter? Or more to the point, why am I paying for all those things?
Every time I read of studies about Peruvian hookers or some Kazakhstan caterpillar, I wonder who thinks anyone should be paying for that, let alone taxpayers.
That's the problem. If you want to voluntarily pay for those, go ahead, and you'll get more bang for your buck without the inefficiency of taxes. Why should you have any say on where my money goes?
Maybe we can agree that government is too involved though I'm more inclined just to say it's done somewhat ineffectively versus too much. But let's say govt was completely out of education. Would we be better off? I say we would end up with too little, and probably something that sends a weaker signal to employers, versus what is optimal and we would all be poorer for it, both educationally and financially.
"Too little" refers both to a life less enjoyed for lack of education and an economy less robust that provides for less needs and wants, especially things toward the need end of the spectrum.
Rather than talking about it wouldn’t you like to have experiments going on to allow people to live out their ideas? For example, small federal government involvement allowing state by state experimentation?
Of course Einstein, Crick and Watson would also have gone unfunded in your utopia, not just the caterpillar people and NASA. Maybe the sweet spot is somewhere in the middle.
Probably none who would have been funded by the free market, there seem to be systemic reasons why foundational science isn't a profitable investment at the scales and timelines that matter here
Why do you have such a sorry opinion of other people's choices? Why do you think most everybody hates science and wouldn't donate a penny to its funding? And why do you think your judgment of what other people should spend their money on is any of your business?
Re your first question, one relevant statistic is that *among people who think climate change is real* less than half would pay $100 a year to address the problem.
Re your second question, see Murphy and Nagel, The Myth of Ownership.
This is why economics should drive policy and not vice versa. Public figures who prate about the danger of climate change but buy expensive homes on Cape Cod clearly do not believe a word of what they are saying. So neither should taxpayers have to pay to alleviate the phony emergency.
Oliver Wendell Holmes has been quoted as saying taxes are the price we pay for civilization, that he was glad to buy civilization with his taxes. He was an idiot. Civilization is cooperation, not coercion. Taxes are to civilization what bullets are to cooperation.
Frankly, any article with such a title sounds like arguing over angels dancing on pin heads. My money is none of your business. Your money is none of my business.
A resounding YES from my perch. 50 years ago, I was that kid that didn't see the sense in university, and I went into a trade. That trade eventually led to a small remodeling business, which eventually led to a very tidy little business doing consulting and analysis on buildings that were falling apart for one reason or another, but approximately 7 times out of 10 it was water intrusion in all its forms. These were/are buildings designed by high end architects that didn't know how to build, and they tapped my expertise because I'd spent a couple decades actually doing the work and knew what they didn't teach in architectural school.
The whole system is entirely out of whack, and your ideas are spot on.
I've also been amazed how often water intrusion comes up a major reason some construction or renovation project is going overtime and overbudget. There was clearly a lot of bad building in the past, but when one tries to discuss why all one gets from other people is that it's obviously the fault of their designated bad guys who are always to blame for everything.
Total layman's opinion, though I've been involved with buildings that suffered this way, that the impermiability of many materials was way overestimated, and that was coupled with repair and replacement costs rising rapidly due to inflation and likely regulation
Sorta, but no. The shift in building materials (plywood, engineered lumber, tree farm wood instead of decay resistant older growth, Type N mortar instead of lime putty mortar, vastly increased levels of insulation, etc.) post WWII, that is still going on, started using these new materials in the same manner as the old materials. They didn't perform the same, at all. Also, the perceived ability of new sealants and caulks led to an elimination of flashing to divert water away from vulnerable building components; builders thought you could just seal out the water. Nope. Water gets in.
Folks imagine that the exterior wall materials shed water like a duck's back. Nope again. Water gets in. Modern wall systems employ water managed systems, understanding that water always gets in and you have to manage it to divert it back to the exterior. All those skyscrapers that are steel, aluminum, and glass are water managed. All that aluminum channel holding the glass has all sorts of channels and gutters within to collect the water that gets past the "rubber" gasketing and diverts it back to the exterior. Same with vinyl siding. The vinyl lets massive amounts of water through; the "Tyvek" or other water resistant barrier (WRB) stops that water and it drains down and comes out the bottom of the siding.
I've tried to summarize this into a couple paragraphs when it would take me a small volume to adequately explain it. These problems have not gone away. The building industry is the ultimate aircraft carrier; it doesn't turn until it hits something, then it backs up and tries again. We're slowly getting there, but you will probably read in the next couple decades how all those building methods of the 70's through (roughly) 2010 were "wrong", and the result is a lot of rotted out buildings.
I wrote an abbreviated explanation of the problem to Christopher B below. You're right in that when the problems occur, it's an accelerated exercise in finger pointing. Very long story short, the folks designing this stuff don't know what they're doing and neither do the folks building it. Of course, there are some that understand, but industry wide, it's a debacle wherein everyone in the biz tries to deflect blame to someone else.
The fact that you figured out how to address common construction faults has almost nothing to do with whether you got a degree or not. If you had chosen the other path you almost certainly would have figured out similar types of problems. I've known plenty of degreed engineers and architects with the same expertise. Likewise, if the degreed architects you fixed their problems had instead become non-degreed builders they almost certainly would have built in a myriad of bad details, regardless of the design they were given/used.
Remember when everyone thought MOOCs would take over higher education, and everyone would have free/low-priced access to the highest quality teachers? Funny how that never happened.
University of Maryland has a pretty big distance learning program. I think AZ or AZ St has a bigger one. At least a few other major universities have one.
A few years back there was a piece on a MS computer science program from GA Tech that could be taken on campus or remote. Grads got similar job offers well into six figures. Tuition for remote was a small fraction of the on campus rate.
Substack is acting up and won't let me expand on my previous comment or reply to it (the "Reply" button gets hidden by the next comment). So here is my addendum.
As for why all these subsidies turn academia into such a cesspool of political drama, that too seems obvious, to me. It's not fair to say only STEM fields matter, but as far as research goes, it's a good first approximation. I have no problem with teaching literature, languages, and other fields which have no natural research fields. History, archaeology, anthropology, and many other "soft" sciences have useful things to research.
But all those marginal students and teachers in those marginal fields know they are marginal. They have nothing to research and the teaching is mostly regurgitating their own fantasies, whether ideological or nonsensical (usually both). They are the ones most dependent on subsidies and handouts. The easiest route to those is government, the simplest political divide is between statists and individualists, and voila! you get statists driving academia leftwards.
I have no problem replying from either Linux or Android, but on both, Substack has changed its controls so that Brave or Chrome browser users cannot "like" any comment. The problem is nearly a year old and not fixed.
You can upgrade Firefox outside of the standard procedures. That's what I do. It's not what caused this change, however, because another computer does the same with a different Linux.
Works OK on Android, was working a day or two before on Linux, but now, as the new text expands the comment box, it pushes the Cancel/Reply buttons down "behind/under" the next comment, and while I can see the two buttons, I can't click them. This line is as much as I can type before the two buttons are entirely inaccessible.
Well, you knew, this whole internet forum / blogging with comments technology is totally new and untested, and we all have to cut Substack a lot of slack during this brief alpha testing of breakthrough tech as they work out the unforeseeable kinks no one has ever encountered before.
Kidding aside, their approach at visually simulating that solved problem with an engine intended to perform a lot of other functions like surveillance, security, and value capture turns it into an unsolved problem that is, apparently, incredibly difficult to make solved again.
Tim Urban wrote a really good book (What's Our Problem) that picks on both the left and the right, though he spends more time on the left. It's an excellent read, especially the chapters on the left.
At any rate, education is not listed among the central governments enumerated powers. States need to step up, as many have, and pursue reform at their level. One proposal for states that I have not seen implemented is to attempt to level the asymmetric information problem where parents have less information than schools about their children’s attainment of substantive skills and knowledge. Education is in many ways a trust good. States might consider ways to offer a learning outcomes evaluation service separate and apart from the schools and the teaching function. Perhaps states could offer parents AI applications to test their children to ensure that their attainment of math and reading skills is advancing at an acceptable pace? Alternately, perhaps private businesses in the tutoring field could offer testing services that would allow parents to verify their children’s progress? Having reliable outcomes data would hopefully improve parent’s ability to make informed decisions schooling choice.
At the federal level, it would be nice to see Joni Ernst or Rick Scott who, being on the Senate Armed Services Committee and in the DOGE Caucus, step up and repeal the statutory authority for the military academies and the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences. These are luxuries that do not promote war fighting ability in any substantive way and which are no longer affordable in an era of $2 trillion annual budget deficits.
And it would be nice to see DOGE or Education Secretary nominee McMahon step up and pledge to repeal authorization for the plethora of pointless-give away programs listed at title 20, United States Code:
3. Smithsonian Institution, National Museums and Art Galleries
4.National Zoological Park
5.Government Collections and Institutions for Research, and Material for Educational Institutions
6.American Printing House for the Blind
6A.Vending Facilities for Blind in Federal Buildings
7.Instruction as to Nature and Effect of Alcoholic Drinks and Narcotics
8.Howard University
9.National Training School for Boys
10.National Training School for Girls
11.National Arboretum
12.Foreign and Exchange Students
14.School Construction in Areas Affected by Federal Activities [Transferred to Chapter 19]
23.Training and Fellowship Programs for Community Development
24.Grants for Educational Materials, Facilities and Services, and Strengthening of Educational Agencies [Omitted, Repealed, or Transferred]
25.Pay and Personnel Program for Overseas Teachers
25A.Overseas Defense Dependents' Education
26.Support and Scholarship in Humanities and Arts; Museum Services
26A.Indemnity for Exhibitions of Arts and Artifacts
28.Higher Education Resources and Student Assistance
78.Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics, and Critical Foreign Language Education
79.STEM-Training Grant Program
80.State Fiscal Stabilization Fund
If Trump is serious about moving responsibility for education back to the states, the bare minimum we ought to be able to expect to see are statutory repeal and rescission of funding across a majority of the provisions listed.
One idea is to separate education from awarding degrees. Businesses which do nothing but test and award degrees would tend to reduce grade inflation, since individual results could be compared to the business averages and industry averages. It would make it easier to award degrees to on the job training and homeschooling. Some businesses would value reputations for being tough and stingy, others for suggesting what is lacking and how to improve the deficiencies.
“The ultimate use of incentives was suggested by Adam Smith in his magisterial Wealth of Nations over 240 years ago: have students directly pay professors for their services. Extending Smith's analysis, the professors, in turn, could contract with packagers of courses to create degrees, either through traditional universities or other providers. These packagers of degrees can provide administrative and other services (e.g, classroom rental) necessary to ultimately providing a diploma certifying the student has attained a reasonably high level of competence.“
“Does this sounds like a good idea? To have students directly pay professors. As we do here on Substack. What’s stopping people from teaching courses on Substack right now? What’s stopping “packagers of Substack courses” to create degrees certifying that students have attained a reasonably high level of competence?”
Note the difference in teaching incentives. 1) Direct payment from student to teacher vs 2) student paying third party and third party paying teacher fixed rate vs 3) teacher paid based on number of students past threshold number.
Maybe You can explain this better. The whole idea of going direct to a teacher seems absurd.
I can see it working when there are a small number of students and an even smaller number of teachers but that's nothing like what we have today. Al Roth got a Nobel for matching med school grads with intern positions. What you are suggesting is at least an order of magnitude more complicated.
Maybe there was a time when one teacher could cover everything you wanted to learn but is that true today?
Does the teacher hire a team of assistants? who helps manage the administration of this? isn't that what the college does?
Do students want a product that doesn't include the extracurriculars? are they really better without them?
Can the teacher be as productive with individual students? Some schools advertise ~10 to 1 but many students are at 2 year schools where the ratio is upwards of 20 to 1.
Maybe a college degree isn't a great signal to potential employers but in how many cases is being educated directly to the teacher going to be a clearer signal?
The state (government) is the fundamental problem with higher education (as it is with everything else it interferes with). The solution is simply for it to leave higher education completely alone.
Whenever AK mentions the need for a more diverse, market-oriented educational establishment, I am reminded of what's occurring in India. In modern India, since its move toward more classical liberal values, there are many mouths to feed, people to educate, and health concerns to address, so much so that the government in recent times, rather than retain proprietorship in these endeavors, encourages private innovation to help meet the fast-growing needs that government alone cannot fully address. The gradual rise of the middle and upper classes has increased demand for quality education and English instruction resulting in a blossoming of private schooling, to the point where it now is estimated to comprise upwards to half of all schooling and the majority of higher education.
My wonkish alternative is $10k per undergrad, rather than $100k, but starting with a high limit compromise would make it easier, politically. Many of the top colleges are offering tuition free for avg & below avg students.
“…we need many more alternatives: trade schools, apprenticeships, online education, innovative teaching models, and even far-out ideas like a network university.” - Amen. A great post aimed at a serious problem.
I think one band aid could be required class / tests on economics. Students graduating high school should understand how our economy works, which would go a long way to halting the Long March imo. Once you read Basic Economics you become immune to the common arguments and rationales for socialism.
Krugman is a good counter argument to the idea that some economics education immunizes students against wrong think. It would help, that's all. You can lead a student to knowledge, but you can't force them to learn.
"In the case of higher education, supply is restricted by requiring schools to be accredited, and then turning the accreditation process over to the incumbent institutions. Naturally, this leads to a strong barriers to entry."
If accreditation is the issue why don't new entrants take over a closing college? Do you think small colleges are going bankrupt or otherwise failing because they can't meet accreditation requirements?
At minimum, accreditation provides some protection against diploma mills.
On a related note, there is a podcast on Freakonomics radio about fraudulent diplomas. That problem is believed to be far greater than the ones caught but without accreditation I'm not sure there's much that could be done about the ones caught.
There are many problems with accreditation. Will do a big post on this. Regarding diploma mills: could something like Consumer Reports or the current college ranking bodies provide sufficient information to consumers? U.S. News? Forbes? Princeton Review? WSJ? Washington Monthly? Niche? What does accreditation add on top of these services? It certainly has caused a mess? Further the College Scorecard of the U.S. Department of Education provides some useful information to potential students, such as what the debt levels are of students or what the postgraduate earnings are. In short, there are other means besides accreditation to achieve the informational goals of the accreditation process.
All contribute, hopefully net positive, though lots of supposed experts say college rankings aren't a net positive. As for accreditation, I have no idea what you see wrong with that.
I'm certainly one of those "people who think that higher ed will be less parasitical on society if institutions were forced to hire more conservative professors."
Like a 30% quota on Dems & Rep professors & trustees in order to qualify for tax exemptions.
But a reduction in the number of student loans would be good -- until the delinquent rate on student loans is lower than the rate of mortgage forclosures (over the past 3 years).
Plus, more funding for alternatives. And more strings on those students who ask for a loan, like an agreement go into a Jr. Military service if they become delinquent.
Govt itself should be requiring ai-based certification testing without college, for all jobs. And they should prioritize hiring over 55s (over 60s?) to have folk who are more experienced in life, and who are likely to "serve the public" (ha!) for fewer years, even without an 8 year term limit. Govt certificate testing can be created for each major subject from the top schools.
Insofar as upward mobility is heavily on the Ivy +, and recently "top 38" (US News?), those top colleges should be MORE interfered with by the govt. I'd say more objectively those with top 100 endowments, which is far more objective. And a larger govt tax exemption subsidy.
What the top colleges can't do, and shouldn't be asked to do, is to educate avg SAT scorers to the same level as high SAT scorers. A bit unlike IQ, and even more "g", the SAT is tuned towards academics and nothing is better (SAT & ACT).
Another govt requirement I'd like is for all professors at schools receiving more than $10k govt benefits per undergrad student (10k students ~~ $100 million) be required to videotape each lecture, to be kept in the Library of Congress. Even better than the textbook, but related.
And such lecture be available for any govt funded college student to look at, for some small $1 (one dollar) fee.
Future colleges might have more lower paid TAs teaching to the best lectures. And studying which lectures are the best, and why. For smart & not-quite-as-smart folk, thinking is work. Often hard work (not like these comments, so much, tho they're also not nothing). A big part of college is practice in thinking, training one's brain to think.
It should not be mostly, or even heavily, just "signalling" -- the SAT or IQ scores could do that.
And the govt should legalize IQ testing of job applicants, even tho some groups have lower IQ averages. NGOs should be working harder to find out how to increase those low IQs -- or more honestly admitting that there is so much genetic influence, & epigenetic, that less poverty is not enough. (Probably married mothers & fathers are required to max 18 yr old IQs)
There will remain yuuuuuuge political push to get more folk into college. Or the same percentage. As Arnold says, we already have too many going -- but as Freddie de Boer says, there is a Cult of Smart which society should be trying to change. And as D. Brooks did not say, but should have said, IQ superiority does NOT mean moral superiority, and is often against good morals thru rationalizing, smartly, immoral behavior.
Too much micromanagement. Why do student loans need to be different from all other consumer loans? Leave it to banks, schools, and anybody else who wants to. Let them figure out the right collateral. Let standard bankruptcy rules apply.
The bigger problem with government """loans""" is that the authorizing legislation is always drafted so as to allow the government to forgive them, at least in part, and outside of a normal bankruptcy proceeding. It's a sneaky way to cover for what are in reality giant giveaways, but ones with opportunities for reviewers of the applications to play favorites. This creates the incentive for politicians to get as many people as deeply in debt as possible, and then later dangle the prospect of forgiveness as a way to win votes. It's not just the fact that student loans exist, but that Obama changed the law to practically eliminate the possibility of getting those loans from the private sector.
PLSF is a big machine for employing leftists to promote more leftism. It's surprising that the self-licking ice cream cone isn't even larger than it is. The institutional, duly-authorized loan forgiveness system is a lot more powerful and could in theory scale up much more than the proposed Biden ad hoc forgiveness.
I’d support those changes, but … Too many politicians want to use the loans politically—and the American Dream has focused too long on college as The Way to climb up in social status. Is it better to fight against political micromanagement for all, or to take control as a manager and redirect? I used to favor fighting political management, but now favor redirecting it towards Republicans. 1) more quickly helps Reps. 2) makes Dems start agreeing more that govt direction might not be the best.
I don't like that attitude. But I do it myself. I live in California where the Democrats have a supermajority in the legislature. My general voting rule is to vote out the incumbents, but if the only non-incumbent is a Democrat, I hold my nose and vote for the incumbent just as a message, for all it's worth.
"I believe that we need many fewer people going to college"
I gave blood yesterday and the young girl who drew it finished high school last spring. She wants to be a nurse but is worried it will be too hard getting an RN. When I mentioned options with less training she dismissed them because she wanted the bigger income of an RN. You would deny her that?
Maybe we can agree that an RN license shouldn't require a bachelors degree but I don't think that really changes anything in that case.
If we can agree the marginal student will be better off with a degree, I would argue what your position truly implies is that you know better than the prospective student whether they should go to college and you know better than the market who employers should hire and promote at what salary.
Yes, would have been better. I'm not opposed to people wasting their own money on nonsense. In practice, it's the same thing, since very few people who want worthless degrees are willing to work and earn the price themselves. That leaves heirs and taxpayer parasites.
Don't be daft. I'm saying I know what's best for me and students know what's best for them. I don't know what's best for students, students don't know what's best for me, and schools and governments haven't got any idea about what's best for either of us. It's called agency, personal responsibility. If I or students guess wrong, we pay the penalty. If schools or governments guess wrong, they never pay the penalty. And future employers don't enter into the picture at all.
Well put. I would go further and say “Actually, I do know better than most students which degrees are weak. Much better.” Very few students look at what the median incomes for various majors are 5!years after graduation, or even know such data exist. Every time I brought it up during the sections on labor market economics students were shocked when looking at basic BLS data. No one had ever shown them.
And surprise surprise: English, philosophy, polo-sci, psychology, etc. are all a huge waste of time and money for the median student.
Don't you be daft. Of course employers enter into it. Students see what job offers recent graduate get or don't get. Employers decide which schools and majors they are willing to select from. For some students this drives their major a lot, others a little, and others at not at all. This is as it should be.
You get more of what you subsidize. In the case of students, subsidies draw in more marginal students and more marginal teachers who need easier classes to survive four years. In the case of science, more marginal fields and more marginal researchers.
The solution is obvious, to me: get government out of both. It's one thing for government to pay for the R&D it needs, such as better weapons and radar and so on. It should not be funding anything else. And I do include Mars rovers, the space station, the Hubble and Jack Webb telescopes, the Antarctica stations, and everything else NASA does. The military can fund what it needs, private industry can fund what it needs. Why is NASA paying for research into making supersonic business and passenger planes quieter? Or more to the point, why am I paying for all those things?
Every time I read of studies about Peruvian hookers or some Kazakhstan caterpillar, I wonder who thinks anyone should be paying for that, let alone taxpayers.
I'm not saying everything is perfect but I'm glad it's not your decision.
That's the problem. If you want to voluntarily pay for those, go ahead, and you'll get more bang for your buck without the inefficiency of taxes. Why should you have any say on where my money goes?
“Why should you have any say on where my money goes?“ Step 1: make unregulated encryption a norm
Step 2: conduct all trades, payments and transfers in encrypted format
Step 3: keep all of your liquid wealth and financial information in encrypted format accept when in use
Step 4: make this a norm so that most people are doing it
Now if Stu refuses to keep his hands off your money, what will he do about it?
Maybe we can agree that government is too involved though I'm more inclined just to say it's done somewhat ineffectively versus too much. But let's say govt was completely out of education. Would we be better off? I say we would end up with too little, and probably something that sends a weaker signal to employers, versus what is optimal and we would all be poorer for it, both educationally and financially.
"Too little" is meaningless. There is no Goldilocks amount of education. People make their own choices.
Incentives matter in the choices they make.
"Too little" refers both to a life less enjoyed for lack of education and an economy less robust that provides for less needs and wants, especially things toward the need end of the spectrum.
Rather than talking about it wouldn’t you like to have experiments going on to allow people to live out their ideas? For example, small federal government involvement allowing state by state experimentation?
I don't know what experimentation federal funding prevents other than maybe a startup without accreditation.
So more Peruvian hookers?
Of course Einstein, Crick and Watson would also have gone unfunded in your utopia, not just the caterpillar people and NASA. Maybe the sweet spot is somewhere in the middle.
And how many unknown Cricks and Watsons have gone unfunded because the government funded the wrong things?
Probably none who would have been funded by the free market, there seem to be systemic reasons why foundational science isn't a profitable investment at the scales and timelines that matter here
Why do you have such a sorry opinion of other people's choices? Why do you think most everybody hates science and wouldn't donate a penny to its funding? And why do you think your judgment of what other people should spend their money on is any of your business?
Re your first question, one relevant statistic is that *among people who think climate change is real* less than half would pay $100 a year to address the problem.
Re your second question, see Murphy and Nagel, The Myth of Ownership.
This is why economics should drive policy and not vice versa. Public figures who prate about the danger of climate change but buy expensive homes on Cape Cod clearly do not believe a word of what they are saying. So neither should taxpayers have to pay to alleviate the phony emergency.
Oliver Wendell Holmes has been quoted as saying taxes are the price we pay for civilization, that he was glad to buy civilization with his taxes. He was an idiot. Civilization is cooperation, not coercion. Taxes are to civilization what bullets are to cooperation.
Frankly, any article with such a title sounds like arguing over angels dancing on pin heads. My money is none of your business. Your money is none of my business.
A resounding YES from my perch. 50 years ago, I was that kid that didn't see the sense in university, and I went into a trade. That trade eventually led to a small remodeling business, which eventually led to a very tidy little business doing consulting and analysis on buildings that were falling apart for one reason or another, but approximately 7 times out of 10 it was water intrusion in all its forms. These were/are buildings designed by high end architects that didn't know how to build, and they tapped my expertise because I'd spent a couple decades actually doing the work and knew what they didn't teach in architectural school.
The whole system is entirely out of whack, and your ideas are spot on.
I've also been amazed how often water intrusion comes up a major reason some construction or renovation project is going overtime and overbudget. There was clearly a lot of bad building in the past, but when one tries to discuss why all one gets from other people is that it's obviously the fault of their designated bad guys who are always to blame for everything.
Total layman's opinion, though I've been involved with buildings that suffered this way, that the impermiability of many materials was way overestimated, and that was coupled with repair and replacement costs rising rapidly due to inflation and likely regulation
Sorta, but no. The shift in building materials (plywood, engineered lumber, tree farm wood instead of decay resistant older growth, Type N mortar instead of lime putty mortar, vastly increased levels of insulation, etc.) post WWII, that is still going on, started using these new materials in the same manner as the old materials. They didn't perform the same, at all. Also, the perceived ability of new sealants and caulks led to an elimination of flashing to divert water away from vulnerable building components; builders thought you could just seal out the water. Nope. Water gets in.
Folks imagine that the exterior wall materials shed water like a duck's back. Nope again. Water gets in. Modern wall systems employ water managed systems, understanding that water always gets in and you have to manage it to divert it back to the exterior. All those skyscrapers that are steel, aluminum, and glass are water managed. All that aluminum channel holding the glass has all sorts of channels and gutters within to collect the water that gets past the "rubber" gasketing and diverts it back to the exterior. Same with vinyl siding. The vinyl lets massive amounts of water through; the "Tyvek" or other water resistant barrier (WRB) stops that water and it drains down and comes out the bottom of the siding.
I've tried to summarize this into a couple paragraphs when it would take me a small volume to adequately explain it. These problems have not gone away. The building industry is the ultimate aircraft carrier; it doesn't turn until it hits something, then it backs up and tries again. We're slowly getting there, but you will probably read in the next couple decades how all those building methods of the 70's through (roughly) 2010 were "wrong", and the result is a lot of rotted out buildings.
I wrote an abbreviated explanation of the problem to Christopher B below. You're right in that when the problems occur, it's an accelerated exercise in finger pointing. Very long story short, the folks designing this stuff don't know what they're doing and neither do the folks building it. Of course, there are some that understand, but industry wide, it's a debacle wherein everyone in the biz tries to deflect blame to someone else.
The fact that you figured out how to address common construction faults has almost nothing to do with whether you got a degree or not. If you had chosen the other path you almost certainly would have figured out similar types of problems. I've known plenty of degreed engineers and architects with the same expertise. Likewise, if the degreed architects you fixed their problems had instead become non-degreed builders they almost certainly would have built in a myriad of bad details, regardless of the design they were given/used.
One thing is for certain...there's always a troll insisting on projection, strawman-ing, and burden of proof/appeal to ignorance logical fallacies.
Remember when everyone thought MOOCs would take over higher education, and everyone would have free/low-priced access to the highest quality teachers? Funny how that never happened.
Not sure about MOOCs but distance learning is alive and healthy. A decent way to earn a bachelors or masters degree.
University of Maryland has a pretty big distance learning program. I think AZ or AZ St has a bigger one. At least a few other major universities have one.
A few years back there was a piece on a MS computer science program from GA Tech that could be taken on campus or remote. Grads got similar job offers well into six figures. Tuition for remote was a small fraction of the on campus rate.
In accordance with my understanding,
Substack is acting up and won't let me expand on my previous comment or reply to it (the "Reply" button gets hidden by the next comment). So here is my addendum.
As for why all these subsidies turn academia into such a cesspool of political drama, that too seems obvious, to me. It's not fair to say only STEM fields matter, but as far as research goes, it's a good first approximation. I have no problem with teaching literature, languages, and other fields which have no natural research fields. History, archaeology, anthropology, and many other "soft" sciences have useful things to research.
But all those marginal students and teachers in those marginal fields know they are marginal. They have nothing to research and the teaching is mostly regurgitating their own fantasies, whether ideological or nonsensical (usually both). They are the ones most dependent on subsidies and handouts. The easiest route to those is government, the simplest political divide is between statists and individualists, and voila! you get statists driving academia leftwards.
The problem with substack comments seems hit or miss. Maybe just longer comments. Maybe just Android?
I have no problem replying from either Linux or Android, but on both, Substack has changed its controls so that Brave or Chrome browser users cannot "like" any comment. The problem is nearly a year old and not fixed.
I Liked your comment using Chrome on an Android.
What Linux browser? I use Firefox.
Mostly Brave Browser but I've also tried it with Chrome.
My version of Linux won't let me upgrade Firefox, so I haven't tried that.
You can upgrade Firefox outside of the standard procedures. That's what I do. It's not what caused this change, however, because another computer does the same with a different Linux.
Works OK on Android, was working a day or two before on Linux, but now, as the new text expands the comment box, it pushes the Cancel/Reply buttons down "behind/under" the next comment, and while I can see the two buttons, I can't click them. This line is as much as I can type before the two buttons are entirely inaccessible.
Right, only I'm having this problem on two android phone and my windows computer.
I've just learned with my post a moment ago that if I post a short comment, I can go back and Edit to add more. At least that works on my laptop.
I'll have to try that again, thanks.
Well, you knew, this whole internet forum / blogging with comments technology is totally new and untested, and we all have to cut Substack a lot of slack during this brief alpha testing of breakthrough tech as they work out the unforeseeable kinks no one has ever encountered before.
Kidding aside, their approach at visually simulating that solved problem with an engine intended to perform a lot of other functions like surveillance, security, and value capture turns it into an unsolved problem that is, apparently, incredibly difficult to make solved again.
Michael Huemer’s new book Woke Myths has at least two great chapters on the origins and dynamics of woke in higher education.
Tim Urban wrote a really good book (What's Our Problem) that picks on both the left and the right, though he spends more time on the left. It's an excellent read, especially the chapters on the left.
https://scottgibb.substack.com/p/where-does-woke-ideology-come-from
I couldn’t agree more with Dr. Kling’s education proposals. Unfortunately, the Trump education agenda (https://www.donaldjtrump.com/agenda47/agenda47-president-trumps-ten-principles-for-great-schools-leading-to-great-jobs, https://www.donaldjtrump.com/agenda47/agenda47-the-american-academy , https://www.donaldjtrump.com/agenda47/agenda47-protecting-students-from-the-radical-left-and-marxist-maniacs and https://www.thecollegefix.com/heres-everything-trump-promised-regarding-higher-ed-reform-during-his-campaign/ ), while harmonious in many ways, seems conflicted about the need to reduce state and federal funding for higher education. Trump seems to want to use the threat of reduced subsidies. I am not clear how you abolish the Department of Education yet still hold out continued subsidies to Big Ed as a carrot?
At any rate, education is not listed among the central governments enumerated powers. States need to step up, as many have, and pursue reform at their level. One proposal for states that I have not seen implemented is to attempt to level the asymmetric information problem where parents have less information than schools about their children’s attainment of substantive skills and knowledge. Education is in many ways a trust good. States might consider ways to offer a learning outcomes evaluation service separate and apart from the schools and the teaching function. Perhaps states could offer parents AI applications to test their children to ensure that their attainment of math and reading skills is advancing at an acceptable pace? Alternately, perhaps private businesses in the tutoring field could offer testing services that would allow parents to verify their children’s progress? Having reliable outcomes data would hopefully improve parent’s ability to make informed decisions schooling choice.
At the federal level, it would be nice to see Joni Ernst or Rick Scott who, being on the Senate Armed Services Committee and in the DOGE Caucus, step up and repeal the statutory authority for the military academies and the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences. These are luxuries that do not promote war fighting ability in any substantive way and which are no longer affordable in an era of $2 trillion annual budget deficits.
And it would be nice to see DOGE or Education Secretary nominee McMahon step up and pledge to repeal authorization for the plethora of pointless-give away programs listed at title 20, United States Code:
3. Smithsonian Institution, National Museums and Art Galleries
4.National Zoological Park
5.Government Collections and Institutions for Research, and Material for Educational Institutions
6.American Printing House for the Blind
6A.Vending Facilities for Blind in Federal Buildings
7.Instruction as to Nature and Effect of Alcoholic Drinks and Narcotics
8.Howard University
9.National Training School for Boys
10.National Training School for Girls
11.National Arboretum
12.Foreign and Exchange Students
14.School Construction in Areas Affected by Federal Activities [Transferred to Chapter 19]
23.Training and Fellowship Programs for Community Development
24.Grants for Educational Materials, Facilities and Services, and Strengthening of Educational Agencies [Omitted, Repealed, or Transferred]
25.Pay and Personnel Program for Overseas Teachers
25A.Overseas Defense Dependents' Education
26.Support and Scholarship in Humanities and Arts; Museum Services
26A.Indemnity for Exhibitions of Arts and Artifacts
28.Higher Education Resources and Student Assistance
31.General Provisions Concerning Education
33.Education of Individuals With Disabilities
37.Assignment or Transportation of Students
38.Discrimination Based on Sex or Blindness
39.Equal Educational Opportunities and Transportation of Students
42.Harry S Truman Memorial Scholarships
43.American Folklife Preservation
44.Career and Technical Education
45.Career Education and Career Development
49.Asbestos School Hazard Detection and Control
50.National Center for the Study of Afro-American History and Culture
52.Education for Economic Security
55.Education of the Deaf
56.American Indian, Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian Culture and Art Development
57.James Madison Memorial Fellowship Program
59.Barry Goldwater Scholarship and Excellence in Education Program
63.Eisenhower Exchange Fellowship Program
65.National Environmental Education
66.Morris K. Udall and Stewart L. Udall Foundation
68.National Education Reform
69.School-to-Work Opportunities [Omitted]
70.Strengthening and Improvement of Elementary and Secondary Schools
72.Museum and Library Services
74.Troops-to-Teachers Program
75.Early Learning Opportunities
76.Education Research, Statistics, Evaluation, Information, and Dissemination
77.Financial Literacy and Education Improvement
78.Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics, and Critical Foreign Language Education
79.STEM-Training Grant Program
80.State Fiscal Stabilization Fund
If Trump is serious about moving responsibility for education back to the states, the bare minimum we ought to be able to expect to see are statutory repeal and rescission of funding across a majority of the provisions listed.
One idea is to separate education from awarding degrees. Businesses which do nothing but test and award degrees would tend to reduce grade inflation, since individual results could be compared to the business averages and industry averages. It would make it easier to award degrees to on the job training and homeschooling. Some businesses would value reputations for being tough and stingy, others for suggesting what is lacking and how to improve the deficiencies.
But I've never thought it through in any detail.
“The ultimate use of incentives was suggested by Adam Smith in his magisterial Wealth of Nations over 240 years ago: have students directly pay professors for their services. Extending Smith's analysis, the professors, in turn, could contract with packagers of courses to create degrees, either through traditional universities or other providers. These packagers of degrees can provide administrative and other services (e.g, classroom rental) necessary to ultimately providing a diploma certifying the student has attained a reasonably high level of competence.“
https://substack.com/@scottgibb/p-152187930
“Does this sounds like a good idea? To have students directly pay professors. As we do here on Substack. What’s stopping people from teaching courses on Substack right now? What’s stopping “packagers of Substack courses” to create degrees certifying that students have attained a reasonably high level of competence?”
"Packagers" sounds like what we have now.
But at what price?
And packaging what?
Note the difference in teaching incentives. 1) Direct payment from student to teacher vs 2) student paying third party and third party paying teacher fixed rate vs 3) teacher paid based on number of students past threshold number.
Maybe You can explain this better. The whole idea of going direct to a teacher seems absurd.
I can see it working when there are a small number of students and an even smaller number of teachers but that's nothing like what we have today. Al Roth got a Nobel for matching med school grads with intern positions. What you are suggesting is at least an order of magnitude more complicated.
Maybe there was a time when one teacher could cover everything you wanted to learn but is that true today?
Does the teacher hire a team of assistants? who helps manage the administration of this? isn't that what the college does?
Do students want a product that doesn't include the extracurriculars? are they really better without them?
Can the teacher be as productive with individual students? Some schools advertise ~10 to 1 but many students are at 2 year schools where the ratio is upwards of 20 to 1.
Maybe a college degree isn't a great signal to potential employers but in how many cases is being educated directly to the teacher going to be a clearer signal?
What’s stopping someone from teaching a “class” on Substack right now? Not much. Sure, the teacher could hire a grader or TA if it makes sense.
How is this absurd?
I think I recognize your “voice.”
The state (government) is the fundamental problem with higher education (as it is with everything else it interferes with). The solution is simply for it to leave higher education completely alone.
https://jclester.substack.com/p/the-augean-stables-of-academe
Whenever AK mentions the need for a more diverse, market-oriented educational establishment, I am reminded of what's occurring in India. In modern India, since its move toward more classical liberal values, there are many mouths to feed, people to educate, and health concerns to address, so much so that the government in recent times, rather than retain proprietorship in these endeavors, encourages private innovation to help meet the fast-growing needs that government alone cannot fully address. The gradual rise of the middle and upper classes has increased demand for quality education and English instruction resulting in a blossoming of private schooling, to the point where it now is estimated to comprise upwards to half of all schooling and the majority of higher education.
https://educationforallinindia.com/public-vs-private-understanding-the-shifting-landscape-of-indian-education-2024/
Thanks for the link. Storing for later use. Keep us updated if you learn more.
What about starting by eliminating all aid to students attending universities with endowments over say $1 billion.
My wonkish alternative is $10k per undergrad, rather than $100k, but starting with a high limit compromise would make it easier, politically. Many of the top colleges are offering tuition free for avg & below avg students.
“…we need many more alternatives: trade schools, apprenticeships, online education, innovative teaching models, and even far-out ideas like a network university.” - Amen. A great post aimed at a serious problem.
I think one band aid could be required class / tests on economics. Students graduating high school should understand how our economy works, which would go a long way to halting the Long March imo. Once you read Basic Economics you become immune to the common arguments and rationales for socialism.
Krugman is a good counter argument to the idea that some economics education immunizes students against wrong think. It would help, that's all. You can lead a student to knowledge, but you can't force them to learn.
Required reading
Capitalist Manifesto by J Norberg
Basic Economics by Sowell
The left can’t survive public informed about relevant history and theory.
"In the case of higher education, supply is restricted by requiring schools to be accredited, and then turning the accreditation process over to the incumbent institutions. Naturally, this leads to a strong barriers to entry."
If accreditation is the issue why don't new entrants take over a closing college? Do you think small colleges are going bankrupt or otherwise failing because they can't meet accreditation requirements?
A more fundamental question: what purpose does accreditation serve?
At minimum, accreditation provides some protection against diploma mills.
On a related note, there is a podcast on Freakonomics radio about fraudulent diplomas. That problem is believed to be far greater than the ones caught but without accreditation I'm not sure there's much that could be done about the ones caught.
There are many problems with accreditation. Will do a big post on this. Regarding diploma mills: could something like Consumer Reports or the current college ranking bodies provide sufficient information to consumers? U.S. News? Forbes? Princeton Review? WSJ? Washington Monthly? Niche? What does accreditation add on top of these services? It certainly has caused a mess? Further the College Scorecard of the U.S. Department of Education provides some useful information to potential students, such as what the debt levels are of students or what the postgraduate earnings are. In short, there are other means besides accreditation to achieve the informational goals of the accreditation process.
All contribute, hopefully net positive, though lots of supposed experts say college rankings aren't a net positive. As for accreditation, I have no idea what you see wrong with that.
Exactly Church and State should be separated, those aren’t schools.
I'm certainly one of those "people who think that higher ed will be less parasitical on society if institutions were forced to hire more conservative professors."
Like a 30% quota on Dems & Rep professors & trustees in order to qualify for tax exemptions.
But a reduction in the number of student loans would be good -- until the delinquent rate on student loans is lower than the rate of mortgage forclosures (over the past 3 years).
Plus, more funding for alternatives. And more strings on those students who ask for a loan, like an agreement go into a Jr. Military service if they become delinquent.
Govt itself should be requiring ai-based certification testing without college, for all jobs. And they should prioritize hiring over 55s (over 60s?) to have folk who are more experienced in life, and who are likely to "serve the public" (ha!) for fewer years, even without an 8 year term limit. Govt certificate testing can be created for each major subject from the top schools.
Insofar as upward mobility is heavily on the Ivy +, and recently "top 38" (US News?), those top colleges should be MORE interfered with by the govt. I'd say more objectively those with top 100 endowments, which is far more objective. And a larger govt tax exemption subsidy.
What the top colleges can't do, and shouldn't be asked to do, is to educate avg SAT scorers to the same level as high SAT scorers. A bit unlike IQ, and even more "g", the SAT is tuned towards academics and nothing is better (SAT & ACT).
Another govt requirement I'd like is for all professors at schools receiving more than $10k govt benefits per undergrad student (10k students ~~ $100 million) be required to videotape each lecture, to be kept in the Library of Congress. Even better than the textbook, but related.
And such lecture be available for any govt funded college student to look at, for some small $1 (one dollar) fee.
Future colleges might have more lower paid TAs teaching to the best lectures. And studying which lectures are the best, and why. For smart & not-quite-as-smart folk, thinking is work. Often hard work (not like these comments, so much, tho they're also not nothing). A big part of college is practice in thinking, training one's brain to think.
It should not be mostly, or even heavily, just "signalling" -- the SAT or IQ scores could do that.
And the govt should legalize IQ testing of job applicants, even tho some groups have lower IQ averages. NGOs should be working harder to find out how to increase those low IQs -- or more honestly admitting that there is so much genetic influence, & epigenetic, that less poverty is not enough. (Probably married mothers & fathers are required to max 18 yr old IQs)
There will remain yuuuuuuge political push to get more folk into college. Or the same percentage. As Arnold says, we already have too many going -- but as Freddie de Boer says, there is a Cult of Smart which society should be trying to change. And as D. Brooks did not say, but should have said, IQ superiority does NOT mean moral superiority, and is often against good morals thru rationalizing, smartly, immoral behavior.
Too much micromanagement. Why do student loans need to be different from all other consumer loans? Leave it to banks, schools, and anybody else who wants to. Let them figure out the right collateral. Let standard bankruptcy rules apply.
The bigger problem with government """loans""" is that the authorizing legislation is always drafted so as to allow the government to forgive them, at least in part, and outside of a normal bankruptcy proceeding. It's a sneaky way to cover for what are in reality giant giveaways, but ones with opportunities for reviewers of the applications to play favorites. This creates the incentive for politicians to get as many people as deeply in debt as possible, and then later dangle the prospect of forgiveness as a way to win votes. It's not just the fact that student loans exist, but that Obama changed the law to practically eliminate the possibility of getting those loans from the private sector.
And Obama created legislation to make life very difficult for for-profit colleges.
PLSF is a big machine for employing leftists to promote more leftism. It's surprising that the self-licking ice cream cone isn't even larger than it is. The institutional, duly-authorized loan forgiveness system is a lot more powerful and could in theory scale up much more than the proposed Biden ad hoc forgiveness.
I’d support those changes, but … Too many politicians want to use the loans politically—and the American Dream has focused too long on college as The Way to climb up in social status. Is it better to fight against political micromanagement for all, or to take control as a manager and redirect? I used to favor fighting political management, but now favor redirecting it towards Republicans. 1) more quickly helps Reps. 2) makes Dems start agreeing more that govt direction might not be the best.
I don't like that attitude. But I do it myself. I live in California where the Democrats have a supermajority in the legislature. My general voting rule is to vote out the incumbents, but if the only non-incumbent is a Democrat, I hold my nose and vote for the incumbent just as a message, for all it's worth.
Couldn't agree more.
https://open.substack.com/pub/tonymartyr/p/apprentices?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=2jswp
And independent schools should stop taking government money and return to being independent - pipers & tunes.
Great post, though I would prefer a tinge more libertarian crank. Just a tinge though.
For example: “education is not listed among the central governments enumerated powers.”
See cleisthenes‘ comment.
"I believe that we need many fewer people going to college"
I gave blood yesterday and the young girl who drew it finished high school last spring. She wants to be a nurse but is worried it will be too hard getting an RN. When I mentioned options with less training she dismissed them because she wanted the bigger income of an RN. You would deny her that?
Maybe we can agree that an RN license shouldn't require a bachelors degree but I don't think that really changes anything in that case.
If we can agree the marginal student will be better off with a degree, I would argue what your position truly implies is that you know better than the prospective student whether they should go to college and you know better than the market who employers should hire and promote at what salary.
No one is saying stop students from getting an education. But stop using tax dollars for nonsense degrees that can't begin to pay back the cost.
Suggested edit: But stop using my dollars for some other family’s degrees.
Yes, would have been better. I'm not opposed to people wasting their own money on nonsense. In practice, it's the same thing, since very few people who want worthless degrees are willing to work and earn the price themselves. That leaves heirs and taxpayer parasites.
Yes, better but still a weak argument. You are saying you know better than the student, their schools, and future employers which degrees are weak.
Don't be daft. I'm saying I know what's best for me and students know what's best for them. I don't know what's best for students, students don't know what's best for me, and schools and governments haven't got any idea about what's best for either of us. It's called agency, personal responsibility. If I or students guess wrong, we pay the penalty. If schools or governments guess wrong, they never pay the penalty. And future employers don't enter into the picture at all.
Well put. I would go further and say “Actually, I do know better than most students which degrees are weak. Much better.” Very few students look at what the median incomes for various majors are 5!years after graduation, or even know such data exist. Every time I brought it up during the sections on labor market economics students were shocked when looking at basic BLS data. No one had ever shown them.
And surprise surprise: English, philosophy, polo-sci, psychology, etc. are all a huge waste of time and money for the median student.
Don't you be daft. Of course employers enter into it. Students see what job offers recent graduate get or don't get. Employers decide which schools and majors they are willing to select from. For some students this drives their major a lot, others a little, and others at not at all. This is as it should be.