From The New York Times Magazine: Americans Are Losing Faith in the Value of College. Whose Fault Is That?
From The New York Times Magazine:
A decade or so ago, Americans were feeling pretty positive about higher education. Public-opinion polls in the early 2010s all told the same story. In one survey, 86 percent of college graduates said that college had been a good investment; in another, 74 percent of young adults said a college education was “very important”; in a third, 60 percent of Americans said that colleges and universities were having a positive impact on the country. Ninety-six percent of parents who identified as Democrats said they expected their kids to attend college — only to be outdone by Republican parents, 99 percent of whom said they expected their kids to go to college.
In the fall of 2009, 70 percent of that year’s crop of high school graduates did in fact go straight to college. That was the highest percentage ever, and the collegegoing rate stayed near that elevated level for the next few years. The motivation of these students was largely financial. The 2008 recession devastated many of the industries that for decades provided good jobs for less-educated workers, and a college degree had become a particularly valuable commodity in the American labor market. The typical American with a bachelor’s degree (and no further credential) was earning about two-thirds more than the typical high school grad, a financial advantage about twice as large as the one a college degree produced a generation earlier. College seemed like a reliable runway to a life of comfort and affluence.
A decade later, Americans’ feelings about higher education have turned sharply negative. The percentage of young adults who said that a college degree is very important fell to 41 percent from 74 percent. Only about a third of Americans now say they have a lot of confidence in higher education. Among young Americans in Generation Z, 45 percent say that a high school diploma is all you need today to “ensure financial security.” And in contrast to the college-focused parents of a decade ago, now almost half of American parents say they’d prefer that their children not enroll in a four-year college.
This is the part that had me raising my eyebrows: “The percentage of young adults who said that a college degree is very important fell to 41 percent from 74 percent.”
That is likely to have ripples. The size of the megaphone held by the people screaming that they were ripped off isn’t helping either.Report
I think the people with the megaphone are the ones who spent BMW money when an entry level VW would have served them fine. The people we never near from are the ones who went into debt for a Kia they can’t afford to gas up when a bus pass was their only sustainable choice.Report
This is the part that didn’t raise my eyebrows, because I knew it already:
When you look at the polling trends on higher education over the past few decades, you notice one other striking development. A decade ago, there was not much difference between members of the two political parties when it came to their opinions about higher education. Then around 2015, that consensus shattered, and Republican sentiments suddenly nose-dived.
…
When pollsters ask Republicans to expand on why they’ve turned against college, the answer generally has to do with ideology. In a Pew survey published in 2019, 79 percent of Republicans said a major problem in higher education was professors’ bringing their political and social views into the classroom. Only 17 percent of Democrats agreed. In a 2017 Gallup poll, the No. 1 reason Republicans gave for their declining faith in higher ed was that colleges had become “too liberal/political.”Report
We have degrees which clearly add value. The STEMMs and so on.
We have degrees which don’t add a lot of value or who are even negative.
We have degrees which look a lot like indoctrination.
We have degrees which don’t clearly fall into any of these camps and where your experience can vary.
We have predatory schools.
All schools increased their prices to capture gov subsidies.
The basic idea that college is good because it adds value because it’s college is probably wrong. It’s mistaking “a degree” for “a degree which adds value or which signals value”.
If we want to pull politics into this, Colleges look a lot like a normal special interest group trying to get more gov funds and hand the bill off to us taxpayers. Putting in large amounts of loan forgiveness just makes it more explicit.
If colleges want to claim to be a public good which has a strong claim on public dollars then they need to make a much better case and they also need to stop putting in layer upon layer of administration.Report
Those statements are true, but it doesn’t change the fact that there was a sudden change of attitude by conservatives towards college in 2015.
Colleges didn’t suddenly change, conservatives did.Report
Since 2015 college prices have gone up and their value has gone down. Just like in the previous 10 years and just like the ten years before that and so on.
That people didn’t notice, or didn’t prioritize that awareness, is irrelevant to my argument. That happens in vast social movements. Jim Crow was a problem before the issue came to a head.
We’ve known for a long time that colleges were becoming less and less of a good deal and at some point this would be a problem. That “some point” has happened doesn’t mean the solution is to blame the conservatives unless you have some way to claim that they’re wrong.Report
Several things can be true at once.
It could be true that the college wealth premium has declined, and also that conservatives decided to hate on colleges for an entirely separate reason.
Is Ron DeSantis remaking the New College into a pragmatic “good deal” of a college which teaches pragmatic job skills?
Nah, of course not.
Is “Prager U” intending to provide valuable career skills to young people?
Nah, of course not.
Job skills have nothing to do with the conservative criticism of colleges.Report
A few things:
1. There is more to education that providing practical and/or financially lucrative degrees. Part of education is also learning how to be part of a polis and/or just being a curious person on a wide variety of subjects who likes to learn.
2. The world would be a far sadder and more boring place if everyone went and got “practical” degrees. People still like art, music, movies, TV, video games, books, novels, poems, etc and it does take training and skill to learn how to produce good art or act well or write well. It is not just raw, natural talent that someone has or doesn’t have. I think it would be nice if the world recognized this more.
3. There are predatory/for-profit colleges, universities, and especially vocational schools that should get deader than the Dodo.Report
I’ve gone back to school for personal interest. My wife has done the same. I’ve done so without taking life affecting loans.
If you’re taking life affecting loans to fund this, then either it needs to justify a cost/benefit analysis or you’re rich enough to not need a loan.
Or you’re reckless enough to roll those dice.
We need to figure out what to do with people who are reckless enough to take large education loans that will negatively affect their lives.
There is a massive disconnect between “we should not allow predatory colleges to exist” and “we should allow colleges to enable people getting life affectingly large loans for degrees that won’t pay for them”.Report
I’m going to bring up Trumwill’s excellent point on this again. We keep comparing college to no college and we shouldn’t.
We should compare no college to community college. We should compare community college to compass directional state. We should compare compass directional state to state college. We should compare state college to state university. And we should compare state university to SLACs.
Comparing no college to SLACs is a bad comparison.
(Indeed. We’re mixing up our inputs and our outputs again.)Report
The story also says this:
If this is accurate, doesn’t this indicate that people are rationally deciding that college may not be worth it (defining “worth it” as financial in nature, of course)?Report
It does indeed.
It doesn’t explain the sudden shift in 2015, but it is true.Report
I wonder if there was something similar that happened in the 1960s. Colleges and universities were regarded as dangerous hotbeds of radicalism back then too. There is also the infamous American Legion magazine cover from the 1950s of a clearly Jewish professor giving a lecture to good White Christian Americans that is pro-Communist.
American conservatives want and always wanted colleges to be about training kids for business or engineering while providing them some fraternity and sorority type fun. Humanities that might lead to kids to have un-American thoughts were bad.Report
“Among young Americans in Generation Z, 45 percent say that a high school diploma is all you need today to ‘ensure financial security.'”
That’s just…dumb. That’s nothing but dumb.Report
I wonder if in some cases this is people out of touch with history. I teach at a small uni in a lower-SES region, I have had students tell me they wanted a degree because they wanted out of having to do a retail job for the rest of their lives. Maybe if you’re in line to inherit a car dealership or have a parent who runs a firm that will find a place for you you can avoid college (or, as I saw in the wealthier school I was a teaching assistant at, party your way through for four years and then take your guaranteed job, and along the way make your instructors’ lives frustrating).Report
Keep in mind that they’ve come of age in a time of massive job hopping and super high minimum wage. McDonalds is hiring at $20 where we live and retail, non-food service jobs are even higher. That seems like a lot of money to people under 30.Report
My generation of Louisiana highschool graduates could – and did – go into the oil patch with no further formal education and earn their way into the middle class. The same can be done now in fracking field and solar and wind farms. To say nothing of the success of plumbers and electricians and such.
Its not as dumb as you think.Report
It’s possible to be successful in a boom industry, sure. But boom industries don’t keep booming, so they don’t ensure financial security. Trades typically do, but it’s the mastery of the trade, not the high school diploma, that ensures security.Report
oh yeah, I had a student rage-quit our program (he was one of my advisees) and he said he was going to work in the Dakota oilfields and make more money than any of US ever would (and he ran off with a couple books I had loaned him, but he mailed them back later)
I kind of wonder how he’s doing now. We do allow for re-enrollees but they often have to repeat classes.
I also had a student write a really rude and dismissive letter to the department in early spring 2020, basically saying “yeah well this business is willing to pay me (well above the typical wage: basically hazard pay) so you all can kiss off” and okay fine. I hope he fared okay but again I never heard from him again.
In retrospect those experiences may be partly why I’m a tiny bit defensive about all of this.Report
Trades follow a cycle though. You have a dearth of tradesfolk of a given trade and then it propagates a glut. In theory you could move to a region with the right stage of the cycle but moving ain’t easy and the relevant region may not be appealing.Report
You can have (too many trained plumbers), but you’ll never have (zero working plumbers), and there will probably always be (a few vacancies for decent plumbers). Video rental clerks and junk bond fund managers? Adobe Flash developers and YouTube influencers?
You and I are basically saying the same thing though.Report
I think so.Report
As much as some people would like to politicize this, here’s the facts:
Son 1 spent years getting a college degree, graduated 20k in debt, and makes only barely better than minimum wage in a government job for the Parks Dept. that someone without college would not be qualified for, despite it not requiring any particular skill set and certainly nothing he learned in school. (plus retirement and health insurance, so it’s not as bad as all that)
Son 2 went to trucking school for 5 weeks, makes $30 an hour, still has retirement and benefits, worked the whole time his brother was in school, quits his job whenever he gets bored and has a new one in 24 hours, and has this freedom that his brother doesn’t have because he owes nothing to no one, and his skills are in high demand.
My younger half-sister, who’s 40 and super, super liberal BTW, ditched her worthless college degree and became an electrician. She now travels the world working for GE and makes an absolutely scandalous amount of money. Her college degree got her NOTHING. Her life is a very lucrative adventure. Politics didn’t even enter into it.
It’s absolutely baffling to me that some of you guys really would look at a glut of liberal-arts-degreed, debt-ridden Millennial kids who are still working in the mailroom at 35 and can’t afford an avocado for their toast, shake ur fist and be all like “dem dagnabb Republicans, how dare they have opinions on things”.
The fact is, y’all flushed a generation, possibly two because many Gen X’ers certainly fell under this umbrella too, of kids away by turning them into wage slaves for corporations, saddling them with pointless degrees that are worth nothing in the workplace, by preaching to them that their degree would surely, over time, be worth more than some dumb plumber or trucker or electrician. https://ordinary-times.com/2019/04/25/a-conservative-case-for-student-loan-forgiveness/ You lied. They got wise to the lies. Case closed.Report
So an education is only useful if it can bring increased remuneration afterwards? I guess we don’t need philosophy or history then. Because teaching the ability to think critically, or assess social changes or trends in thought ONLY happens in Business school, law school or STEM.
No wonder out country is on the rocks.Report
Oh, you can only learn philosophy or history when you pay thousands of dollars?
Here’s a quick reading list for you:
Sophie’s World:A Novel About the History of Philosophy.
Ten Bucks. It’ll hit the high notes and cover about 30 books that you should read in full. (And the chapters are even in the order that you should read them in.)
As for history… I suppose we could start with Durant…Report
My point is its Ludacris to dismiss a field of intellectual or academic endeavor unless its wildly successful financially. Societies aren’t built on business degrees alone. It needs those other things to inform it, enrich it, and help it see beyond its own limitations. My guess is somewhere around 2/3rds of the regulars here have a 4 year degree at a minimum – and many in non-business, non-stem fields. Dismissing that training, those view points over costs – even when they are inflated – is to loose sight of what education can do for you beyond just assuring a paycheck down the road.Report
I wouldn’t Drake that position at all. I think that there are 3000 reasons to dive into philosophy and history but if you aren’t willing to drop 50 Cent on a book and read it on your own time, I’d Hammer on the discrepancy between your statements and your actual Method, Man.
Study doesn’t begin at college. It doesn’t end when you graduate.
And you don’t need to spend a fortune to read books.Report
This made me chuckle. Fanfare for the Common man.Report
I disagree very strongly with the idea that the proper way to learn things like history or philosophy is through self-learning. Self-learning usually lacks the most recent knowledge and developments in a field. I believe that Sophie’s World was published in 1991. That is over thirty years ago. Self-learning tends to be very disorganized.Report
There is also the concern that the average person may struggle to distinguish reputable history from what they play on the history channel.Report
Yep.Report
This is another big problem. Many disreputable historians are very good at appearing professional or more appealing to the average person. Even the best lay histories written by professional historians might come across as too nerdy for many people but the crack pot stuff seems really fun.Report
A lot of right-wing and/or libertarian-sympathizing dudes are very into autodidactism.Report
Easier to preserve the bubble that way.Report
No, it’s easier to preserve a bubble when you refuse to read.Report
See it as comparing spending tens of thousands versus spending what you’ve got in the cupholder of your car.
You can get a pretty decent history of philosophy education by reading a handful of books. Certainly better than 80% of the folks out there. Hell, just by reading the Euthyphro, the Phaedo, and the Symposium, you’ll be ahead of 80% of the folks out there.
“But you won’t *UNDERSTAND* them!”
Yeah, well, we got r/askphilosophy and if that’s not good enough, there’s even a bunch of websites on https://forums.feedspot.com/philosophy_forums/ and you can find something there.
“It’s best when an adjunct or a TA tells you to read it.”
“Yeah, well. Not everybody wants to spend $60k to have an adjunct or a TA to tell them to start with Plato.”Report
It is not a matter of spending. It is matter of getting it way off base and getting it wrong. I’m not a Protestant. I don’t think it is just the work and the reader and that is all you need.Report
Oh, and an adjunct will prevent getting it wrong?
My recommendation for history of philosophy is to start with Sophie’s World and then read the Euthyphro and the Symposium.
“But what about…”
Yeah. We should read those books too. I’m just talking about getting started.
What books would you recommend instead?
The ones your adjunct told you to read? Which books were those? Maybe we could argue about them here!Report
I’ve never met an auto-didact who wasn’t a real life version of Otto from A Fish Called Wanda.Report
I’ve met some who were not that bad but they always seem to develop some wildly off-base ideas.Report
Auto-didacts don’t tend to get the facts that wrong in my experience. They do develop some really weird and out-there takes because they weren’t taught in a systematic way. If anything science auto-didacts are a lot worse about this than humanities auto-didacts.Report
I disagree that it’s better to pay $60,000 to a mumbling adjunct to tell you to read The Euthyphro while you glance at the clock every 2 minutes because there’s a butt-chugging party at the frathouse later.
As for the most recent knowledge and developments in the field…
Well, when it comes to the history of philosophy, I am not sure that that new and fresh and came out in the last decade or so is the way to start.
Let’s begin with a nice little intro that talks about the history of philosophy from somewhere around Plato to somewhere around the 70’s. The 1970’s, I mean.
And, after we’ve done that, *THEN* we can get into “everything you thought you knew was a lie! Philosophy began when Africans first wandered into what is now Occupied Palestine when women (including transwomen!) invented language.”
Seriously, if you need to buy a new textbook for History of Philosophy every year, there’s some serious grift going on.
You can get a decent (not great, but decent) starting point with a handful of books that you can pick up used for a couple of bucks.
After you’ve done that, then you’ll be ready for the stuff that they charge $60k for.Report
I’m a huge fan of the classical liberal education. There’s a strong argument to be made that it’s nearly impossible to find that in a modern college, though. The Great Books and arts and languages have been crowded out by the Critical Studies. Non-STEM doesn’t have to be an insult, but it’s become one because of the decline in quality.Report
Can you, without Googling, articulate the difference between the “Great Books” and Critical Studies, and why the former is superior to the latter? Have you even read much of either?
I ask because these words are like a copy/ paste of complaints we’ve been hearing since I was young and before, and usually its lifted verbatim from a political essay from someone who hadn’t either.
And it’s always been this weird two-step:
“These pointy headed perfessors are elitists!”
followed by:
“and they aren’t teaching Latin anymore!”Report
When I was a history major back at UMD (go Terps!) all the PC-cum-Woke/Critical Studies stuff was at a nadir. However I recall my first research seminar class, was steeped in what I now recognize as Critical Studies nonsense. The subject of the class was the modern history of Latin America, and had a newly minted professor who couldn’t have been much older than the students.
Unlike any other history classes I had, save maybe one, we were instructed not to use normal primary and secondary sources. Instead she wanted us focusing heavily on depictions of Latin America/people from Latin America in the media, and specifically identifying how those portrayals were negative in some way. This was really different, really strange for the discipline, and came with a very clearly baked in political point of view. The professor made it clear that while we could in theory question that perspective, it was it practice discouraged, and assignments were structured to make it hard to do. Moreover any time someone brought up normal primary or secondary sources that questioned the narrative she wanted us to hear, she did some weird linguistic mumbo jumbo about how it didn’t really matter. To give you an example, my topic was the Falklands War, and she thought it was way more important to analyze this famous picture of British marines mobilizing in Union Jack boxer shorts than the fact that the Argrntine junta was forcibly conscripting barely trained college students to go fight against a professional military, who of course were quickly defeated.
Now there was nothing remotely like a conservative in that class, but everyone was totally baffled by the pedagogy. We all kind of muddled through, but no one knew what to make of it, and I recall joking with others about how strange it was as soon as the professor was out of earshot. This was hugely in contrast with my second research seminar, with an older professor where we were given basically free reign and were required to follow normal methods of research.
Anyway because no one was steeped in this crap at the time, as best as I can tell, everyone just kind of shrugged it off as one of those things. But now? I have no idea if the conservative complaints are true about this colonizing all of the humanities. But I can say that if all of my history classes had been like that I’d have switched majors, and would feel confident in saying that no one should bother with it because they wouldn’t be learning anything other than the weird obsessions of whatever activist professor they had.Report
There is a perceived fear that critical studies are going to be more unfavorable to students that want to push back at whatever the ideological assumptions in the course are. There do seem to be some star professors that manage to demand no ideological hostile student take their course. This seems particularly true in courses on hot topic political issues like Israel-Palestine.
Even if the professor doesn’t get a direct ban on ideological hostile students, there seems to be an assumption that saying even the slightest thing that could be heterodox will result in a real time Twitter Maoist Struggle session.Report
I don’t know how I’d be able to explain why The Great Books are superior to Critical Studies but I can say that if you got a degree in the Great Books in the 1800s, you’d not be particularly surprised by a course in the Great Books in the 1920s (and might even have the tools to teach one) and if you got a degree in the Great Books in the 1920s, you’d not be particularly surprised by a course in the Great Books in the 1950’s (and might even have the tools to teach one) and if you got a degree in the Great Books in the 1950’s you’d not be particularly surprised by a course in the Great Books in the 1980’s (and might even have the tools to teach one).
While I’m not sure that someone who got a degree in Critical Theory in the 1990’s would be able to survive for more than a couple of years in Boston University’s Center for Antiracist Research before being kicked out on her behind.Report
It’s almost like Critical Theory isn’t education at all, but rather a means of jockeying for money and influence in opaque educational bureaucracies.Report
This sounds like a positive development.
Maybe the humanities should be more like other fields of knowledge where it is continuously evolving and changing based on new facts and ideas.
“My knowledge of the Punic Wars is exactly as it has been for 2,000 years!” doesn’t sound much like scholarship.Report
I think InMD and I would agree with this but you haven’t addressed his point that many critical studies classes seem to not want challenges from students, especially students that come from the wrong demographic groups.Report
I’m less worried about challenges from students than I am about replacing rigorous courses of study with a bunch of shallow activism. I’ll also be blunt that I think people who specialize in this stuff are in fact kind of stupid, don’t produce anything useful, and are engaging in a form of public sector grift.Report
I haven’t been in a critical studies class ever, so I can’t say whether there is some form of indoctrination going on or not.
What I do see is that the loudest voices crying about indoctrination also seem to be the ones most eager to indulge in it.
It doesn’t rule out the possibility of poor teaching being done currently, but damaging to the credibility of the plaintiffs.
Any non-rightwing people wanting to honestly critique the system have an uphill battle to separate their comments from the shrieking.Report
I need a quick definition of “indoctrination”.
Is your definition broad enough to include teaching students how to measure the 2nd derivative of X cubed?
Or do you put “teaching calculus” in a different category than “indoctrination”?
Thanks!Report
I just say my opinion and don’t feel the need to navigate perceptions of partisan loyalties. From my perspective a core component of liberalism is trying to see through bullshit. That includes halfwits in academia as much as it does the frothing reactionaries on Fox News.Report
A field where you don’t know whether what you know today will be worth anything in 10 years?
I suppose maybe the humanities should be a little bit more like tech.
Nothing’s more embarrassing than the manager who says stuff like “Just write a perl script!”
Get with the times, Grandpa! It’s all python now!
It can be just like that, only for privilege.Report
Yes, anyone who studied Cold War history in 1986 would need a very strenuous refresher course to be current with the same class in 1996.
Like I said, a very good thing.Report
Would the section on 1946-1972 be significantly different in 1996 than it was in 1986?
If you’re talking about stuff that happened after the class in 1986 ended, well… of course.
If you’re, instead, talking about how we have completely different takes on Khrushchev’s secret speech in 1996 than we did in 1986, I’d love to see a pointer on that.
Or anything similar. It doesn’t have to be about that speech, of course. Just something where our understanding of this event in the 40s or 50s or 60s in 1986 was *THIS* and our understanding in 1996 is now *THIS* instead.Report
You’re kidding, right?Report
I assure you, I am not.
This is a great opportunity for you to dunk on me!
“Here’s what we were saying in 1986 about (event). And here’s what we knew in 1996 about (event) and, holy cow, were *WE* wrong in 1986!!!”
(And don’t pull “Rambo III”.)Report
Start with Alger Hiss. And no, he wasn’t Belgian.
Jesus Christ, Otto.Report
I’m not seeing the obvious dunk.
I’m reading up but I’m not seeing what I think you think I should be seeing.
Is the conclusion that I should be reaching “yes, we finally hammered out that he *WAS* a Soviet agent thanks to Project Venona coming to light”?
I mean, Project Venona coming to light is a pretty big thing that does put a lot of stuff from the Cold War in context! But, in this case, it seems to be “we went from being unsure about whether Hiss was guilty” to “yeah, being pretty sure about it”.
I will grant that Project Venona is new information that reframes a lot of the stuff in the Cold War, though.
Remember the “Somebody going to emergency somebody going to jail” episode of The West Wing? One of the plot points was Project Venona stuff coming to light. Huh.Report
We have a mass educated society but not a mass intellectual society. Many people and not necessarily political conservatives or reactionaries see education in purely pragmatic terms. It is a form of job training now since apprenticeships no longer exist.Report
For most people, yes, formal education is only something they desire to obtain access to better jobs. And I don’t blame them a wit for it.Report
Maybe they are not to blame but the attitude should not be encouraged.Report
Years ago I read a book entitled Pluribus by Michael Kurland. In this novel, a plague has swept the world, and the survivors had an anti-science bent, blaming the plague on scientists (sound familiar?). Enclaves of knowledge survive in some remaining universities. Students are required to have 2 majors, referred to as the quick and the dead in a joking manner. The quick one is something like plumbing or farming, something useful in the world that survived. The dead one is a more traditional college degree, like English lit or finance.
I read this novel when I was on grade school, a fewish years ago (ahem), but this sort of arrangement has always struck me as being quite useful. I have a degree in history but work as an accountant. I’ve never regretted the history degree because it made me a better thinker. Having options coming out of school is never a bad thing.Report
For every “liberal-arts-degreed, debt-ridden Millennial kids who are still working in the mailroom at 35 and can’t afford an avocado for their toast” there are plenty of other kids who were suckered by the Corinthian and ITT Tech colleges promising them STEM educations which turned out to be scams.Report
This just passed by in my Twitter feed:
Report
Car Wash……..$45Report
You know, you got me curious. So I looked it up. My first thought was “it’s probably not $45 but closer to $30 or $35” and then I found this: Buc-ee’s Car Wash Prices List 2023: Cost & Reviews.
I would think that that means that you’d be the detail guy. You know, steam cleaning the rails that the seat slides on and that sort of thing. Going into the crevices in the steering wheel with a q-tip. Get a piece of that $50 or more. But it says “Food Service and Car Wash” and I have no idea.Report
Well the universities are becoming, at the high end, endowment funds with some charming real estate attached to them and some pretensions of education and networking. At the midrange scale they’re research institutions that have to put up with students running around. At the low end, they’re merely bloated administrative work programs with football teams that pretend to care about students (and this administrative parasitic presence is also present but able to conceal itself more in the midtier and elite universities).
And any talk about student loan relief or more money for higher education will founder on the rocks of those facts. There’s going to be a painful reckoning at some point. It can’t go on the way it is- and it shouldn’t.Report
I think these are pretty broad stereotypes. The Hedge Fund universities you describe still offer a lot more bang for your buck, tend to have the most generous forms of financial aid, and/or really rich students who can pay full freight without debt.
The midrange one has some truth to it but there are plenty that do care about instruction. The lowend swipe is a bit of a mix too.Report
It’s entirely possible the upper tier universities have decent instruction. If you can get in. They’re offering a limited number of slots so you can hobnob with the future elite of the country and they aren’t going to expand that number much.
The common problem is they’re all getting utterly devoured by administrative bloat. University presidents get paid fortunes now and oversee massive apparatus of departments that are only tangentially related to instruction.
If money being sent to universities is going to largely be consumed by paying another, say, Assistant director of affinity group leadership or three Academic success coordinators for peer-led instructions, and it largely is, then I expect opinions about universities to continue to plummet and voter appetite for funneling money to them in any way to follow it downward.Report
I don’t deny that administrative bloat is a real issue. I have some beefs with the hardy har things people criticize as administrative bloat. Title IX is worthy and valid law and almost certainly requires an actual administrator to run compliance. Universities do not need 30 Vice-Presidents for Synergy though.
However, numerous things can be true:
1. Universities can suffer from administrative overbloat;
2. Right-wing resentments fueling their distrust of universities are very wrong (or perhaps entirely correct in that education tends to make more liberals) and very dangerous.
3. Jaybird’s desire for autodidactism and self-study could also be related to his own fears against woke 20-somethings yelling at him or his own fears of left-leaning politics in general.Report
I’ve seen the charts. Administrative bloat is the core of the whole mess. Declining student enrolment, adjuncts being treated like crap, overbuilding all directly trackable back to administrative bloat. Even the more risible overreaches in identity politics and other politics can be tangentially connected to this problem.
I agree with you on #1. I’m dubious on your allegation that #2 is “dangerous” and I think #3 is pointless. Jaybird is just speaking for a likely majority (maybe supermajority) of students who view higher education as instrumentally as a way to get a better job. I know this gives arch liberals the vapors but a lot of people, probably most people, really would like remunerative jobs and have very limited interest in the higher parts of higher ed. I also doubt that “money isn’t important” lectures from comfortable liberals who don’t worry about money would help move the needle on that one.Report
Many students are very interested in experimenting with drugs during their college years.Report
Many humans are very interested in experimenting with drugs during the time of their life that they typically go to college. Yeah.Report
There are a few issues here:
1. Do you have proof that most students view higher education as a way of getting better paying jobs?
2. Even if many or most students and their parents view higher education this way, it doesn’t mean that we should turn higher education into glorified vocational school.Report
On number 2 I think an important question is ‘which school’? For most state colleges and universities a critical mass absolutely view it that way. Which doesn’t mean there isn’t variation at the individual level, and some are more romantic than others, but it’s a core part of the larger package. I don’t think middle class people would be there if they didn’t think ‘better job prospects’ was part of what they are getting.Report
If they’re taking out life affecting loans then they should view education as a way to get a better job and they had better be right.
If that’s not where and what you want, then the key is to prevent the need to take out life affecting loans.
My wife’s experiments with carpentry and AC/VAC repair classes were at a community college. It was cheap enough that we could not care about it beyond her wanting to know how to do things.
If you want to enable students to study art-for-fun and great books and whatnot, then you can’t ask them to cripple their financial futures doing so.Report
I think this is true, though I also don’t think there’s nothing to the idea that a real liberal arts education has remunerative value. The challenge is connecting the dot from degree to financial success, plus accounting for the cost.
I took my liberal arts degree to law school, but I don’t think that next step is always necessary. In my career I do a lot of advising to, broadly speaking, the people who make the APIs. The companies could not operate without people who know how to make the APIs and people with nothing but a liberal arts education don’t know how to make APIs. However, and I hope I am not painting with too broad a brush, in my experience the people who make the APIs don’t necessarily think or operate in a way conducive to solving complex business problems, or navigating situations that involve hard to quantify trade offs. And definitely don’t ask them to talk to a group of investors (kidding but only sorta).Report
My strong expectation is it works best where there’s a strong virtue signal from just having a college degree. The one I know who made it work the best took her degree and went to law school.
Both you and she are not great examples because you send more signal with your Law Degree.Report
Maybe. I didn’t go straight from undergrad to law school though. I actually had a federal job with upward potential, which I had gotten after a stint working for a contractor in the same entity. I just found it really, really boring so quit to go to law school, which actually came way closer to ruining my career because of when I graduated. But it isn’t unheard of. A good buddy of mine has done well for himself with an English degree for example.
What will mess it up is if instead of learning how to read, write, and think critically, it becomes teaching people to find increasingly obscure, abstract forms of bigotry in literally everything.Report
Not just mess it up for them. Just the perception that this is the result lowers the value of the degree.
That’s the gift that keeps giving.
Why are my tax dollars being used to do this?
Why are my tax dollars being used to forgive loans which were used to fund this?
Why would I want to employ someone who was educated to do this?Report
Yea, I have noticed a steep increase in bizarre social justice jargon in resumes and cover letters from younger people. I count it against any applicant for any position.Report
Recently, someone on the neighborhood FB group used the term “unalived” non-ironically, and…*sigh*Report
1. Ask and ye shall receive.
“Results confirm that work outcomes are the main reason most people chose higher education, with 58% reporting job and career outcomes as their primary motivation. This is true across all higher education pathways and demographic subgroups. Work outcomes are also more than double the next-most prevalent reason, with 23% reporting a general motivation to learn more and gain knowledge without linking it to work or career aspirations.”
https://news.gallup.com/reports/226457/why-higher-ed.aspx
So DOUBLE the number of people said “work” rather than “enlightenment” as to why they go to higher ed. And that’s respondents who’re answering a poll. You know some of those “enlightenment” people were probably giving the answer they felt made them look better.Report
I don’t have a desire for autodidacticism as much as I have a counter-argument against people who tell me stuff like “So an education is only useful if it can bring increased remuneration afterwards? I guess we don’t need philosophy or history then. Because teaching the ability to think critically, or assess social changes or trends in thought ONLY happens in Business school, law school or STEM.”
You don’t have to go to Amherst to learn Art History. Here. $25.
Makes a great gift and you can tell whomever you give it to “I saw the editor and I thought of you.”Report
Jaybird’s desire for autodidactism and self-study could also be related to his own fears against woke 20-somethings yelling at him or his own fears of left-leaning politics in general.
A recurring theme I’ve seen in your comments here over the years is a sort of knee-jerk rejection of any criticism of ideologies popular with people who are younger than you, and a weird fixation on the idea that people who engage in such criticism are motivated by a fear of being seen as uncool and no longer with it.
I suspect that there’s an element of projection here, because this doesn’t make any sense. If you’re afraid of being seen as uncool, the last thing you want to do is criticize current intellectual fads. Rather, you’d want to distance yourself from such criticism, and maybe engage in a bit of sanewashing or even active defense of these fads.Report
I am 51 years old.
If I have ever been cool, which is up for debate, it has not been for decades.Report
One of the undergraduate moments I still remember was at a party where the cute girl said, “You can’t be a math major. You’re much too normal.”Report
Dude, I’ve met you.
*YOU* are cool.Report
On indoctrination:
Loosely defined, indoctrination occurs in all fields in all nations, over all times.
I mean, when you learned about the American Revolution, did your teachers encourage you to think for yourselves about whether the colonists were heroic freedom fighters, or terrorists?
For any American student in the century between 1890 and 1990, your high school history books were almost certainly filled with distortions and indoctrination about the westward expansion and the Civil War.
Or for that matter, the Great Books about the history of Rome, like Edward Gibbon’s foundational work, were ideological indoctrination devoted to extolling the glories of the Empire.
But even in the sciences we know that our knowledge is clouded and distorted by the lack of alternative voices.
Consider how we handle childbirth today, versus how it was handled in the era 1900- 1970.
Back then the approach was very medicalized, where the woman was treated like an object and pregnancy akin to a tumor needing to be excised.
She was specifically discouraged from being a participant in her own delivery.
This was considered “objectively true” and “scientific”. Of course we know now that this was because physicians were mostly men, and mostly uninterested in the opinions of women.
Modern obstetric practices have changed drastically.
Not the science so much; the biological facts surrounding childbirth aren’t tremendously different than they were then, but with newer voices and opinions we regard it as something different.
Same goes for psychology, sociology, history, and most forms of knowledge where having different voices participating, changes the lens by which we see them.Report
Is your definition broad enough to include teaching students how to measure the 2nd derivative of X cubed?Report
Read my comment and think about it for a few minutes before demanding answers.
(Hint- the answer is “not usually, but sometimes”) I’ll leave it to you to work out the rest. If you haven’t worked it out by tomorrow morning I’ll walk you through it.Report
If your answer is “Yeah, I guess, maybe” then that’s answer enough for me.
Your definition of “indoctrination” is broad to the point that I would use a different one to distinguish between stuff like “Calculus” and stuff like “Sociology”.
The smearing doesn’t benefit the points you’re trying to make, I don’t think.Report
Chip, I’d like to hear some of what you consider the “distortions” about the Civil War as taught in a typical American high-school history class.Report
1. In many history books until recently, slavery was downplayed as a primary driver of secession when in fact it was central to the cause.
2. Reconstruction was often portrayed as a negative, and its termination is often obfuscated when in fact Reconstruction was ended chiefly by white riots which grew so intense the federal troops were unable to contain them.
I think recent textbooks have improved, but there are still pitched battles in many conservative jurisdictions about the subject.Report
NBC News is talking about it now:
Part of the article that is particularly telling:
“A lackluster college experience”
Is it fair that she has to pay back her debt even though she didn’t have fun?Report
Sounds just as fair as me paying the loans I took out to go to a tier 3 commuter law school!Report
You know, if you get a candidate that is good enough, you should always be willing to cut corners on the official job req.
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He’s Asian. Adjusted for diversity and inclusion his GPA and SAT scores are low.Report
I do wonder what hiring high schoolers fresh out of high school will result in…
I mean, the kid will be given some OJT, right? And six figures?
Time for a lawsuit, baby! “How come you didn’t hire me? I have a degree!”Report