We have here a classic vicious circle: the minority high school deficit leads to preferences in college admissions, preferences lead to political radicalism on campus, campus radicalism leads to a deterioration in the education of high school teachers, more poorly educated high school teachers increase the minority deficit, and that leads to even greater demands for preferences. Though the intent of college admissions preferences is to provide upward mobility for minorities, what they really do is reduce the quality of a college education by promoting a force that cripples it.
Note that this goes against the Null Hypothesis. In this case, the null hypothesis offers hope: if it is true, then education isn’t really causing this much harm.
His book is called The Breakdown of Higher Education.
The university class room is unjustified congestion.
The actual core of education is information via literacy, and this is the age of the web. For core principles, the university , or high school, the classroom is obsolete. I can see the classroom in the grammar schools where students haven’t learned the system, yet.
A mechanism that supports Arnold Kling’s null hypothesis:
Bryan Caplan makes the case that a college degree is a probabilistic “signal” of three personal qualities, which employers seek: intelligence, conscientiousness, and *conformity* (i.e., ability to intuit and follow expectations).
Successful students figure out how to play the game of conformity to Faculty expectations in courses. Employers then reasonably trust that these same graduates probably will figure out games of conformity at the workplace — even though the specific *substance* of conformity might differ greatly between campus and workplace.
If I understand correctly, John Ellis makes a case that higher education has landed in a bad equilibrium, due to feedback loops to grade-school instruction.
A crucial mechanism in the bad equilibrium *within* a university:
Faculty Committees *within* the university determine the curriculum and hire and promote new Faculty members. When the political composition of the Faculty becomes lopsided, the imbalance becomes self-reinforcing, through “self-cloning” decisions by these Faculty Committees.
A mechanism that might undo the bad equilibrium:
Usually, the Boards of Trustees at a university has an Academic Affairs Committee, which includes also some distinguished scholars from other universities. If this Trustee Committee (somehow) is not lopsided, then it could appoint distinguished, politically-mixed external substitute Faculty Committees to assure balance in curricular change and in Faculty hiring.
Isn’t expanding “access” to higher ed just as likely a culprit? The increased need for remedial (I.e., high school classes delivered at the college campus) could be due to inadequate secondary education whatever its cause but also due to higher proportion of high school grads seeking additional education. And the experience in the Cal State system probably can’t be understood without acknowledgement of huge demographic changes in California’s student body since the early 90s. The student profile in the 90s is simply not the same even 10-15 years later.