This one is on the Higher Education Bubble. It makes a nice complement to the earlier thread on OWS. This is the education system that has produced these kids:
The traditionalist critique of the university — I made it myself over thirteen years ago in the co-authored Who Killed Homer? — was that somewhere around the time of the Vietnam War, higher education changed radically for the worse. Note I am talking mostly about the liberal arts. America remains preeminent in math, physics, hard sciences, medicine, and engineering, subjects that are largely immune to politicization and race, class, and gender relativism. The top students, and often the more hard-working, gravitate to these fields; indeed, in my general education courses on the ancient world, I often noticed that math and science students did far better than did their sociology or anthropology counterparts.
Such excellence in math and science explains why the world’s top-rated universities in all the most recent rankings are overwhelmingly American. (Indeed, liberal arts professors piggyback on such findings and often, in a sense quite fraudulently, point to these polls as if to confirm their own superiority.)
I spent a great deal of my life in the university as a student and professor and now as a researcher. Higher learning in the arts and humanities has enriched American life for 200 years. Small liberal arts colleges like Hillsdale, St. John’s, St. Thomas Aquinas, and dozens of others continue to be models of enlightened learning. But all that said, increasingly public universities and the larger private institutions have become morally and fiscally bankrupt.
This is definately true. The University has declined dramatically in the 15 years since I completed my last degree. The whys of this are pretty easy to see:
We know all the other pathologies of the modern university. Tenure metamorphosized from the protection of unpopular expression in the classroom into the ossification of thought and the proliferation of the mediocre. Faculty senate votes did not reflect raucous diversity of thought among secure professors, but were analogous to Saddam’s old plebiscites in their one-sided voting. Tenure created the notion of a select cloister, immune from the tawdry pursuit of money and neurotic worry over job security so true on the crass “outside.”
Campus ethics and values were warped by specialization in both faculty instruction and publication. The grandee that butchered a graduate class every semester was deemed more valuable to the university than the dynamic lecturer who enthused and enlightened three undergraduate introductory classes each term — on the dubious proposition that the former serially “published” peer-reviewed expansions on his dissertation in journals that at most five or ten fellow academics read.
Not teaching at all was even preferable to teaching very little, as a priestly class of administrators evaded the “burdens” of instruction. The new bureaucrats were often given catchy titles: “Assistant to the Provost for Diversity”, or “Associate Dean for Cultural Studies”, or the mundane “Special Assistant to the President for Internal Affairs”, in the manner of late Soviet apparatchiks or the power flow charts of the more mediocre corporations. Although the faculty was overwhelmingly liberal, it was also cynical, and understood that the avalanche of self-serving daily memos it received from the nomenklatura need not be read. I used to see entire trash cans filled each morning with reams of xeroxed pages, as professors started off their days by nonchalantly dumping the contents of their mail slots. Most of the memos read just like those “letters” congressmen send to their constituents, listing a dean’s or vice-provost’s res gestae and detailing how they were “working for you.”
The meat of the essay is this gem:
There is a new element in the equation. Debt. Almost every year, tuition climbed at a rate higher than inflation. It had to. Higher paid faculty taught fewer classes. “Centers,” run by professors who did not teach and full of new staff, addressed everything from declining literacy to supposedly illiberal epidemics of meanness. Somewhere around 1980, the university was no longer a place to learn, but a sort of surrogate parent, eagerly taking on the responsibility of ensuring that students were happy, fit, right thinking, and committed. That required everything from state-of-the-art gyms replete with climbing walls, to grief counselors, to lecture series and symposia on global warming and the West Bank. All that was costly.
To pay for it, the federal government guaranteed student loans and the university charged what they wished — with the hook that the interest need not be paid until after graduation. For an 18-year-old, taking on debt was easy, paying it back something to be dealt with in the distant future — especially when the university promised higher-paying jobs and faculty reminded college students that their newly acquired correct-thinking was in itself worth the cost of education. There was little competition. Trade schools were still looked down upon, and online instruction was in its infancy.
The result, as we now know, was a huge debt bubble, one of nearly $1 trillion in aggregate borrowing that rivaled the Freddie and Fannie frauds. And yet the debt no longer comes with guarantees that the liberal arts and social science graduate will find employment, either of the sort that he was trained for, or necessarily more remunerative than the federal clerk or the union tile setter. Starbucks from 7-7 each day will not pay off that Environmental Studies degree from UC Irvine.
As the economy cooled, cash-strapped parents increasingly had little money to ease the mounting burdens. What was once a rare $10,000 student loan became a commonplace $50,000 and more in debt. Living at home until one’s late twenties is in part explicable to the mounting cost of college and the accompanying dismal job market — and the admission that many college degrees are no proof of reading, writing, or thinking skills. (Note as well that the themes and ethos of the university were not “life is short, get on with it”, but rather population control, abortion, careerism, metrosexism, etc. that contributed to the notion that one’s 20s and even 30s were for fun and exploring alternatives, but most certainly not to marry, have children, get a job, buy a house, and run the rat race.)
I noticed about 1990 that some students in my classes at CSU were both clearly illiterate and yet beneficiaries of lots of federal cash, loans, and university support to ensure their graduation. And when one had to flunk them, an entire apparatus was in place at the university to see that they in fact did not flunk. Just as coaches steered jocks to the right courses, so too counselors did the same with those poorly prepared but on fat federal grants and loans. By the millennium, faculty were conscious that the university was a sort of farm and the students the paying crop that had to be cultivated if it were to make it all the way to harvest and sale — and thus pay for the farmers’ livelihood.How could a Ponzi scheme of such magnitude go on this long?
Lots of reasons. The university was deeply embedded with a faux-morality and a supposed disdain for lucre. “College” or “university” was sort of like “green” — an ethical veneer for almost anything imaginable without audit or examination (Whether a Joe Paterno-like exemption or something akin to Climategate or the local CSU campus where the student body president recently boasted that he was an illegal alien and dared authorities to act — to near unanimous support from the university.)
He goes on. The essay is four pages long, but well worth your time. The Higher Education Bubble will burst. In fact, it is already fraying. The question is, when will hiring managers stop looking for a degree, and looking for people who have demonstrated a capacity to learn? When that happens, people will flee the university in droves. Maybe then they can clean out all the “Diversity” studies departments, and get back to teaching real Liberal Arts for a price real people can afford.
Tags: Higher Education Bubble, VDH
