In 1975, I heard second-hand about an informal session where Robert Solow spoke with a group of MIT economics grad students. One of the students, apparently feeling guilty about his fellowship from the National Science Foundation, asked, “Why does society pay me to go to graduate school in economics, given all the benefit that I get from having the degree?” Solow, known for his caustic wit, shot back, “Society doesn’t know what the hell it’s doing.”
Government money has played a role in the decline of quality in academia. Programs like the GI bill and student loan programs have swelled the ranks of college students. Programs like the National Science Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities have dumped huge amounts of money into higher education. The net effect has been harmful.
The conventional wisdom, which comes from college professors, is the exact opposite. They argue that we should be putting more young people through higher education than we do. That funding for research produces great positive externalities and we should do more of it. The same with funding for the humanities.
Average returns to higher education have gone up. But some of this has been due to government-engineered regulations that require firms to be bureaucratized for compliance purposes. Both the regulators and the corporate bureaucrats have college degrees.
More important, at the margin, we are sending people to college who do not belong there. This is demonstrated by low graduation rates as well as a significant number of graduates working at jobs that do not use anything they learned in college. Credentialism is out of control. Somebody could learn to be a physical therapist as an apprentice, but instead many states require a Ph.D for new PT’s.
The expansion of higher education increased the demand for professors. In the 1960s and 1970s, graduate schools cranked up the volume of post-graduate degrees. The results were excessive, in two senses. A lot of mediocre intellects acquired advanced degrees. And a lot of people with advanced degrees could not obtain full-time academic positions.
Expansion also lowered the quality of classrooms at all but the very top colleges. Teaching is emotionally rewarding only if your students want to learn. But most of the students that we send to college these days are not highly-motivated learners. Below the top tier in higher education (the best 150 colleges, plus or minus), a typical class has poorly motivated students in a class taught by disappointed professors.
IfW. Bentley MacLeod and Miguel Urquiola are correct that the U.S. already had the leading research universities before World War II, then the postwar government programs were not necessarily responsible for the growth of research. Instead, it is plausible that government money bureaucratized and homogenized research. Of course, now that government provides so much of the funding for research, professors are loathe to bite the hand that feeds them. I am sure that for every published paper questioning the value of government-funded research you can find at least a thousand lauding its achievements. But we cannot go back and run a controlled experiment to see where research would have headed in the absence of government funding. We can be sure that there would have been less junk research. But the question is what would have happened to quality research. I would speculate that it would not have been any less.
Michael Huemer at Fake Nous blog has been writing about General education is his last two blog posts.
https://fakenous.net/?p=2166
https://fakenous.net/?p=2167
If an adult wants to spend their days playing Call of Duty, or driving Uber, or cooking new recipes for friends, or playing guitar, or training for a triathalon, or writing a movie script, or socializing, building a web site, learning to code, or studying economics, or studying math proofs, or learning history: that should be their choice. Government shouldn’t be involved. We need separation of school and state. The US was founded on separation of church and state. Churches founded institutions like Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. Today, we need separation of school and state. That would cure many problems of society.
Michael Huemer’s rant against K-12 gym class is particularly weak. Physical exercise and athletics has a wide range of health, emotional, and social benefits, and isn’t narrowly intended on training kids to be professional athletes as Huemer sarcastically suggests. Most “Soccer Moms” and “Little League Dads” don’t expect their kids to go pro. Enrolling your child in such sports, is a reasonably healthy practice.
Another example of lowered academic quality: The glut of Ph.D.s and other advanced degrees enabled institutions to shift the teaching load, especially in lower-level courses, to contingent faculty who are paid below-poverty wages and no benefits. I became caught in this trap in the 1990s. I was working simultaneously in three cities in MA at three universities, teaching about double the number of classes tenure-track people taught. In one school I shared an office space with 25 other adjuncts! Nowhere to store books or anything else; I had to tote everything I needed everywhere I went. We were excluded from faculty meetings, so no voice. These pro-union progressive professors and administrators furiously fought any attempt by contingent faculty to unionize. Publish or perish, but I could barely keep up my course load. I bailed after one year of that madness, reducing the glut by one. Most graduate students serve two purposes: they assist established professors with their research, both directly and by participating in seminars based on the professors’ current projects, and they provide cheap undergraduate teaching, with the additional benefit of enabling the institution to claim that fewer of their courses are taught by adjuncts.
Government money has created a host of bad incentives. These are compounded by popular college rankings that explicitly or implicitly incorporate outside funding into their ranking mechanism. As far as I can tell, the money ends up being far more important than quality. Arnold notes, quality has declined a lot at lower tiers. I think this decline will eventually work its way up to the higher tiers as well. Sure, those schools will still be admitting the best and the brightest (at least to some extent…). But this will not protect them from the general academic malaise.
A good general rule is: if you think academia should be doing – or is doing – something, the incentives are likely in the opposite direction. For instance, dissemination of knowledge through teaching. Most R1 universities have little incentive to do so.
Dr. Kling, the experience in my household is at odds with your assessment.
My wife (recently deceased) and I earned liberal arts degrees in the 1960s without benefit of more than token scholarship support, entered the Armed Forces, served for 25 and 20 years respectively, used the GI Bill to obtain technical certificates and eventual professional certifications in information assurance, commanded six-figure salaries in second careers as Beltway bandits, invested our earnings in the stock markets, and support at a modest scale numerous religious and civic charities.
Our liberal arts educations enabled us to appreciate better than our peers the many cultures we encountered in our extensive travels before we met in overseas assignments that called for our linguistic skills, to re-tool promptly after the vagaries of corporate life that devastated companions having only narrow specializations or no post-high school education at all, and to enjoy retirement in the rich artistic environment of our nation’s capital.
Recently it has come to my attention that a contemporary admitted as a disadvantaged student to the institution where I earned my bachelor’s degree accomplished in her chosen profession much more than her high school instructors might have expected.
From my point of view, Americans are outnumbered in a world both envious and jealous of our opportunities and accomplishments. As it was not only just but essential to engage the talents of women in our Armed Forces in the 1970s and 1980s, so now must we forge through both university-level and trade/technical education the full potential of our entire population. As was true in my own life, there will be academic failures, but the successes will contribute to the national welfare and, equally important, to the ability of individuals to perceive and fulfill the call to lives well-lived.
Thanks for a great mini-bio, Charley.
Is it possible for “both” to be true?
For every 100 students who enter college, some number are hugely helped in their lives and careers. Yet some number drop out, others graduate but the jobs they get didn’t require college knowledge, tho often the job requires the credential.
I’d guess in the 60s it was like 90% good, with only 9% drop outs, 1% jobs not really needing college.
In the 70s it was already down to 80% good, as the Boomers were going into college, up thru the 80s – and a drop in the number of 18 year old HS grads.
“Go to college to be a success” continued to be the mantra – becoming “success at most organizations requires being a college grad”. Credentialism replacing “critical thinking”. So 80s avg down to 70% good, with maybe 20% dropouts and 10% normal jobs.
In 90s down to 60% good, 24% drops, normal jobs up to 16%.
Since 2000 maybe only 50% good, 25% dropouts, 25% with jobs that don’t need college knowledge.
These are my own quick guesstimates – do have other guesses? Or better data?
Maybe by now US colleges are graduating only 30% good, 20% dropouts with 50% getting jobs that don’t use college learned knowledge.
At some ratio of “good” graduates compared to dropouts & unnecessary degree for job being done, there is not enough “good” to justify the cost.
We’re past that point now, but it would be good to get the trade-off problem stated in these or possibly better ratios that can be compared over time and discussed for cost-benefit.
Some possible FIT candidates with work in a similar vein:
Todd J. Zywicki, editor, UNPROFITABLE SCHOOLING: EXAMINING CAUSES OF, AND FIXES FOR, AMERICA’S BROKEN IVORY TOWER (with Neal McCluskey) (Cato Press, 2019)
John M. Ellis, THE BREAKDOWN OF HIGHER EDUCATION: HOW IT HAPPENED, THE DAMAGE IT DOES, AND WHAT CAN BE DONE (Encounter Books, 2020)
Jennifer Washburn, University, Inc.: The Corporate Corruption of Higher Education (Basic Books, 2008)
Bryan M. Caplan, The Case against Education: Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money (Princeton University Press, 2018)
Christian Schierenbeck, Fixing Higher Education: A Business Manager’s Take on How to Boost Productivity in Higher Education (Springer, 2014)
I recommend the first two.
The Washburn book is timely given Biden’s decision to turn USA universities over to CCP management: https://www.independentsentinel.com/biden-ends-trump-rule-requiring-schools-to-reveal-partnership-to-the-ccp/
The Washburn book is about how little a corporation has to donate to a university to get it to act as a subsidiary. Corporations with their hooks in a university are naturally supportive of additional public funding for the universities which they have influence over. Naturally the establishment elite objection to this arrangement dried up once the CCP mastered the technique. The CCP has also bought significant influence in the tax exempt swamp from which the Biden administration is filling its ranks.
If you want to fix higher education, you will need to talk with Beijing.
To go off on a hopefully parallel tangent, in the new econtalk up today, Roberts asks Dana Gioia why poetry is so unimportant in the USA today. Gioia responds that it is a case of over funding:
“I point out a cultural paradox: that there has never been a country in the history of the world that has paid more people to profess poetry.
We have 100,000 people teaching poetry. We have poetry foundations. We have poetry readings. We have poetry residencies. And yet, there’s probably never been a great nation in which poetry mattered less than it did in the United States in the 1990s.
And, the assumption, in the Academy–if you ask the Academy, they will say, ‘Well, people never liked poetry because it’s too challenging–this, that, and the other.’ But, the fact is, if you go back and you look at history, poetry was enormously popular in the United States. It was read by all classes of people.”
Interestingly they are discussing Gioia’s new book about Elizabeth Bishop, one that I have yet to read. I have attended several of Gioia’s public lectures and have the utmost respect for the man, but I have also studied Bishop especially her time in Brazil. Members of my family have farms not far from the house where she lived in Ouro Preto. Among other accomplishments, Bishop translated one of the truly remarkable books with which Brazilian literature is so richly endowed, The Diary of Helena Morley, set in the same general area and still taught in public schools there. Unfortunately if USA wokesters ever got ahold of it, it would be canceled and banned, for being an honest book. Nevertheless a mind opener in a free country where individual lives are valued.
To go off on a hopefully parallel tangent, in the new econtalk up today, Roberts asks Dana Gioia why poetry is so unimportant in the USA today. Gioia responds that it is a case of over funding:
“I point out a cultural paradox: that there has never been a country in the history of the world that has paid more people to profess poetry.
We have 100,000 people teaching poetry. We have poetry foundations. We have poetry readings. We have poetry residencies. And yet, there’s probably never been a great nation in which poetry mattered less than it did in the United States in the 1990s.
And, the assumption, in the Academy–if you ask the Academy, they will say, ‘Well, people never liked poetry because it’s too challenging–this, that, and the other.’ But, the fact is, if you go back and you look at history, poetry was enormously popular in the United States. It was read by all classes of people.”
Interestingly they are discussing Gioia’s new book about Elizabeth Bishop, one that I have yet to read. I have attended several of Gioia’s public lectures and have the utmost respect for the man, but I have also studied Bishop especially her time in Brazil. Members of my family have farms not far from the house where she lived in Ouro Preto. Among other accomplishments, Bishop translated one of the truly remarkable books with which Brazilian literature is so richly endowed, The Diary of Helena Morley, set in the same general area and still taught in public schools there. Unfortunately if USA wokesters ever got ahold of it, it would be canceled and banned, for being an honest book. Nevertheless a mind opener in a free country where individual lives are valued. One wonders if Bishop’s somewhat melancholy experience Brazil was attributable to her own academic experience.
And this suggests a counter argument. Would all of the corrupt over funding in education and poetry be such a problem if the top priority for the elite establishment was not enforced conformism? If there was actually some real diversity instead of all the cookie cutter departments and curricula, perhaps areas of exploration and pragmatic new ideas could soak up and put to good use all the minds getting sucked into them. Not sure. Just a thought. And this suggests a counter argument. Would all of the corrupt over funding in education and poetry be such a problem if the top priority for the elite establishment was not enforced conformism? If there was actually some real diversity instead of all the cookie cutter departments and curricula, perhaps areas of exploration and pragmatic new ideas could soak up and put to good use all the minds getting sucked into them. Not sure. Just a thought.
I don’t know. If you include Hip Hop and Rap lyrics, you could argue poetry has never been more popular.
You have a good point.
At any rate, it seems like a lot of the negative consequences of massive subsidies could be mitigated if the government used its bargaining power to get better prices. Just as health economists are always calling for Medicare to negotiate pharmaceutical prices, so too could the government negotiate tuition and fee limitations as a condition for loans, grants, tax exemptios, etc. It would solve at least half the problem. A minimum condition for passage of any student loan debt forgiveness bill, should be a $100 per credit hour limit on undergraduate tuition as a condition for student loan participation eligibility and tax exempt status, with a total cap on tuition and fees of say $14,000 over 6 years. Institutions that can’t adapt to that level of funding are better off closed.
Another problem with shoving too many people through university is that it creates unrest. People with college degrees expect good, well-paying jobs. But not all college degrees are equal. A BS in Mechanical Engineering is worth much more in the marketplace than is a degree in grievance studies. Yet students with the latter sorts of degrees are outraged at “society” when they end up as baristas.
Some of the BLM/Antifa violence we saw in 2020 was, no doubt, fueled by people with such resentments. And we’re not the only country with this sort of problem. Oil-rich nations in the Middle East have also experienced social unrest created by such university graduates.
I’m a beneficiary of the GI Bill (pre-9/11 Navy College Fund), so I’m wondering what the concern is about it?
My experience (1999-2003) was that most folks who were eligible for the GI Bill weren’t ever going to use it, either because they did not want to (college degrees had negative status for some groups) or because they didn’t think themselves capable of getting through a four year degree program .
Maybe the GI Bill’s effect was different post WW2 or Vietnam?
The irony is that the top tier is the center for the demolition of the humanities.
Kling (or anyone else) has no moral right to say who should or shouldn’t attend college or study academics. Just as you don’t have a moral right to say who should or shouldn’t play guitar or play Call of Duty. Similarly, you don’t have a moral right to say who should or shouldn’t study math or economics. One does have a right to say that they don’t want to pay for someone else’s pursuits. One does have the right to say that they don’t want this giant credentialing cartel that blocks them from the path they are interested in.
Imagine an institution that combines the following mechanisms:
Consumer sovereignty.
Immature preferences.
Customers as inputs.
Asymmetric information.
Remote, 3rd-party payment.
Massive tax exemptions.
Massive taxpayer subsidies.
Vague, lofty, murky mission.
Thickets of principal-agent problems.
Lifelong job security.
Product line designed partly to complement job security.
Industry rankings based mainly on inputs.
Accreditation based mainly on inputs.
Subjective certification of unit outputs.
Final output based on incoherent aggregation of subjective certifications of unit outputs.
Status competition.
Egalitarianism.
Informal barriers to entry based on history and prestige.
Philanthropy based on loyalty, nostalgia, and insidery.
Price discrimination based partly on group identity.
Etc. etc. etc.
What could go wrong?
Human nature has not changed, but science and technology have made life a lot better than it used to be.
I am perfectly comfortable with the government investing in long term basic research that will improve the human condition.
I am less comfortable with the government picking winners and losers in technology. For example, in the Obama administration Steven Chu chose lithium ion technology over hydrogen powered fuel cells. Maybe he was right, maybe not, but the market should decide which technology makes the most sense.
Below the top tier in higher education (the best 150 colleges, plus or minus), a typical class has poorly motivated students in a class taught by disappointed professors.—ASK
Ouch. Probably largely true.
I would like to see ASK tackle the recent Brian Sicknick story as presented by establishment media and the Democratic Party.
“I would like to see ASK tackle the recent Brian Sicknick story as presented by establishment media and the Democratic Party.”
I would rather he not. There’s nothing to learn from it, and nothing to say that wasn’t also true and said about 100 other recent stories which turned out to be exploitatively bogus to a sickening degree. We are in really bad shape and things continue to get worse fast, but then, we already knew that.
Perhaps the only insight to mine from it would be to once again update one’s priors to lower the status of the theses forwarded by Gurri and Levin, and their FIT rankings.
Consider:
Q For Levin: Have people lost faith in the institution of the media because of rogue vain individuals building up their own brands, or because it is *institutionally* corrupt, and, acting as an institution which effectively disciplines individuals to toe the line, engages in brazenly false agitprop? That is, like Pravda, we don’t trust it not because the institution is too weak, but because it is too strong.
Q For Gurri: Is there any evidence here that the powers that be fear they have lost control of the information flow that controls over 90% of public opinion, and can no longer be confident that conventional and social media has their back and can effectively cover up scandals? They went so far as to hold a whole state funeral for the poor guy and report him killed in the line of duty, but reportedly they won’t be prosecuting anyone for it, from which one can infer they can’t make a case because hundreds of cameras show nothing happened.
So much for an Army of Davids. The case he failed to make was why certain disruptions were irreversible, and that’s because they weren’t. No one stands still in an arms race, and for every disruption, there is a counter-disruption. Every time it looks like the genie might get out of the bottle, they stuff it back in and double the size of the cork.
Well, maybe you are right, but I think the story clarifies the relationship between establishment media (minus Fox) and the Democratic Party.
I think it is incorrect to say the establishment media is “left wing.”
It is worse than that. I would not mind an honest socialist newspaper, for example.
Much worse, the establishment media is infused with the Democratic Party, which itself is subservient to Silicon Valley, Big Tech, Hollywood and the globalist-multinationals-foreihn policy-military establishment. At times, a type of fascism is promoted.
The Democratic Party ID-politics obsession is real but also window-dressing.
I am not sure there is a medicine, but perhaps counter-balance movement can be created, if a new media can be married to the better parts of Trumpism.
Fight fire with fire.
I agree with the main thrust of this post. But it strikes me that passages such as the following are unnecessary, of questionable veracity, and likely to repel people who would be otherwise open to your perspective.
“Teaching is emotionally rewarding only if your students want to learn. But most of the students that we send to college these days are not highly-motivated learners. Below the top tier in higher education (the best 150 colleges, plus or minus), a typical class has poorly motivated students in a class taught by disappointed professors.”
Colleges are addicted to OPM (Other People’s Money). They are also the ticket towards the elite for almost all smart non-elites; at least the petty-elite top level bureaucrats in the many mammoth organizations which need mid level managers.
Colleges are also rotten. Despite lip service to non-discrimination, they have been, for years, decades, been discriminating against Christians, pro-market, small-gov’t, Republicans and a bit against Libertarians.
We need Republican affirmative action in colleges, but are unlikely to get it. Without Reps as college Professors and admin staff, it would be better to get gov’t out of gov’t loans to students, to reduce the flood of gov’t loan money.
Now at over a $1.6 trillion, more students should NOT be borrowing.
https://thecollegeinvestor.com/32031/average-student-loan-debt-by-year/
Plausible policy: 1) Limit gov’t loan to 1/4 of median income (~60) so ~$15,000 per year. Require the college to give a subordinate loan, as well.
2) Reduce max gov’t loan limit each year of study, increasing the amount the college loans to the student.
2b) … explore other ways for the students to borrow and repay the teachers/ colleges based on their own earnings. Little or no earnings means little or no repayments.
First step to get out of a hole – stop digging.
To fix colleges, we need to enforce standards, and have harder testing and core classes. This would be like a world in which the top 50 universities made classes as hard as they used to be at Chicago and Caltech, and the next hundred behave like state universities in the early to mid seventies. In that world, all respectable colleges would weed out those who could only pass majors ending in studies and affirmative action would have a lot less bite. MIT has only been able to engage in holistic admission since the 90s when it began lowering the standards for the freshman core by creating 3 different calculus classes. Caltech held on for a long time, but has been recently watering down its core so more can pass. This and similar such initiatives were always a prerequisite to greater “diversity.” Not just for race but all social admits who might not otherwise make it through.
With no real standards, you can mix fake with real students and call them both “qualified.”