Two years ago, 54 percent of Republicans said colleges had a positive impact on the country’s direction, with 37 percent rating higher education negatively…The latest version of the survey, conducted last month among 2,504 adults, for the first time found a majority (58 percent) of Republicans saying colleges have a negative effect, compared to 36 percent saying they have a positive effect.
The story is interesting throughout. It is based on an annual Pew survey.
I tell friends that if I had an 18-year-old child today, I would be tempted to try home schooling for college. Just go with YouTube and avoid the indoctrination centers.
As a check on myself, I regularly ask college students and very recent graduates if things are as bad as they are portrayed in conservative media. The modal answer is that indeed the faculty and a minority of students are very far left and very obnoxious about it, but if you are conservative or moderate you can work around the radical leftists.
My sense is that the people in charge of those institutions are past the point of caring what Republicans or conservatives think of them. Students are still clamoring to get in, so why change?
This may be a stupid question, but why can’t some conservative billionaire start a university with an office building and buying up some cheap housing in a declining city like Buffalo or Cleveland or something. You could run the classes in the office building and then tell the students that they can rent rooms in the cheap local housing owned by the university. It would be a way to make money on the real estate while also starting a cheap university. The labor would all be cheap adjuncts hired from the oversupplied Phd market and the school would be marketed as the non-SJW version of a decent uni education, with focus on a great books core plus stem and business oriented majors. Tony Hsieh has been trying to revive the old core of Las Vegas and I think there’s a guy in Tampa, Jeff Vinik, who is reviving parts of that city. I think you could combine the real estate aspect with a university and make money on the proposition.
A very good question.
Some of it is accreditation–that is a hurdle. Some for-profit chains tended to buy pre-existing institutions rather start new ones from scratch in order to expand.
A big issue is “signaling.” Your solution would work better if there were more exit exams that signal proficiency, like CPA exams. Charles Murray discussed this in _Real education: four simple truths_.
That guys law that says if something isn’t inherently conservative it evolves to be progressive.
And if it is conservative it won’t get federal dollars and thus can’t compete.
Isn’t that idea basically what Hillsdale College is?
It has been my understanding that Hillsdale doesn’t want to take Federal money and deal with the strings attached.
I think there could be a college similar to Hillsdale that managed to get Federal money.
Probably, to assume that the Federal government is punishing Hillsdale for its conservativism is to misunderstand the dynamics. Even if it seems plausible.
Perhaps someone else can explain?
perhaps a link from the college’s page might clarify?
https://www.hillsdale.edu/about/history/
The punishment does not have to be explicit.
If education were an efficient competitive market, how could they compete with competitors willing to deal with the strings?
Lots of Republican governors, for example, are taking Obamacare funds and other funds and putting up with the strings.
In some ways, learning at home is a good option to college, especially for concentrating on curriculum areas which aren’t well represented in an undergraduate curriculum. Still, it’s difficult for anyone without college degrees to engage in public dialogue so as to be heard. This matters all the more, as it’s the ones with college degrees who are now debating the “fate” of high school graduates, with precious little feedback from the ones they discuss. Self learners need viable platforms for dialogue, where they can chart alternate routes for themselves that actually count.
You will learn more, but college isn’t about learning.
The saving grace is that for the most part, if you are in an SJW major, you picked the wrong major anyway.
Unfortunately I also think universities (outside possibly the top tier) do a horrible job with STEM education particularly engineering.
I don’t know. I was at a mid-tier in Chem E. There is no higher education than that. And yet no job I would have gotten used a single technique we drilled. They would say “we teach you HOW to think.” I thought the more likely explanation was that it is All bullshit.
Btw, at mid-tiers, all our professors were from Minnesota, Princeton, MIT, etc. So does education work???
Perhaps Republicans and conservatives should ask themselves why.
We know why. I know exactly why.
My sense is that the core issues are
1. increasing costs
2. decreasing quality (at least a decline in predictable, measurable quality)
3. the emptying of substantive content from portions of the curricula
4. amplification of unhealthy habits of young adults in a hot house environment. At least the military has drill instructors and a mission.
= – = – = – =
three decent books to read (and not brand new) continue to be
_Beer and Circus_ by Murray Sperber
_Killing the Spirit_ by the great (or at least very good) Page Smith
and
_Going broke by degree_ by Richard Vedder
= – = – = – = – =
I like to think that the leftist SJW mania will die down in a few years–but predictions are hard, and it is chastening to note that, as Jonathan Haidt claims, “The problem begins in high school.” The incentives seem to favor weirdness at the moment. Has it peaked? We don’t know.
_Academically adrift_ showed there is a quality problem.
The big issue for the average student is opportunity cost and uncertainty. If the student stays home to watch youtube videos, he/she needs careful supervision. Even at mediocre schools, there are weeks when everyone is studying constantly.
= – = – = – =
There are risks–it seems to be surprisingly easy to become labeled a sexual predator based on mechanisms that don’t meet the basic standards of jurisprudence. That’s the downside–bad things that can happen. A nice young man can sleep with a friendly young woman on a boozy night, and 6 months later he’s getting kicked out of school for reasons he can’t understand and that don’t hold up to careful, objective scrutiny.
There is still an upside–meeting people smarter than yourself and interacting with them.
The libraries are still there. The labs. The art studios, teaching hospitals (at big schools), and faculty who actually are willing to instruct and would actually like to.
As I’ve mentioned several times on Twitter lately, some national discussions are treated as American, when in fact the debate is entirely about and for white people. Recent examples: Bret Stephens’ insulting column, David Brooks’ anecdote, and now the college protests.
The college protests are entirely driven by white people. Evergreen State College admitted just 190 black students last year. 109 are Asian, another 400 are Hispanic. 2600 are white. So either a lot of white kids are protesting, or the white faculty is almost singlehandedly driving this.
At UC Santa Cruz, where a black student went berserk and started protests, just 400 students are black. UCSC is now the designated drop spot for Hispanic students who aren’t terribly qualified (but aren’t ludicrously so–they go to Merced and Riverside), so there are equal amounts white and Hispanic. Very little mention of Hispanics in the UCSC protests, and the pictures show mostly white and a few token blacks.
A few other protesting colleges:
University of Missouri at Columbia? Overwhelmingly white (2000 blacks, 20000 whites admitted every year).
Yale? Ha. Middlebury? Please.
Berkeley? 2.5% black. Berkeley’s so Asian that they break down the percentages by nationalities in the hopes that no one notices. Bank on the fact that Asians aren’t a big part of the protesters over The Bell Curve.
Overwhelmingly, these protests are validated by the white media, the white elite, the white faculties and white conservatives and libertarians who like bitching about kids these days. There hasn’t been a serious attempt to stop them–I don’t think anyone wants to. For most of the colleges, a threat to stop state or federal funding would focus the faculties’ minds beautifully. But whether they continue or stop, it’s a white folks’ matter, aided by a few token blacks cleverly exploiting SJW bylaws.
Meanwhile, EVERYONE is ignoring the utter disgrace going on at many large state universities, where they have completely eliminated even the pretense of remediation. Colleges are constantly lowering the standards in order to meet their (self-imposed) quotas of blacks and Hispanics. Since even remediation was causing a lot of students to wash out, they’ve quit even trying to do that much, so that students can get credit for middle school math.
https://educationrealist.wordpress.com/2017/04/15/corrupted-college/
Discussing this would be an all-American debate. I am outraged at these actions, but I understand that the alternative is not easily accomplished either. Of course Democrats like colleges. Dems are disproportionately black and Hispanic, and for them, colleges are not only a leg up, but a way to get basically free money. Why wouldn’t they like the idea?
But the problem is, everyone unconsciously assumes that all Democrats are white folks, SJWs who approve of the protests.
So instead, everyone ignores the overwhelming number of nearly illiterate students getting federal funds to attend college, and pretends that these stupid college protests are something other than a fringe.
+1, another excellent, high quality comment.
Bank on the fact that Asians aren’t a big part of the protesters over The Bell Curve.
Well, they are voting more Democrat than yesteryear (say 1988) so something has changed.
Most of the change in Asian voting patterns related to a phenomenon seen in Hispanic voting patterns as well. Namely, ethnic groups from Communist countries used to be a lot more Republican. Chinese Americans, Cuban Americans, etc. Since Communism became irrelevant these groups have been drifting further left each year. That explains much of your non-black minority drift.
Add to this the fact that most Asians are coastal professionals that are working with bobos in heavily liberal industries (Silicon Valley, etc). It makes sense they would adapt to their surroundings to fit in.
That’s easy. The Republicans are anti-immigrant. Many claim that they are only against illegal immigration, but since most of them oppose letting more people in legally, it’s clear to anyone who thinks about it for a minute that they just don’t like immigrants. Since most Asians are first or second generation immigrants, of course they don’t vote for people who campaign against immigration.
A better plan would be to send an 18 yr old to trade school, perhaps with some home schooling in reading the Great Books and a blog or something (live public exposure) to incentivize improving writing. Then at 20 or 21, they can enter college, with a basis in reality, mostly beyond the easy indoctrination years and with focus.
Engineering and most of the sciences are best taken after some practical experience. Then the theory has nook in the student’s life experience to settle into. Most EEs who were electronics hobbyists did better than the student coming in with no hands-on experience.
“Students are still clamoring to get in, so why change?”
The universities live under a double-edged Damocles’ sword.
On the one hand, the Liberal Arts and Social Sciences have been near completely consumed by post-modernism on all but a couple campuses. Those “old guys” who rushed to argue for a liberal arts education are dying off. Upon inspection one discovered they were referencing their liberal arts education from around 1963 rather than anything resembling what has been offered since around 1985.
On the other hand, the idea that technology follows theory is a myth that academia promotes. But almost all technological advances in human history have come from tinkering with theories mapped on later by the academics as best they could. Still most of engineering is by numeric analysis and tinkering. Nassim Taleb offers quite a few more examples than I was familiar with in chapter 15 of ‘Anti-Fragile’.
“Practitioners don’t write; they do. Birds fly and those who lecture them are the ones who write their story. So it is easy to see that history is truly written by losers with time on their hands and a protected academic position.”
–Taleb, Nassim Nicholas. Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder
If, or perhaps when, the public takes a critical look at the university, they are in trouble and it is unlikely that the credential will remain a threshold for getting hired.
That’s basically the attitude of local politicians in the major Blue hub cities towards crime, negative externalities from unregulated vagrants, high taxes, poor quality government services, and so forth. Or the executives in some monopolistic corporation (e.g. MS) regarding innovation, prices, quality improvement, and customer service.
In general, the rule is that frustration with and dysfunction in an organization builds up to whatever level the leadership can get away with, until it poses an existential threat. It’s like genetic load. The only thing that helps with that is the incentives and discipline provided by competition and the prospect of ruthless culling.
Conversely, when we see dysfunction and frustration increasing at the top, that tells us that apparent competition is misleading, and that the most prestigious or attractive spots on the list have some special, hard to imitate feature by which they are able to maintain a lock on a captive audience.
This is clearly becoming less true every day, and the important thing is the direction of the trend. There is an increasing stream of testimony that one simply cannot have a reputation for producing conservative-leaning scholarship and having the “wrong” opinions and expect to have a fair shake at making it through each of the various stages of the gauntlet to a tenured position at a prestigious institution, to include winning grants and getting published in elite journals. Meanwhile Nancy MacLean gets an NEH grant to defame Jim Buchanan with actual malice.
Some prescient progressive academics have been sounding the alarm about the logic of political reaction, “biting the hand that feeds you,” and the potential for future loss of government subsidies. This obviously applies to state schools – and most especially in red states – but it could also come in the form of some unpleasant strings attached to accreditation; and eligibility for grants, student loans, and tax exempt status. After all if you are openly and proudly teaching utter hostility to the people having some considerable influence on your own purse strings, then it’s completely plausible that at some point you will pile on a straw that breaks the camel’s back of their patience.
Personally I can only hope campus administrators don’t heed these warnings – probably through a combination of can’t and won’t – and that Republican politicians are indeed provoked into defunding them as much as politically possible, “If you want to teach and learn hate to hate us, you are free to do so, on your own dime.”
In one of many possible alternatives, they could start imposing “intellectual diversity” quotas (kind of like what Haidt is suggesting) in which professors and administrators get chosen from well-established and politically exclusive hiring pools like judges or members of bipartisan commissions. Of course many academics would react with outrage as such a program, but they should recognize that non-progressives experience that same degree of outrage regarding the ideological abuses on campus nearly every day.
“In one of many possible alternatives, they could start imposing “intellectual diversity” quotas…”
Haidt has been the intellectual inspiration for some recent laws (e.g. in Tennessee) attempting to rein in campus hostility from progressives, but from what I can tell mostly disagrees with them. He promotes the bark but doesn’t like the bite.
So your hope is that Republican politicians – philistine, clueless, venal, donor-driven, ignorant, small-minded, risk-averse Republican politicians – will save American academia from itself.
It think you’re going to be hoping for a very long time.
Heh, “Make Academia Great Again.”
But no, I think I was pretty clear in saying I’d prefer Republicans didn’t try to salvage anything and just defunded the whole enterprise from all of the various government subsidies. Most of the states are in or heading towards fiscal crisis anyway, so they’ll need to cut somewhere, and if Republicans are in charge, this is something that’s going to seem increasingly tempting.
One baby step in that direction would be to get rid of the whole in-state / out-of-state tuition differential. And in my opinion, the line of privileges and immunities / equal protection jurisprudence that permits these durational residency requirements for state universities as Constitutional has been incoherent, inconsistent with other matter such a welfare, and incorrectly decided in general.
If subsidies can’t be avoided, they could be reserved for classes in a few priority disciplines which are less likely to openly teach students to hate Republicans, which would probably exempt everything with a “studies” at the end of its name.
Defunding won’t happen, in red states or anywhere else. In every state, the forces supporting public universities are much, much stronger than those who want to see change.
The real question to be answered is, how is it that, within just two or three generations, did virtually the West’s entire intellectual class (aside from a tiny, ineffectual minority) become indifferent or hostile to their own native civilization. But once this has happened, I don’t think the situation can be reversed by legislative action by state politicians of the caliber of, at the very best, Mike Pence.
My preferred alternative is to go after them with the tools that took church attendance down, since the universities are openly promoters of one particular approach to truth.
“We’re perfectly happy for anyone who wants to go to a university, but no regular employer may ask whether you went, or keep any evidence of where you went, or use the fact that you went or didn’t go in the hiring and promotion process.”
Yes, and maybe the Libertarian candidate will win the next presidential election.
The modal answer is that indeed the faculty and a minority of students are very far left and very obnoxious about it, but if you are conservative or moderate you can work around the radical leftists.
Geez, ever speak to any minority students? Don’t they have an opinion as well? Given in some states the minority (including foreign) students are the highest portion of the student body? (When I went to a high minority population College in California it was during the Bush Sr. administration when most Asian-Americans voted Republican.)
My guess it is:
1) It is bad practice to work around it as most large companies are fairly globally diversified. So they can practice the David Brooks sandwich lecture.
2) I always assumed modern college professors are more liberal because the job pays less than the private sector. (I remember an Econ professor in 1990 pointed out Economic PHd earned less than Economic Master degrees.)
3) I remember the obvious people at my school were the young Republican Frat Clubs and I have to work well these people today. Maybe college is a training ground to allow your obvious self out in safe environment while learning to deal with people not like you.
collin, I think you misread what you quoted. He said “A minority of students” not “minority students”.
I’ve been encouraging my 16 year old brother to enter a program like Praxis (https://discoverpraxis.com/). It’s basically a high-tech trade school with a very high job placement rate (98%). They are selective about who can enter, but I hope that more programs like that will spread around the country.
“The modal answer is that indeed the faculty and a minority of students are very far left and very obnoxious about it, but if you are conservative or moderate you can work around the radical leftists.”
If this were an Amazon or Yelp review, who would be encouraged to buy?
The indoctrination is completely ineffective and only serves to waste students time. Since the only thing that matters to employers and future employees is the certification that the student is smart enough to get in and diligent enough to get through, no one cares about the wasted time. The universities keep trying and failing to convert students and the market doesn’t punish them for it.