So I really like and respect your writings on higher ed, Noah, and I am desperate to read that poem, which gets at something I wondered about with this piece: the subject is college but not knowledge! From my position as dean the key component part I am required to deliver is a curriculum, is teaching. (You mention teaching twice but not as an activity.) In my decades in higher ed I have seen a reduction in that teaching component compared to all the other goods college is supposed to be delivering now: a sense of identity, belonging, skills for social mobility, a premiere residential experience (at some places), access to sporting events (at some places), access to Greek life (at some places), etc. So from my perspective it bears noting that my small component -- delivering a curriculum, supporting excellent teaching and the delivery/transfer of knowledge to hungry young minds -- is still what we should do and I don't blame graduates for being sad that they're getting less of that for the money.
Oh and PS -- humanities majors are in fact rising at many places, including UUtah!
I have a (probably wrong) theory that in the coming decades, progress in automation and AI will cause a lot of higher institutions to rebrand themselves as some kind of "return to form". As in, return to what colleges were in the past. Places of learning for the liberal arts. Making colleges more of an institution of culture instead of the proxies for corporate internships.
That's born from my feeling that colleges have been saddled with the responsibility to make workers capable of hitting the ground running when they arrive at their job, instead of expecting those organizations to properly equip themselves with the ability to train their workers with the skills they'll need to succeed.
As a dean, do you share that impression on colleges being set up as the one-stop shop for job training, essentially offloading the risk businesses take in training someone? If so, do you think this is a good thing for colleges? Or might it be good for them to return to that older liberal arts ethos?
Don't know if it's true, but I've read recently that computer science majors are having a hard time finding jobs due to oversupply plus the ravages of AI. I'm a terrible programmer, but now I just have ChatGPT write and troubleshoot my Python code.
That suggests a revival of subjects that give you a framework for solving problems and practical tools to do so. Engineering. Economics. Business-related subjects like finance and marketing and operations science. And the experience of collaborating with others towards a common endeavor.
AI can write code, but it doesn't necessarily tell you how to approach a problem and bring together a team to accomplish it.
I also wonder if the woke reputation of the highly educated in general and professors in particular is driving away students.
lol knowledge they’ll quickly forget because they’re not regularly using it, unless you count projecting status at cocktail parties (are those still a thing?)
I find it a little weird to see the survey response that college is not worth the cost "because people often graduate without specific job skills..."
People, you know you can pick your own major, right? So, maybe just don't make bad choices?
Like I painfully recall switching majors because I wanted to be sure my degree that would line up to a job. And I say "painfully" because in the 90s I switched from Math (too theoretical) to Business and then watched my math friends make crazy money as Wall St quants. Sigh.
"People, you know you can pick your own major, right? So, maybe just don't make bad choices?"
Not all 17-18 year old kids make great choices. And sometimes the adults in their lives give them terrible advice. My older son did not want to take any "hard" courses, and he had no problem graduating with a history major. He then became a paramedic. His degree has nothing to do with his job, other than he has one. My younger son tried engineering, could not cut the math, changed majors a few times and then eventually dropped out. Now he works as a pharmacy technician. His college courses also have nothing to do with his job, but not having a degree is a stigma if other pharmacy technicians have a history degree o the like.
Correct, but I think this really depends on the person. To be a professor of something almost definitionally means that you are passionate about your field to the point you value it to the exclusion of all other priorities. This does not necessarily apply to the student. Or it might. It just depends on the student.
Yeah, I don't think the comment you're replying to has it straight at all, and it looks like me might be a right wing troll any way lol.
I was a history major (and in retrospect, I should have majored in economics or geology/geophysics rather than history for many reasons - I went with what I loved when I was a kid, rather than what I turned out to be good at or newly into) and my professors in that field were very clear that there was basically no future for even the brightest undergrads to be tenured history faculty and that if I was going to go in I should have no hope of becoming one.
One of them, my advisor who was from a small Midwestern town and went to an Ivy as an undergrad and grad student before becoming tenured at my highly related SLAC and advising me told me basically outright, "You don't understand this right now but my friends who went into medicine, law, and finance are giving their kids opportunities I'll never be able to hand to my daughters". I had another prof who had just gotten tenure at my SLAC after her husband got denied at the SLAC on the other side of the river (guess where this is) and going over for coffee at their house was like a bad Raymond Carver short story.
Humanities academia has been in decline for a long time now, probably 50 or so years by now in the US. It's lost support and essential purpose, and if it goes out we're going to have to find another way to keep research and work in these essential and vital disciplines going.
I started to do some googling to test this theory. I suspect too many people major in Psychology (relative to the available job prospects). But lo and behold, the internet has garbage write-ups like this:
"What lucrative non-psychology career paths might a psychology major pursue? Because you understand human behavior and decision-making, you might make an excellent sales manager or marketing manager. The BLS reports median wages of $124,220 for sales managers and $134,290 for marketing managers. You can also use your knowledge of how the human brain works to go to law school and become a lawyer, an occupation with a median salary of $120,910."
I mean c'mon, NO, you do not see sales orgs sending account managers out to get Psych degrees because the knowledge is so valuable in sales. This does not pass the smell test. So yes, I guess there is a bad advice out there, sorry.
For people who've taken humanities or theoretical social science courses as majors, they are aware that there aren't many careers that will leverage what they've learned. But they do translate their learning skills into employable careers. When a job posting says minimum qualifications include a bachelor's in a specific field, they're negotiable about the major unless its a profession requiring a license (e.g., engineers, health care fields, accounting, law). Hirers are much more rigid on the college degree part, though.
To add to this, 1/3rd of students are first generation university students so they likely don't have anyone who can offer them good advice on college majors.
interesting - I might have thought they would be the ones thinking more practically about education, versus the folks from well-off families who might just drift into Art History or English or something
Great article but I think it is a little over-optimistic about how universities operate. I am adjunct at a four-year commuter university. I started the program while working (and raising a family), attending the school as a graduate student and then doing the adjunct work because I enjoy it. I am by no means an expert, so these are just my impressions.
In our university adjuncts teach about 40% of the student hours and are about 3% of the budget. So basically, a substantial portion of your teaching is done on a fraction of your overall budget. This kind of highlights the value placed on pure teaching and I suspect it is not uncommon. I know a lot of adjuncts, who would like to be more like tenured or even non-tenure track professors get upset about this, but adjuncting has never been a high paying or prestigious occupation (really more a side-job). Honestly, I think a better system would have fewer adjuncts and fewer tenured track professors and more non-tenured, teaching focused professor.
But this would only work well if actual education of students was the highest priority. I would say education of the student body is almost never the highest priority at any University...it's what generates student hours and, therefore, money. Education is the means to funding the truly high priority stuff.
What seems to be a high priority is the other stuff, and this varies by college. Sports at many colleges are a huge priority. Most colleges value prestige programs such as engineering, hard sciences, etc. They try harder to teach in these programs, but really it is not about education but more about the prestige associated with the program. Most four-year colleges place at least a moderate value (and some a very high value) on research. Finally, over the more than a decade that I have been in higher education it seems like indoctrinating students into a pre-identified, nearly religiously sacrosanct set of beliefs is among the top priorities (although this is often exaggerated by the political right).
This is what I see as problem one and really is about the incentives of the university staff. Administrators want to grow the university and increase its prestige. Tenured faculty vary. Some want a very easy job (the lazy ones) or want to focus on research and building their prestige (the more ambitious ones or the ones needing to make tenure) and many, but not nearly enough, want to educate their students. The proportion of each varies but I think most professors would agree that educating students is under-emphasized.
On the bottom end of the hierarchy things differ. Non-tenured faculty want to be treated like tenured staff and adjuncts want to be treated like non-tenured faculty. Again, many in both groups want to educate their students, but not all. Often these groups are not the sharpest or most motivated faculty, but I do think they value the teaching they provide.
The second set of issues is related to the students. As Noah points out they often have unrealistic expectations, both of the colleges and their ability to succeed with minimal efforts. I have so many students who claim they are going to be lawyers, and almost none succeed because they lack either the intellect, work ethic, or both. However, they can take loans, tell themselves they will have high-paying jobs so they can afford extra loans to live better, and then be horribly disappointed by reality. They also do not want to take difficult but high-paying jobs (due to the work ethic issues). People underestimate how many of these types of jobs exist, and many do not require a four-year degree.
I don't know what to do about this problem either as it is human nature. The students that fall into this group are not bad, or unintelligent, they are just lying to themselves (something we all do). The only way I could see to address this is to dial back loans for living expenses (which is for many students more than half of what they borrow and seem to be a favorite for those with questionable work ethics as they can take loans instead of working while going to school) and/or do a better job of ensuring loans go to those who will finish (because not finishing and taking the loans is disastrous) and are able to pay.
One final thought...so many programs currently in most universities are not linked very well to skills or knowledge that will generate a return for the student (I am looking at you "Critical Studies"). These programs should exist as they provide a valuable check on many of society's inequities. But they should also be much smaller in terms of size and student hours and more selective in how loans pay for the education.
The same could be said to a large extent about some other humanities programs and few, but still a substantial number, of social science programs. I am not saying these programs do not have value, only that most of them seem to attract the students most likely to regret taking out large loans to fund them. At the end of the day those of us in higher education should place the highest priority on these students' well-being (kind of like medicine's first do no harm principle).
>They also do not want to take difficult but high-paying jobs (due to the work ethic issues). People underestimate how many of these types of jobs exist, and many do not require a four-year degree.
Not sure if you mean more about the jobs or the students. In terms of the students, too many believe they will be able to skate through college, taking the easiest path to a degree, and make excellent money. Grade inflation, online classes that may not be as rigorous as in person classes and an emphasis by colleges on growing student body, while also trying to help them graduate may have reduced both the signaling value of college and the actual learning that occurs. This coupled with an emphasis on non-remunerative skills and activities (just look at all the activities colleges have) has probably added to the cost but not necessarily the employment options of the students. While an excellent return on investment, you still have to work and develop skills attractive to employers to make good money.
Also, I do not blame the students...they were raised in an environment, culture, and time where they were led to believe that high school, to college, to work = financial success. They were just doing what they were told would work and going about it in the same way older people would have if they had been raised in that environment. Luckily the coming demographic crash will probably make them fairly marketable regardless. It just means that some degrees will not be as good of an investment as they once were.
In terms of jobs that do not require a degree but pay well the easiest way to identify this kind of work is to Google it but just off the top of my head here are some excellent jobs that are high paying (at least by my standards) and do not require traditional four-year degrees:
RN - this pays anywhere from $60 to over $100k with overtime. In the community I live in the local hospital just signed a new contract and RN's will make $48 an hour.
Police Officer - These jobs take anywhere from no degree to military experience, to a 2 or 4 year degree but I know the Portland Police pay up to $113k annually and do not require a four- year degree. The median income for this profession is over $60k anywhere and that does not include overtime. I teach in this field and am amazed at how few of my students want to go down this path.
Electricians - start in the $50k range (probably much more now) and can earn in the $70 -100k range in a 4 or so years.
Dental Hygienists - this profession can earn $80k plus a year. More if you travel.
Fireman - this is not woodland firefighters (who are way underpaid) but in cities/fire districts firefighters can make near $100k a year (again you would need to work overtime to make that much) and have the best schedule in the world (a lot are one day on two days off).
There are a bunch more good jobs depending on location.
Funny that you mentioned the latter. My brother attended a top 20 university and subsequently burned out of management consulting and is working as an EMT with the eventual goal of becoming a municipal firefighter somewhere in metro Seattle, which is a highly desirable job. He's working his ass off right now and absolutely loves it. I will say that one of the downsides of hard labor and jobs in trades seem to be the physical effects over time. I had friends growing up whose dads were tradesmen (who became small business owners or something that netted them high incomes) who had big issues with mobility and physical pain after age 50 that got them into bad relationships with alcohol and painkillers. And this was before fentanyl.
Great point...I know there are a lot of mental health issues as well for first responders. Physical health, mental health/substance abuse and for some of the hours they work probably make some of the jobs less desirable.
A long comment, and some great insights, especially on how student loans are used to live life while not being much of a student. Student loans are they problem IMO.
But, I'm not sure I understand this sentence: "Finally, over the more than a decade that I have been in higher education it seems like indoctrinating students into a pre-identified, nearly religiously sacrosanct set of beliefs is among the top priorities (although this is often exaggerated by the political right)."
If "indoctrinating students into a pre-identified, nearly religiously sacrosanct set of beliefs is among the top priorities," how is this "often exaggerated by the political right" if it is a top priority of the university?
That is my fault. I actually edited out the explanation because the post was already too long, and this idea was tangential. My impression is that the really intense "woke" ideology that gets so many people upset is really the personal opinions of a small number of people in education but that institutionally the support is really more about appearances. It's basically lip service to keep the students from protesting, etc. Some departments are big into the ideology but behind closed doors most people admit the ideas lack rigor and just don't want to get sideways of the mob. I don't know if it's a majority, but a lot of folks believe that our current version of woke is kind of like a moral panic that is running its course. There are some truths in terms of marginalized populations being treated poorly, but the solutions become absurd.
The exaggeration by the right, again in my opinion, is the danger of the ideas or movement. Treat people as human beings worthy of respect and most of the issues go away.
IDK if this woke stuff is running its course, or not, but if we live long enough, we'll find out. In the meantime, it's easy to understand why "absurd solutions" are mocked by those evil righties, in the same way that the evil lefties mocks "absurd solutions" of the right (e.g., "don't have sex if you don't want to get pregnant"). But, I do not mean to put words in your mouth, so if that's not what you are getting at, then please ignore.
There's another aspect of our elite universities that needs to be considered,, which is their role as research and entrepreneurial centers of excellence.
You make a convincing case that the elite 12 don't do a good job in creating an economically diverse student body. But these same elite institutions and their graduate schools and often their hospitals are among the greatest assets of the country. And often are crucial to the economy of a city. What would Boston be without Harvard and MIT or Philly without UPenn?
I'm sure you recognize all this, but as criticism grows of the elite 12, we need to remind people of this other important aspect.
I have to point out that while MIT is one of the nations elite schools, it is an outlier in never giving preference to legacies or athletes. To everyone who says that the Ivies must give preference to he children of alumni and the super wealthy in order to pay the bills, MIT manages to get plenty of alumni dollars without doing that. If alumni support for Harvard and Yale is predicated on transferring elite status across generations, maybe they are not teaching Enlightenment values as well as they think they are.
I wonder what would happen if those schools killed their undergraduate programs and went graduate-only? If seems like that would neatly solve the problems you’re mentioning, except that funding would be difficult.
interesting idea, but as a business aren't there substantial synergies from having both UG and Grad programs? All those grad students teaching & grading papers...
Also, business and law schools do tend to run as pretty darn separate operations. But they can benefit from the shared brand name and operational efficiencies. I'm thinking of how MIT Sloan is pretty much in a separate part of the campus with separate professors, but they can piggyback on all the IT and accounting infrastructure that MIT has in place, share the same medical center, etc.
Kind of weird tho that prospective undergraduates are effectively competing for the chance to buy into the runoff prestige from the research institution.
I have a lot of thoughts on this. Before I list them, I would like to point everyone towards Slate's latest podcast episode, The Weeds, about the student loan crisis our country is experiencing. It goes a long way towards explaining how a nasty confluence of events, including poor public policy and great lobbying by greedy banks and very greedy universities, caused tuition costs to skyrocket and debt burdens to expand dramatically.
Note: I myself owe a ton of student loan money, having entered college in 2001 and continuing on to graduate school in 2005, believing what I had been told by my Boomer parents without question: get into the biggest name university you can to maximize your success in life. Following this advice has dramatically impacted my life (read: close to ruined, financially), and it's taken me years of struggle to even remotely right my own ship, sans a house or a family.
Anyway, back to what I see as the causes of this:
1.) The insane cost, expected debt burden, and now-proven inability on the part of policymakers to provide relief is a major deterrent to taking on a college education. This, coupled with comically low acceptance rates at elite schools that tend to cost the most, and one wonders how anyone of college age thinks they can attend a "school of their dreams" at all.
2.) The 2008 financial crisis disabused many Millennials and Gen Z'ers that the woefully out-of-date lessons Boomers had been teaching us (go to college, be successful!) held much water. One could expand this analysis, as Noah does in his article, to include a number of socioeconomic factors, but to me, this was the start of the sea change.
3.) Outside of a handful of elite, big-name schools that the "chattering class" Noah mentions cannot shut up about because they all mostly went to those places, America is chock full of excellent public schools, 2 year colleges, and other opportunities for advancement that mostly fell by the wayside over the last twenty or thirty years. Why? Because there is nothing Americans cannot vulgarize with money and elitism, including education. Noah also mentions a decline (and regret amongst those who get them) in humanities majors. Well, that isn't because humanities are not worth it, it's because we do not have good incentives to promote humanities majors and then support them with good jobs after college. And, as some commentators are pointing out during the WGA/SAG strikes and looming AI in the art world, a society without good humanities results in a less human, more brutish and stupid society. Think about that as our airwaves are flooded with game shows and reality TV this fall.
4.) Despite the over-simplified lessons we were taught, college degrees are not plug-and-play. You still have to go out there and hustle to get anything going for yourself these days, and I am not sure that back in the 60's, 70's, and 80's, this was as much the case. When I talk to older Boomers about their experiences, they mostly say they never thought twice about tuition, because there wasn't much of it to worry about, and they knew that after graduation they would be able to kind of mosey into jobs wherever they wanted, free of crushing debt and able to take risks. If a college-degree-requiring job didn't work out, they could always join a union or try something creative to make a living.
I've read Sandel and Markovitz's books on the perils of the Meritocracy run amok, and weighed that against the experience my grandfather had after WW2 attending the University of Michigan (he just showed up after moving to Ann Arbor with his family, talked to the dean, asked for in-state tuition because he'd just moved to town, and was admitted that day). The American economy back then was just such a wildly different place, and our younger generations frankly do not live in that world anymore. Like most things, America has done a poor job of updating our expectations or addressing these problems with sound public policy meant to shape society in an optimal way. I see that as the primary reason why trust in education has started to drop, and frankly, I think that we are all to blame for this trend.
Honestly, there may generally be less of a real need for humanities majors going forward into the future. In the past lots of college educated people of any kind were needed to staff corporate and government bureaucracies that operated on paperwork and human-regulated systems. With digitization, those that can master esoteric methods of data analysis, software engineering, and information management systems are needed above all other professionals, which you see reflected in the premium salaries their jobs command. Beyond that, I'm at least hoping to see a "Sputnik Moment" galvanize science and engineering to the end of renewable energy systems, carbon sequestration, sustainable infrastructure, and other stuff like that to beat climate change instead of the Soviet Union.
This is not to say that history, literature, art, and philosophy are worthless - quite the opposite - but more and more educated people might be learning those fields without getting a degree in them and that's okay.
To whose advantage does this break? I really hate to use this terminology...but is this technology going to deskill programming and information systems management or mastery of a wide array of fields that involve the corpus of human language? I'd say the former is more likely.
I understand your point but do not agree. I think you would see a natural adjustment up or down in certain industries, but we are already seeing what happens to the American public when civics classes are no longer required in school, and history is white-washed.
Do we need engineers and scientists? Yes, badly. But do we also need generalists and people who are taught how to think? I think we need that now more than ever.
I can see your point as well. Since I'd been posting about Scandinavian education systems elsewhere in the thread, one thing I've admired about Finland forever is how well respected and relatively highly paid public school teachers are there. Many of the graduating university students at the top of their classes want to be high school teachers. It would probably be better to funnel many of the brightest humanities grads in the country into pure teaching rather than into the professoriat, and that is a place where they would be essential.
I'm sorry things were so difficult for you. As a boomer, it is somewhat excruciating for me to see the amount of pressure young people are under these days. I passed up opportunities that kids now would give their right arm for and didn't think twice, and still got into good schools. Spending 12 plus hours a week doing athletic events from an early age is pretty detrimental to kids' mental health, but apparently that is semi-required. Sad state of affairs.
It rose dramatically over decades at private schools. I believe Noah linked a chart showing the costs in 2022 dollars from 1992 to today? What is the myth?
Advertised tuition and the average amount paid by students are very different things. Noah knows this and has acknowledged it elsewhere. I'm not sure why the presentation above is dumbed down with respect to this matter. Since you are passionate about this subject, you should educate yourself about the true cost of college, which includes the ubiquitous "scholarships" that have cancelled most of the scary-looking tuition increases.
I am aware of the true cost of college. After reading the Brookings piece, it isn't really persuasive that there is not a student debt problem in America today, which is what I was mostly talking about in my post. It talks about how financial aid partially discounts the cost of attendance (particularly at private schools) and that inflation has an effect on the cost. In addition, that article isn't acknowledging that many universities receive quite a great deal of money from the federal government, in the form of guaranteed loans, funds for research, grants, etc. Universities are not the wealthiest institutions we have, but many of them could easily afford to lower the cost of tuition (more on that is discussed in the podcast I link below), they just simply don't do it because they haven't had to.
Some things you are not considering:
One, the idea of meeting the full need of the student as long as they are admitted, and demonstrate need, is a relatively new concept introduced by Harvard in 2005. In my case, I received a Pell grant, and once, a semester-specific scholarship based on merit. When I attended college (2001-2005), merit-based scholarships existed, but they were not ubiquitous. Not all universities have attempted to follow Harvard's policy (Harvard has a ton of money), as some cannot afford to, but some have, and that's generally good.
I think if you did you might reconsider calling rising tuition a myth.
Three, sorry, but the overwhelming amount of evidence suggests that there is far too much student debt, it's affecting the lives of at least two generations of Americans (and the economy), and it isn't getting any better. Here is an article that discusses this more fully (in addition to the podcast): https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/us-student-loan-debt-trends-economic-impact
Lastly, there are ways we could be dealing with this much more effectively. Our peer nations offer good examples. So, solutions exist. Denying that there is a problem in the first place isn't one I am interested in.
Sorry your are in such financial straights, but is it possible that you would not be, expect for fed-guaranteed loans? I don't know what the Slate podcast has to say (I would not click on anything by Slate since they lost their shit in 2016, but I digress), but it is a simple fact that those "greedy banks" and - most to blame - "greedy colleges" vacuum up every dollar they can get get out of you. The more the US gov says they will "loan" you, the more the colleges will suck out of you. But, you know this since you experienced it. Our current President was a key senator in making sure those loans were not easily dischargeable in bankruptcy:
Yeah, there was a big propaganda movement that college is always worth it, no mater how much it costs. Your parents probably took that to heart, but it's easy for them to say when they are not paying. That narrative is finally dying, at least a little bit.
It is true that I would not be in debt had I not been loaned money, but that's not much of a connection to make. I participated in a system that a huge amount of young Americans did. I wouldn't have been able to make the choices I did without it, as I do not come from affluence. However, I made those choices as an inexperienced 18-22 year old who had been fed a narrative that was, even at the time, increasingly inaccurate. What I'm saying is, the system as it existed then (and mostly still exists now) is unfair, and leads to poor outcomes for our society.
What I was attempting to do in highlighting my own experience and listing out what I see are catastrophic failures in policy was to help us all think about how it could all be remedied in easy to understand ways. Personally, I think we need a greater emphasis on 2-year college and apprenticeship programs (and increase the strength of organized labor to demand greater benefits for workers), make public universities more attractive than they already are (and they are one of the greatest institutions our country has ever invested in), and de-emphasize the so-called "Meritocracy" (the policy prescriptions for this are outlined most clearly in Daniel Markovitz's book "The Meritocracy Trap," which I highly recommend).
Lastly, I don't care if Joe Biden voted to make student loan debt harder to discharge; politicians take all kinds of votes over time. What matters is what they are willing to do when situations change and public pressure demands action. In this case, Biden attempted to cancel up to $20,000 of student loan debt, due to a national crisis, and was struck down by a rabidly political Supreme Court that LOL-ed it's way through a piss-poor justification, arriving at "Well we just don't like it, so you can't do it." I'll save my ire for the real villains, thanks.
You think a global pandemic that ground the economy to a halt is not a crisis? Well, I disagree. And actually, the term used in the statute is "national emergency." Specifically: "in connection with a war or other military operation or national emergency." <-- COVID was declared a national emergency by the President on March 13, 2020.
You may not like the idea of forgiving some student loan debt, but the language of this is clear and the discretion to do so is supposed to be left up to the Secretary of Education.
Ryan - I understand and agree fully with your first two paragraphs. As for the last one, you can hate the SCOTUS all you want, but granting people money through whatever means, including sending them checks, debt relief, tax relief, whatever, needs to be done by Congress. Biden knew this. He did not care. He wanted to be able to blame the SCOTUS (which has always been "rapidly political" if you don't like their decisions). Consider that when Biden pulled this stunt, he could instead simply asked his Democrat controlled congress to pass an actual law that he would sign. But that did not happen. Ask yourself why? You were on the "receiving end" of political theater.
I don't agree that these must always be acts of congress. The whole point of having federal agencies and a large federal bureaucracy is to be able to delegate power from congress or the executive branches to act efficiently without their direct involvement in every particular instance. Anyway, that doesn't matter in this case. The Heroes Act of 2002 was an act of congress granting broad authority to the U.S. Secretary of Education to do exactly what Biden tried to do. So, what you want already took place.
On the ruling itself: the flimsy reasoning employed by the majority around standing on behalf of MOHELA (who did not sue and did not clearly want to be a party to the case) invented a harm out of whole cloth, and then fumbled around with the meaning of the words "waive" and "modify" to say that the statute wasn't clear enough. (This is particularly rich because the act itself has been used since its inception to waive, modify, pause, or forgive student loan debt for specific classes of borrowers with no legal challenge whatsoever.) The super-majority does this with a nonsense legal concept they had invented a few years prior called the "major questions doctrine," which just allows them to shoot down things they do not like.
And, sorry, but your argument here is somewhat ignorant of what has been taking place since the 6-3 supermajority of conservatives took over the Supreme Court.
"And, sorry, but your argument here is somewhat ignorant of what has been taking place since the 6-3 supermajority of conservatives took over the Supreme Court."
Exactly what a conservative would tell me after the Warren court took over and issued Roe v Wade. Many Scotus rulings are by their very nature political in that certain political stripes will be happy and others unhappy with the decision. This has always been true since Marbury v Madison. Whether or not you want to blame the make up of the court depends on whether you like the decision. Believe it or not, most decisions of the 6-3 supermajority court are in fact unanimous or at least with the majority included judges of both conservative and liberal stripes. I am well-aware of boots-strapping and important question doctrine for standing. It's been allowed by plenty of liberal judges and appellant courts through the years. It's why we have forum shopping consultants that make a living on the topic of which courts will be friendly to both allow your case to be heard and rule in your favor. It's the way the system works. I stopped the litigation part of practice some years ago, so I don't keep up so much, but I don't think I've reached "ignorant" of how the federal courts operate. And, again, why didn't the Dem controlled congress/senate of 2021-2022 just pass a law handing out debt relief, or at least making the loans dischargeable in BR?
I repeat, they didn't do that because they didn't have the votes and it was presumed that either the Heroes Act or subsequent authority that the Secretary of Education has could handle the policy.
I'm not trying to be partisan in my anger, by the way. I look at policy and SCOTUS rulings from the standpoint of how much sense they make and what their outcome will be on society writ large.
Yes, but. We shifted the subsidies from supply-side to demand-side, in the form of vastly expanded federally subsidized student loans. We removed the cap from Grad Plus loans and made many other changes besides. As you might expect, it improved completion rates but as you pointed out, we also ended up with large tuition increases.
See: Black et al, 2020, "Taking It to the Limit: Effects of Increased Student Loan Availability on Attainment, Earnings, and Financial Well-Being" and Black et al, 2023, "PLUS or Minus? The Effect of Graduate School Loans on Access, Attainment, and Prices."
Interesting question and I sure don’t have the answer. If subsidies lower the overall cost of higher education, then I would think expectations would drop even lower with reduced subsidies in a cost/benefit setting. In a public goods setting if the benefits to society from higher education is overstated then reducing the subsidies might make sense, assuming they were optimal under previous expectations.
" If subsidies lower the overall cost of higher education"
In some fantasy world, government subsidies transfer the same costs from the student to the government. But in reality, colleges just raise the prices to suck up all those subsidies and still suck as much as possible out of the student and his/her family. This is why guaranteed student loans caused the costs to skyrocket. Every time the max loan amount is increased, the colleges raise tuition/fees to vacuum it up. Then the students cry out for higher limits because they are still broke. Government raises the limits, and tuition/fee shoot up to grab it. Quite a feedback loop.
You want the price of college to decrease coupled with a better vetting of who actually belongs there (and will benefit)? Then stop guaranteed loans. Let the universities finance their own sales, just like auto dealers, and take the default risk instead of the US treasury.
When someone else is paying, what do you care if your product is not worthy of the cost?
Highly stratified systems like US (with Ivies +) and UK (with Oxbridge) worked well when the proportion of young people going to college/university was small, but the model can't be scaled because it's based on huge endowments of land and financial assets that can't be replicated.
Cal State is the second-tier public in CA while SUNY is the top-tier in NY.
I'm not sure what you mean by "supporting" these schools. To make them cheaper, increase enrollment, or what? I can say that for a state that size of NY, the public uni system is poor compared to the likes of GA, CA, WA, TX, VA, MN, MI, IL, WI, MD. The NY high school grads just don't have a mass, low-cost, highly-ranked uni available to them.
The consequence is a lot of really bright working-class kids in CUNY/SUNY, but there really should be a proper flagship. I'm not sure what historical factors have led to these circumstances.
Many of the schools at Cornell (Agriculture and Life Sciences, Industrial and Labor Relations, Human Ecology, Veterinary Medicine to name a few) are state schools with state tuition for in-state students. They're all highly ranked and would count as flagships in any state's system.
Thanks for the comment, I did not know that. You overstate things a bit when you write "to name a few". It's precisely the four programs you mentioned, and no more.
So the situation is indeed a little better than I indicated. It's not all of Cornell though. No physics, math, CS, business, etc. While NYS higher ed is not quite as bad as I suggested, I would still say that it's probably the weakest in the nation after adjusting for state population.
Are people who attend ivies more likely to enter academia? If so, that could explain why those who just missed the cut made similar money. Academia is a high prestige but relatively low income career
Yes generally but not at the bottom of admits, which is the relevant comparison. What’s relevant is how people do on both sides of the admission cutoff: those who just barely got off the waitlist compared to those who just barely didn’t make it off the waitlist.
I feel like we should blame the institutions staffed with people those same institutions certified as brilliant rather than employers who are trying to meet material human needs directly by providing goods and services.
When I was was going to college, 72-75, I was generally clueless about work, salaries and expectations. I expect HS students have more knowledge about the researchable facts of incomes by profession.
I'm much more certain they are clueless about the context, competition and how it all will work.
Unless. They come from a highly educated college parent. Doctors, executives. Ergo the legacy.
I went to several Ivy League schools, but I'm old and out of boredom I've been watching some YouTube etc lectures, often from much less famous colleges. And to be honest there's really no difference in the quality of lecturing. Of course the famous college professors I'm sure do better research and publishing but that really doesn't affect students. But I'm sure by far the biggest difference in educational experience is the quality of the student body, which makes a huge difference. That's why I think tinkering with the student body to reach diversity or fundraising goals is always going to negatively affect the learning experience.
Elite institutions rely on their brand name, not the quality of their professors, to attract the students and employment premia required to retain their status. They've taken a page from Louis Vuitton and so far it's worked.
Lecturing is in many ways the least valuable part - as you note, a lecture on YouTube is about as good as one in person. But answering questions and holding office hours can enable a professor to give you access to their broader understanding and not just the equivalent of a ten page textbook chapter.
The word “can” is doing a lot of work here. Some professors might engage a student well and simulate a greater interest in their field. Others may be lazy idiots who realize they don’t have to care since they’re tenured. And then there’s the profs who simply hand office hours to a TA.
Good point. I think the asking questions differentiator ties more to my emphasis on the quality of the student body, but also takes the professor into subjects discussed in a more give and take format. But the office hours and one on one time with professors is very valuable. Back in my day, at large-ish elite universities, it was pretty rare to do that, and forget about talking to famous professors or people up the hierarchy. Now I live in a college town dominated by a prestigious college (that I'm not connected to). It's amazing to see how much time the students spend with professors, on and off campus. I know the college president much more than I ever knew the presidents of my schools.
Elite institutions aren’t only brands. They provide smarter and harder-working classmates, as you note. But because the class is of better quality generally, the education is better. This enhancement is because assessments like tests and projects have to be made harder, to still effectively separate the men from the boys, when the class is generally strong. Remember that most learning happens at the active practice stage, and not the passive reading/listening phase. So, the crappy lecture quality doesn’t matter. It’s fine to have research stars “teach” lol even if they’re not engaging. So, even with bad lecturers, elite schools do provide a better education through the more rigorous assessments they have to provide.
Yes, I think I rambled here. But all I really meant is that the quality of the student body, which is statistically reflected in the difficulty of admission, is paramount. The school "brand" depends on it. So the more they make it easier for some applicants to get in despite lower academics, the more they brand is tarnished. At one extreme, I remember someone, I think in a NYT editorial, arguing that admissions should be by lottery, randomly assigning kids to Yale or Hertzing University (showed up when I googled worst college).
College generally pays off, even for Humanities majors (at least if you don’t overburden yourself with debt), but if you’re a Humanities major you have to have some idea of what you want to do after college and maybe do an internship or something during college. If you don’t, then it may be hard to find a good job, and it may have been (financially) better to do a trade school or something.
All that being said, I do wonder if there are civil/societal benefits from people going to college apart from the financial cost! (Of course, that doesn’t mean it’s worth it to financially ruin yourself.)
The fact our universities have become ideological training grounds for the new commissars of the far left is one reason many people have lost respect for them. Zero intellectual diversity, sterile academic atmosphere and overpriced degrees. Can anyone blame the public at-large for falling out of love with our system of higher education?
Thank you for adding this. The military and small businesses are regularly at the top of trusted institutions. I did not serve. Just appreciate you reminding folks.
Great data-based article. Some decidedly not-data-based thoughts:
Quality of education will improve as less kids go to college. Students who are outwardly dismissive of learning and are there only for the signals to future potential employers sap the learning energy and teaching energy from students and professors. Those students shifting away from college to the job market is good for everyone.
I wonder if the social benefit of college is reducing over time as social networks become less place-based.
Firstly, Irrespective of the impressive stats, this is the third article in a week I've seen on some variation of the theme that college is no longer worth it from Noah Smith: Ph.D U. Michigan, Bryan Caplan: Ph.D. Princeton, Richard Hanania: JD U. Chicago. Is the subtext that it's worth it for them, but not for the rest of us?
Secondly, I grew up relatively poor. There's no way I would've had my career if I hadn't gone to college. My kids both went to college and there's no way they'd have their respective jobs if they hadn't. What am I missing? It's worth it for me, but not for other people?
Having asked these two admittedly rhetorical questions, I understand there are lots of kids for whom college is going to be a waste of time and work/apprenticeship is going to be a much better option, but let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater.
My hiring business experience over the last 15 years, albeit small sample, is that PhDs are a far better value hire than BS ME, and 10x better than generic BS Biomedical. The PhDs know how to multitask. Write effectively. Organize and initiate their work. Efficiently do it. Offer to more. Work harder. And today, with CAE, CAD, DOE, simulations, they can go start to finish on a product program or design.
When I started calling on automotive in 1977, I recall visiting the world's largest engineering group, Fisher Body at the GM Tech center. Then, it was as wood drafting tables, beziers, slope rules and 2 to 5 draftsmen per engineer.
So I really like and respect your writings on higher ed, Noah, and I am desperate to read that poem, which gets at something I wondered about with this piece: the subject is college but not knowledge! From my position as dean the key component part I am required to deliver is a curriculum, is teaching. (You mention teaching twice but not as an activity.) In my decades in higher ed I have seen a reduction in that teaching component compared to all the other goods college is supposed to be delivering now: a sense of identity, belonging, skills for social mobility, a premiere residential experience (at some places), access to sporting events (at some places), access to Greek life (at some places), etc. So from my perspective it bears noting that my small component -- delivering a curriculum, supporting excellent teaching and the delivery/transfer of knowledge to hungry young minds -- is still what we should do and I don't blame graduates for being sad that they're getting less of that for the money.
Oh and PS -- humanities majors are in fact rising at many places, including UUtah!
I have a (probably wrong) theory that in the coming decades, progress in automation and AI will cause a lot of higher institutions to rebrand themselves as some kind of "return to form". As in, return to what colleges were in the past. Places of learning for the liberal arts. Making colleges more of an institution of culture instead of the proxies for corporate internships.
That's born from my feeling that colleges have been saddled with the responsibility to make workers capable of hitting the ground running when they arrive at their job, instead of expecting those organizations to properly equip themselves with the ability to train their workers with the skills they'll need to succeed.
As a dean, do you share that impression on colleges being set up as the one-stop shop for job training, essentially offloading the risk businesses take in training someone? If so, do you think this is a good thing for colleges? Or might it be good for them to return to that older liberal arts ethos?
Don't know if it's true, but I've read recently that computer science majors are having a hard time finding jobs due to oversupply plus the ravages of AI. I'm a terrible programmer, but now I just have ChatGPT write and troubleshoot my Python code.
That suggests a revival of subjects that give you a framework for solving problems and practical tools to do so. Engineering. Economics. Business-related subjects like finance and marketing and operations science. And the experience of collaborating with others towards a common endeavor.
AI can write code, but it doesn't necessarily tell you how to approach a problem and bring together a team to accomplish it.
I also wonder if the woke reputation of the highly educated in general and professors in particular is driving away students.
lol knowledge they’ll quickly forget because they’re not regularly using it, unless you count projecting status at cocktail parties (are those still a thing?)
Projecting status dates back to the formation of Homo sapiens as a distinct species.
I just want the humanities to keep up with the best ways of projecting status so students get their money’s worth
I find it a little weird to see the survey response that college is not worth the cost "because people often graduate without specific job skills..."
People, you know you can pick your own major, right? So, maybe just don't make bad choices?
Like I painfully recall switching majors because I wanted to be sure my degree that would line up to a job. And I say "painfully" because in the 90s I switched from Math (too theoretical) to Business and then watched my math friends make crazy money as Wall St quants. Sigh.
"People, you know you can pick your own major, right? So, maybe just don't make bad choices?"
Not all 17-18 year old kids make great choices. And sometimes the adults in their lives give them terrible advice. My older son did not want to take any "hard" courses, and he had no problem graduating with a history major. He then became a paramedic. His degree has nothing to do with his job, other than he has one. My younger son tried engineering, could not cut the math, changed majors a few times and then eventually dropped out. Now he works as a pharmacy technician. His college courses also have nothing to do with his job, but not having a degree is a stigma if other pharmacy technicians have a history degree o the like.
Also professors actively mislead students about the fulfillment-practicality trade off. Like an in-house propaganda organ.
Correct, but I think this really depends on the person. To be a professor of something almost definitionally means that you are passionate about your field to the point you value it to the exclusion of all other priorities. This does not necessarily apply to the student. Or it might. It just depends on the student.
Yeah, I don't think the comment you're replying to has it straight at all, and it looks like me might be a right wing troll any way lol.
I was a history major (and in retrospect, I should have majored in economics or geology/geophysics rather than history for many reasons - I went with what I loved when I was a kid, rather than what I turned out to be good at or newly into) and my professors in that field were very clear that there was basically no future for even the brightest undergrads to be tenured history faculty and that if I was going to go in I should have no hope of becoming one.
One of them, my advisor who was from a small Midwestern town and went to an Ivy as an undergrad and grad student before becoming tenured at my highly related SLAC and advising me told me basically outright, "You don't understand this right now but my friends who went into medicine, law, and finance are giving their kids opportunities I'll never be able to hand to my daughters". I had another prof who had just gotten tenure at my SLAC after her husband got denied at the SLAC on the other side of the river (guess where this is) and going over for coffee at their house was like a bad Raymond Carver short story.
Humanities academia has been in decline for a long time now, probably 50 or so years by now in the US. It's lost support and essential purpose, and if it goes out we're going to have to find another way to keep research and work in these essential and vital disciplines going.
I started to do some googling to test this theory. I suspect too many people major in Psychology (relative to the available job prospects). But lo and behold, the internet has garbage write-ups like this:
"What lucrative non-psychology career paths might a psychology major pursue? Because you understand human behavior and decision-making, you might make an excellent sales manager or marketing manager. The BLS reports median wages of $124,220 for sales managers and $134,290 for marketing managers. You can also use your knowledge of how the human brain works to go to law school and become a lawyer, an occupation with a median salary of $120,910."
I mean c'mon, NO, you do not see sales orgs sending account managers out to get Psych degrees because the knowledge is so valuable in sales. This does not pass the smell test. So yes, I guess there is a bad advice out there, sorry.
(ref: https://www.degreequery.com/queries/what-is-the-salary-potential-for-someone-with-a-psychology-degree/ )
The advice isn't bad.
For people who've taken humanities or theoretical social science courses as majors, they are aware that there aren't many careers that will leverage what they've learned. But they do translate their learning skills into employable careers. When a job posting says minimum qualifications include a bachelor's in a specific field, they're negotiable about the major unless its a profession requiring a license (e.g., engineers, health care fields, accounting, law). Hirers are much more rigid on the college degree part, though.
To add to this, 1/3rd of students are first generation university students so they likely don't have anyone who can offer them good advice on college majors.
interesting - I might have thought they would be the ones thinking more practically about education, versus the folks from well-off families who might just drift into Art History or English or something
Yeah. It's a market correction, really.
Great article but I think it is a little over-optimistic about how universities operate. I am adjunct at a four-year commuter university. I started the program while working (and raising a family), attending the school as a graduate student and then doing the adjunct work because I enjoy it. I am by no means an expert, so these are just my impressions.
In our university adjuncts teach about 40% of the student hours and are about 3% of the budget. So basically, a substantial portion of your teaching is done on a fraction of your overall budget. This kind of highlights the value placed on pure teaching and I suspect it is not uncommon. I know a lot of adjuncts, who would like to be more like tenured or even non-tenure track professors get upset about this, but adjuncting has never been a high paying or prestigious occupation (really more a side-job). Honestly, I think a better system would have fewer adjuncts and fewer tenured track professors and more non-tenured, teaching focused professor.
But this would only work well if actual education of students was the highest priority. I would say education of the student body is almost never the highest priority at any University...it's what generates student hours and, therefore, money. Education is the means to funding the truly high priority stuff.
What seems to be a high priority is the other stuff, and this varies by college. Sports at many colleges are a huge priority. Most colleges value prestige programs such as engineering, hard sciences, etc. They try harder to teach in these programs, but really it is not about education but more about the prestige associated with the program. Most four-year colleges place at least a moderate value (and some a very high value) on research. Finally, over the more than a decade that I have been in higher education it seems like indoctrinating students into a pre-identified, nearly religiously sacrosanct set of beliefs is among the top priorities (although this is often exaggerated by the political right).
This is what I see as problem one and really is about the incentives of the university staff. Administrators want to grow the university and increase its prestige. Tenured faculty vary. Some want a very easy job (the lazy ones) or want to focus on research and building their prestige (the more ambitious ones or the ones needing to make tenure) and many, but not nearly enough, want to educate their students. The proportion of each varies but I think most professors would agree that educating students is under-emphasized.
On the bottom end of the hierarchy things differ. Non-tenured faculty want to be treated like tenured staff and adjuncts want to be treated like non-tenured faculty. Again, many in both groups want to educate their students, but not all. Often these groups are not the sharpest or most motivated faculty, but I do think they value the teaching they provide.
The second set of issues is related to the students. As Noah points out they often have unrealistic expectations, both of the colleges and their ability to succeed with minimal efforts. I have so many students who claim they are going to be lawyers, and almost none succeed because they lack either the intellect, work ethic, or both. However, they can take loans, tell themselves they will have high-paying jobs so they can afford extra loans to live better, and then be horribly disappointed by reality. They also do not want to take difficult but high-paying jobs (due to the work ethic issues). People underestimate how many of these types of jobs exist, and many do not require a four-year degree.
I don't know what to do about this problem either as it is human nature. The students that fall into this group are not bad, or unintelligent, they are just lying to themselves (something we all do). The only way I could see to address this is to dial back loans for living expenses (which is for many students more than half of what they borrow and seem to be a favorite for those with questionable work ethics as they can take loans instead of working while going to school) and/or do a better job of ensuring loans go to those who will finish (because not finishing and taking the loans is disastrous) and are able to pay.
One final thought...so many programs currently in most universities are not linked very well to skills or knowledge that will generate a return for the student (I am looking at you "Critical Studies"). These programs should exist as they provide a valuable check on many of society's inequities. But they should also be much smaller in terms of size and student hours and more selective in how loans pay for the education.
The same could be said to a large extent about some other humanities programs and few, but still a substantial number, of social science programs. I am not saying these programs do not have value, only that most of them seem to attract the students most likely to regret taking out large loans to fund them. At the end of the day those of us in higher education should place the highest priority on these students' well-being (kind of like medicine's first do no harm principle).
>They also do not want to take difficult but high-paying jobs (due to the work ethic issues). People underestimate how many of these types of jobs exist, and many do not require a four-year degree.
I would love to hear more about this
Not sure if you mean more about the jobs or the students. In terms of the students, too many believe they will be able to skate through college, taking the easiest path to a degree, and make excellent money. Grade inflation, online classes that may not be as rigorous as in person classes and an emphasis by colleges on growing student body, while also trying to help them graduate may have reduced both the signaling value of college and the actual learning that occurs. This coupled with an emphasis on non-remunerative skills and activities (just look at all the activities colleges have) has probably added to the cost but not necessarily the employment options of the students. While an excellent return on investment, you still have to work and develop skills attractive to employers to make good money.
Also, I do not blame the students...they were raised in an environment, culture, and time where they were led to believe that high school, to college, to work = financial success. They were just doing what they were told would work and going about it in the same way older people would have if they had been raised in that environment. Luckily the coming demographic crash will probably make them fairly marketable regardless. It just means that some degrees will not be as good of an investment as they once were.
In terms of jobs that do not require a degree but pay well the easiest way to identify this kind of work is to Google it but just off the top of my head here are some excellent jobs that are high paying (at least by my standards) and do not require traditional four-year degrees:
RN - this pays anywhere from $60 to over $100k with overtime. In the community I live in the local hospital just signed a new contract and RN's will make $48 an hour.
Police Officer - These jobs take anywhere from no degree to military experience, to a 2 or 4 year degree but I know the Portland Police pay up to $113k annually and do not require a four- year degree. The median income for this profession is over $60k anywhere and that does not include overtime. I teach in this field and am amazed at how few of my students want to go down this path.
Electricians - start in the $50k range (probably much more now) and can earn in the $70 -100k range in a 4 or so years.
Dental Hygienists - this profession can earn $80k plus a year. More if you travel.
Fireman - this is not woodland firefighters (who are way underpaid) but in cities/fire districts firefighters can make near $100k a year (again you would need to work overtime to make that much) and have the best schedule in the world (a lot are one day on two days off).
There are a bunch more good jobs depending on location.
Funny that you mentioned the latter. My brother attended a top 20 university and subsequently burned out of management consulting and is working as an EMT with the eventual goal of becoming a municipal firefighter somewhere in metro Seattle, which is a highly desirable job. He's working his ass off right now and absolutely loves it. I will say that one of the downsides of hard labor and jobs in trades seem to be the physical effects over time. I had friends growing up whose dads were tradesmen (who became small business owners or something that netted them high incomes) who had big issues with mobility and physical pain after age 50 that got them into bad relationships with alcohol and painkillers. And this was before fentanyl.
Great point...I know there are a lot of mental health issues as well for first responders. Physical health, mental health/substance abuse and for some of the hours they work probably make some of the jobs less desirable.
A long comment, and some great insights, especially on how student loans are used to live life while not being much of a student. Student loans are they problem IMO.
But, I'm not sure I understand this sentence: "Finally, over the more than a decade that I have been in higher education it seems like indoctrinating students into a pre-identified, nearly religiously sacrosanct set of beliefs is among the top priorities (although this is often exaggerated by the political right)."
If "indoctrinating students into a pre-identified, nearly religiously sacrosanct set of beliefs is among the top priorities," how is this "often exaggerated by the political right" if it is a top priority of the university?
That is my fault. I actually edited out the explanation because the post was already too long, and this idea was tangential. My impression is that the really intense "woke" ideology that gets so many people upset is really the personal opinions of a small number of people in education but that institutionally the support is really more about appearances. It's basically lip service to keep the students from protesting, etc. Some departments are big into the ideology but behind closed doors most people admit the ideas lack rigor and just don't want to get sideways of the mob. I don't know if it's a majority, but a lot of folks believe that our current version of woke is kind of like a moral panic that is running its course. There are some truths in terms of marginalized populations being treated poorly, but the solutions become absurd.
The exaggeration by the right, again in my opinion, is the danger of the ideas or movement. Treat people as human beings worthy of respect and most of the issues go away.
IDK if this woke stuff is running its course, or not, but if we live long enough, we'll find out. In the meantime, it's easy to understand why "absurd solutions" are mocked by those evil righties, in the same way that the evil lefties mocks "absurd solutions" of the right (e.g., "don't have sex if you don't want to get pregnant"). But, I do not mean to put words in your mouth, so if that's not what you are getting at, then please ignore.
I agree completely...the biggest danger is demonizing each other.
There's another aspect of our elite universities that needs to be considered,, which is their role as research and entrepreneurial centers of excellence.
You make a convincing case that the elite 12 don't do a good job in creating an economically diverse student body. But these same elite institutions and their graduate schools and often their hospitals are among the greatest assets of the country. And often are crucial to the economy of a city. What would Boston be without Harvard and MIT or Philly without UPenn?
I'm sure you recognize all this, but as criticism grows of the elite 12, we need to remind people of this other important aspect.
Yeah. That will be the follow-up post!
I have to point out that while MIT is one of the nations elite schools, it is an outlier in never giving preference to legacies or athletes. To everyone who says that the Ivies must give preference to he children of alumni and the super wealthy in order to pay the bills, MIT manages to get plenty of alumni dollars without doing that. If alumni support for Harvard and Yale is predicated on transferring elite status across generations, maybe they are not teaching Enlightenment values as well as they think they are.
Yes, it is delightful how many write-ups of this latest Chetty research have to say "except MIT" in their descriptions of the problem!
A cynic might suggest that the legacies or athletes wouldn’t graduate from rigorous tech programs.
Also CalTech, I think, but those schools are techy while the prestige admissions places are more business and law oriented.
Yes, pretty sure Cal Tech is a no legacy school too.
I wonder what would happen if those schools killed their undergraduate programs and went graduate-only? If seems like that would neatly solve the problems you’re mentioning, except that funding would be difficult.
interesting idea, but as a business aren't there substantial synergies from having both UG and Grad programs? All those grad students teaching & grading papers...
Also, business and law schools do tend to run as pretty darn separate operations. But they can benefit from the shared brand name and operational efficiencies. I'm thinking of how MIT Sloan is pretty much in a separate part of the campus with separate professors, but they can piggyback on all the IT and accounting infrastructure that MIT has in place, share the same medical center, etc.
Kind of weird tho that prospective undergraduates are effectively competing for the chance to buy into the runoff prestige from the research institution.
Impressive data driven article.
I have a lot of thoughts on this. Before I list them, I would like to point everyone towards Slate's latest podcast episode, The Weeds, about the student loan crisis our country is experiencing. It goes a long way towards explaining how a nasty confluence of events, including poor public policy and great lobbying by greedy banks and very greedy universities, caused tuition costs to skyrocket and debt burdens to expand dramatically.
Note: I myself owe a ton of student loan money, having entered college in 2001 and continuing on to graduate school in 2005, believing what I had been told by my Boomer parents without question: get into the biggest name university you can to maximize your success in life. Following this advice has dramatically impacted my life (read: close to ruined, financially), and it's taken me years of struggle to even remotely right my own ship, sans a house or a family.
Anyway, back to what I see as the causes of this:
1.) The insane cost, expected debt burden, and now-proven inability on the part of policymakers to provide relief is a major deterrent to taking on a college education. This, coupled with comically low acceptance rates at elite schools that tend to cost the most, and one wonders how anyone of college age thinks they can attend a "school of their dreams" at all.
2.) The 2008 financial crisis disabused many Millennials and Gen Z'ers that the woefully out-of-date lessons Boomers had been teaching us (go to college, be successful!) held much water. One could expand this analysis, as Noah does in his article, to include a number of socioeconomic factors, but to me, this was the start of the sea change.
3.) Outside of a handful of elite, big-name schools that the "chattering class" Noah mentions cannot shut up about because they all mostly went to those places, America is chock full of excellent public schools, 2 year colleges, and other opportunities for advancement that mostly fell by the wayside over the last twenty or thirty years. Why? Because there is nothing Americans cannot vulgarize with money and elitism, including education. Noah also mentions a decline (and regret amongst those who get them) in humanities majors. Well, that isn't because humanities are not worth it, it's because we do not have good incentives to promote humanities majors and then support them with good jobs after college. And, as some commentators are pointing out during the WGA/SAG strikes and looming AI in the art world, a society without good humanities results in a less human, more brutish and stupid society. Think about that as our airwaves are flooded with game shows and reality TV this fall.
4.) Despite the over-simplified lessons we were taught, college degrees are not plug-and-play. You still have to go out there and hustle to get anything going for yourself these days, and I am not sure that back in the 60's, 70's, and 80's, this was as much the case. When I talk to older Boomers about their experiences, they mostly say they never thought twice about tuition, because there wasn't much of it to worry about, and they knew that after graduation they would be able to kind of mosey into jobs wherever they wanted, free of crushing debt and able to take risks. If a college-degree-requiring job didn't work out, they could always join a union or try something creative to make a living.
I've read Sandel and Markovitz's books on the perils of the Meritocracy run amok, and weighed that against the experience my grandfather had after WW2 attending the University of Michigan (he just showed up after moving to Ann Arbor with his family, talked to the dean, asked for in-state tuition because he'd just moved to town, and was admitted that day). The American economy back then was just such a wildly different place, and our younger generations frankly do not live in that world anymore. Like most things, America has done a poor job of updating our expectations or addressing these problems with sound public policy meant to shape society in an optimal way. I see that as the primary reason why trust in education has started to drop, and frankly, I think that we are all to blame for this trend.
Honestly, there may generally be less of a real need for humanities majors going forward into the future. In the past lots of college educated people of any kind were needed to staff corporate and government bureaucracies that operated on paperwork and human-regulated systems. With digitization, those that can master esoteric methods of data analysis, software engineering, and information management systems are needed above all other professionals, which you see reflected in the premium salaries their jobs command. Beyond that, I'm at least hoping to see a "Sputnik Moment" galvanize science and engineering to the end of renewable energy systems, carbon sequestration, sustainable infrastructure, and other stuff like that to beat climate change instead of the Soviet Union.
This is not to say that history, literature, art, and philosophy are worthless - quite the opposite - but more and more educated people might be learning those fields without getting a degree in them and that's okay.
GPT-5.
To whose advantage does this break? I really hate to use this terminology...but is this technology going to deskill programming and information systems management or mastery of a wide array of fields that involve the corpus of human language? I'd say the former is more likely.
I understand your point but do not agree. I think you would see a natural adjustment up or down in certain industries, but we are already seeing what happens to the American public when civics classes are no longer required in school, and history is white-washed.
Do we need engineers and scientists? Yes, badly. But do we also need generalists and people who are taught how to think? I think we need that now more than ever.
I can see your point as well. Since I'd been posting about Scandinavian education systems elsewhere in the thread, one thing I've admired about Finland forever is how well respected and relatively highly paid public school teachers are there. Many of the graduating university students at the top of their classes want to be high school teachers. It would probably be better to funnel many of the brightest humanities grads in the country into pure teaching rather than into the professoriat, and that is a place where they would be essential.
I'm sorry things were so difficult for you. As a boomer, it is somewhat excruciating for me to see the amount of pressure young people are under these days. I passed up opportunities that kids now would give their right arm for and didn't think twice, and still got into good schools. Spending 12 plus hours a week doing athletic events from an early age is pretty detrimental to kids' mental health, but apparently that is semi-required. Sad state of affairs.
ahh the myth of rising tuition is alive and well...
It rose dramatically over decades at private schools. I believe Noah linked a chart showing the costs in 2022 dollars from 1992 to today? What is the myth?
Start here:
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/inflation-affects-the-price-of-everything-including-a-college-education/
You're welcome =)
Advertised tuition and the average amount paid by students are very different things. Noah knows this and has acknowledged it elsewhere. I'm not sure why the presentation above is dumbed down with respect to this matter. Since you are passionate about this subject, you should educate yourself about the true cost of college, which includes the ubiquitous "scholarships" that have cancelled most of the scary-looking tuition increases.
Michael,
I am aware of the true cost of college. After reading the Brookings piece, it isn't really persuasive that there is not a student debt problem in America today, which is what I was mostly talking about in my post. It talks about how financial aid partially discounts the cost of attendance (particularly at private schools) and that inflation has an effect on the cost. In addition, that article isn't acknowledging that many universities receive quite a great deal of money from the federal government, in the form of guaranteed loans, funds for research, grants, etc. Universities are not the wealthiest institutions we have, but many of them could easily afford to lower the cost of tuition (more on that is discussed in the podcast I link below), they just simply don't do it because they haven't had to.
Some things you are not considering:
One, the idea of meeting the full need of the student as long as they are admitted, and demonstrate need, is a relatively new concept introduced by Harvard in 2005. In my case, I received a Pell grant, and once, a semester-specific scholarship based on merit. When I attended college (2001-2005), merit-based scholarships existed, but they were not ubiquitous. Not all universities have attempted to follow Harvard's policy (Harvard has a ton of money), as some cannot afford to, but some have, and that's generally good.
Two, I would encourage you to listen to The Weeds podcast about this: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-weeds/id1042433083
I think if you did you might reconsider calling rising tuition a myth.
Three, sorry, but the overwhelming amount of evidence suggests that there is far too much student debt, it's affecting the lives of at least two generations of Americans (and the economy), and it isn't getting any better. Here is an article that discusses this more fully (in addition to the podcast): https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/us-student-loan-debt-trends-economic-impact
Lastly, there are ways we could be dealing with this much more effectively. Our peer nations offer good examples. So, solutions exist. Denying that there is a problem in the first place isn't one I am interested in.
Ryan,
Sorry your are in such financial straights, but is it possible that you would not be, expect for fed-guaranteed loans? I don't know what the Slate podcast has to say (I would not click on anything by Slate since they lost their shit in 2016, but I digress), but it is a simple fact that those "greedy banks" and - most to blame - "greedy colleges" vacuum up every dollar they can get get out of you. The more the US gov says they will "loan" you, the more the colleges will suck out of you. But, you know this since you experienced it. Our current President was a key senator in making sure those loans were not easily dischargeable in bankruptcy:
https://www.businessinsider.com/biden-made-it-harder-to-discharge-student-debt-through-bankruptcy-2022-5?op=1
Yeah, there was a big propaganda movement that college is always worth it, no mater how much it costs. Your parents probably took that to heart, but it's easy for them to say when they are not paying. That narrative is finally dying, at least a little bit.
David,
It is true that I would not be in debt had I not been loaned money, but that's not much of a connection to make. I participated in a system that a huge amount of young Americans did. I wouldn't have been able to make the choices I did without it, as I do not come from affluence. However, I made those choices as an inexperienced 18-22 year old who had been fed a narrative that was, even at the time, increasingly inaccurate. What I'm saying is, the system as it existed then (and mostly still exists now) is unfair, and leads to poor outcomes for our society.
What I was attempting to do in highlighting my own experience and listing out what I see are catastrophic failures in policy was to help us all think about how it could all be remedied in easy to understand ways. Personally, I think we need a greater emphasis on 2-year college and apprenticeship programs (and increase the strength of organized labor to demand greater benefits for workers), make public universities more attractive than they already are (and they are one of the greatest institutions our country has ever invested in), and de-emphasize the so-called "Meritocracy" (the policy prescriptions for this are outlined most clearly in Daniel Markovitz's book "The Meritocracy Trap," which I highly recommend).
Lastly, I don't care if Joe Biden voted to make student loan debt harder to discharge; politicians take all kinds of votes over time. What matters is what they are willing to do when situations change and public pressure demands action. In this case, Biden attempted to cancel up to $20,000 of student loan debt, due to a national crisis, and was struck down by a rabidly political Supreme Court that LOL-ed it's way through a piss-poor justification, arriving at "Well we just don't like it, so you can't do it." I'll save my ire for the real villains, thanks.
Biden attempted to cancel up to $20,000 of student loan debt, due to a national crisis.
The "crisis" was pretextual, please.
You think a global pandemic that ground the economy to a halt is not a crisis? Well, I disagree. And actually, the term used in the statute is "national emergency." Specifically: "in connection with a war or other military operation or national emergency." <-- COVID was declared a national emergency by the President on March 13, 2020.
You may not like the idea of forgiving some student loan debt, but the language of this is clear and the discretion to do so is supposed to be left up to the Secretary of Education.
Ryan - I understand and agree fully with your first two paragraphs. As for the last one, you can hate the SCOTUS all you want, but granting people money through whatever means, including sending them checks, debt relief, tax relief, whatever, needs to be done by Congress. Biden knew this. He did not care. He wanted to be able to blame the SCOTUS (which has always been "rapidly political" if you don't like their decisions). Consider that when Biden pulled this stunt, he could instead simply asked his Democrat controlled congress to pass an actual law that he would sign. But that did not happen. Ask yourself why? You were on the "receiving end" of political theater.
David,
I don't agree that these must always be acts of congress. The whole point of having federal agencies and a large federal bureaucracy is to be able to delegate power from congress or the executive branches to act efficiently without their direct involvement in every particular instance. Anyway, that doesn't matter in this case. The Heroes Act of 2002 was an act of congress granting broad authority to the U.S. Secretary of Education to do exactly what Biden tried to do. So, what you want already took place.
On the ruling itself: the flimsy reasoning employed by the majority around standing on behalf of MOHELA (who did not sue and did not clearly want to be a party to the case) invented a harm out of whole cloth, and then fumbled around with the meaning of the words "waive" and "modify" to say that the statute wasn't clear enough. (This is particularly rich because the act itself has been used since its inception to waive, modify, pause, or forgive student loan debt for specific classes of borrowers with no legal challenge whatsoever.) The super-majority does this with a nonsense legal concept they had invented a few years prior called the "major questions doctrine," which just allows them to shoot down things they do not like.
And, sorry, but your argument here is somewhat ignorant of what has been taking place since the 6-3 supermajority of conservatives took over the Supreme Court.
"And, sorry, but your argument here is somewhat ignorant of what has been taking place since the 6-3 supermajority of conservatives took over the Supreme Court."
Exactly what a conservative would tell me after the Warren court took over and issued Roe v Wade. Many Scotus rulings are by their very nature political in that certain political stripes will be happy and others unhappy with the decision. This has always been true since Marbury v Madison. Whether or not you want to blame the make up of the court depends on whether you like the decision. Believe it or not, most decisions of the 6-3 supermajority court are in fact unanimous or at least with the majority included judges of both conservative and liberal stripes. I am well-aware of boots-strapping and important question doctrine for standing. It's been allowed by plenty of liberal judges and appellant courts through the years. It's why we have forum shopping consultants that make a living on the topic of which courts will be friendly to both allow your case to be heard and rule in your favor. It's the way the system works. I stopped the litigation part of practice some years ago, so I don't keep up so much, but I don't think I've reached "ignorant" of how the federal courts operate. And, again, why didn't the Dem controlled congress/senate of 2021-2022 just pass a law handing out debt relief, or at least making the loans dischargeable in BR?
I repeat, they didn't do that because they didn't have the votes and it was presumed that either the Heroes Act or subsequent authority that the Secretary of Education has could handle the policy.
I'm not trying to be partisan in my anger, by the way. I look at policy and SCOTUS rulings from the standpoint of how much sense they make and what their outcome will be on society writ large.
If we’re going to lower our expectations for higher education, should we not reduce our subsidies to it commensurately?
We already did, after 2008. That's a big reason tuition rose.
Yes, but. We shifted the subsidies from supply-side to demand-side, in the form of vastly expanded federally subsidized student loans. We removed the cap from Grad Plus loans and made many other changes besides. As you might expect, it improved completion rates but as you pointed out, we also ended up with large tuition increases.
See: Black et al, 2020, "Taking It to the Limit: Effects of Increased Student Loan Availability on Attainment, Earnings, and Financial Well-Being" and Black et al, 2023, "PLUS or Minus? The Effect of Graduate School Loans on Access, Attainment, and Prices."
Interesting question and I sure don’t have the answer. If subsidies lower the overall cost of higher education, then I would think expectations would drop even lower with reduced subsidies in a cost/benefit setting. In a public goods setting if the benefits to society from higher education is overstated then reducing the subsidies might make sense, assuming they were optimal under previous expectations.
" If subsidies lower the overall cost of higher education"
In some fantasy world, government subsidies transfer the same costs from the student to the government. But in reality, colleges just raise the prices to suck up all those subsidies and still suck as much as possible out of the student and his/her family. This is why guaranteed student loans caused the costs to skyrocket. Every time the max loan amount is increased, the colleges raise tuition/fees to vacuum it up. Then the students cry out for higher limits because they are still broke. Government raises the limits, and tuition/fee shoot up to grab it. Quite a feedback loop.
You want the price of college to decrease coupled with a better vetting of who actually belongs there (and will benefit)? Then stop guaranteed loans. Let the universities finance their own sales, just like auto dealers, and take the default risk instead of the US treasury.
When someone else is paying, what do you care if your product is not worthy of the cost?
Highly stratified systems like US (with Ivies +) and UK (with Oxbridge) worked well when the proportion of young people going to college/university was small, but the model can't be scaled because it's based on huge endowments of land and financial assets that can't be replicated.
About land I agree. (Financial endowments aren't government-issued.)
That's why we should be supporting the Cal State and SUNY systems and the like.
Cal State is the second-tier public in CA while SUNY is the top-tier in NY.
I'm not sure what you mean by "supporting" these schools. To make them cheaper, increase enrollment, or what? I can say that for a state that size of NY, the public uni system is poor compared to the likes of GA, CA, WA, TX, VA, MN, MI, IL, WI, MD. The NY high school grads just don't have a mass, low-cost, highly-ranked uni available to them.
The consequence is a lot of really bright working-class kids in CUNY/SUNY, but there really should be a proper flagship. I'm not sure what historical factors have led to these circumstances.
Many of the schools at Cornell (Agriculture and Life Sciences, Industrial and Labor Relations, Human Ecology, Veterinary Medicine to name a few) are state schools with state tuition for in-state students. They're all highly ranked and would count as flagships in any state's system.
Thanks for the comment, I did not know that. You overstate things a bit when you write "to name a few". It's precisely the four programs you mentioned, and no more.
So the situation is indeed a little better than I indicated. It's not all of Cornell though. No physics, math, CS, business, etc. While NYS higher ed is not quite as bad as I suggested, I would still say that it's probably the weakest in the nation after adjusting for state population.
Are people who attend ivies more likely to enter academia? If so, that could explain why those who just missed the cut made similar money. Academia is a high prestige but relatively low income career
Yes generally but not at the bottom of admits, which is the relevant comparison. What’s relevant is how people do on both sides of the admission cutoff: those who just barely got off the waitlist compared to those who just barely didn’t make it off the waitlist.
I’m not so sure about that anecdotally. Seems likely that lots of barely admits look to attend grad school in sociology and related fields
I wonder, if college can't get people well-paid jobs, should we be blaming the colleges or the job market?
I feel like we should blame the institutions staffed with people those same institutions certified as brilliant rather than employers who are trying to meet material human needs directly by providing goods and services.
When I was was going to college, 72-75, I was generally clueless about work, salaries and expectations. I expect HS students have more knowledge about the researchable facts of incomes by profession.
I'm much more certain they are clueless about the context, competition and how it all will work.
Unless. They come from a highly educated college parent. Doctors, executives. Ergo the legacy.
I went to several Ivy League schools, but I'm old and out of boredom I've been watching some YouTube etc lectures, often from much less famous colleges. And to be honest there's really no difference in the quality of lecturing. Of course the famous college professors I'm sure do better research and publishing but that really doesn't affect students. But I'm sure by far the biggest difference in educational experience is the quality of the student body, which makes a huge difference. That's why I think tinkering with the student body to reach diversity or fundraising goals is always going to negatively affect the learning experience.
Elite institutions rely on their brand name, not the quality of their professors, to attract the students and employment premia required to retain their status. They've taken a page from Louis Vuitton and so far it's worked.
Lecturing is in many ways the least valuable part - as you note, a lecture on YouTube is about as good as one in person. But answering questions and holding office hours can enable a professor to give you access to their broader understanding and not just the equivalent of a ten page textbook chapter.
The word “can” is doing a lot of work here. Some professors might engage a student well and simulate a greater interest in their field. Others may be lazy idiots who realize they don’t have to care since they’re tenured. And then there’s the profs who simply hand office hours to a TA.
Good point. I think the asking questions differentiator ties more to my emphasis on the quality of the student body, but also takes the professor into subjects discussed in a more give and take format. But the office hours and one on one time with professors is very valuable. Back in my day, at large-ish elite universities, it was pretty rare to do that, and forget about talking to famous professors or people up the hierarchy. Now I live in a college town dominated by a prestigious college (that I'm not connected to). It's amazing to see how much time the students spend with professors, on and off campus. I know the college president much more than I ever knew the presidents of my schools.
Elite institutions aren’t only brands. They provide smarter and harder-working classmates, as you note. But because the class is of better quality generally, the education is better. This enhancement is because assessments like tests and projects have to be made harder, to still effectively separate the men from the boys, when the class is generally strong. Remember that most learning happens at the active practice stage, and not the passive reading/listening phase. So, the crappy lecture quality doesn’t matter. It’s fine to have research stars “teach” lol even if they’re not engaging. So, even with bad lecturers, elite schools do provide a better education through the more rigorous assessments they have to provide.
Yes, I think I rambled here. But all I really meant is that the quality of the student body, which is statistically reflected in the difficulty of admission, is paramount. The school "brand" depends on it. So the more they make it easier for some applicants to get in despite lower academics, the more they brand is tarnished. At one extreme, I remember someone, I think in a NYT editorial, arguing that admissions should be by lottery, randomly assigning kids to Yale or Hertzing University (showed up when I googled worst college).
College generally pays off, even for Humanities majors (at least if you don’t overburden yourself with debt), but if you’re a Humanities major you have to have some idea of what you want to do after college and maybe do an internship or something during college. If you don’t, then it may be hard to find a good job, and it may have been (financially) better to do a trade school or something.
All that being said, I do wonder if there are civil/societal benefits from people going to college apart from the financial cost! (Of course, that doesn’t mean it’s worth it to financially ruin yourself.)
The fact our universities have become ideological training grounds for the new commissars of the far left is one reason many people have lost respect for them. Zero intellectual diversity, sterile academic atmosphere and overpriced degrees. Can anyone blame the public at-large for falling out of love with our system of higher education?
The military is still a highly functioning institution that enjoys broad support and respect from Americans, though it has declined since 2019.
Thank you for adding this. The military and small businesses are regularly at the top of trusted institutions. I did not serve. Just appreciate you reminding folks.
Great data-based article. Some decidedly not-data-based thoughts:
Quality of education will improve as less kids go to college. Students who are outwardly dismissive of learning and are there only for the signals to future potential employers sap the learning energy and teaching energy from students and professors. Those students shifting away from college to the job market is good for everyone.
I wonder if the social benefit of college is reducing over time as social networks become less place-based.
Firstly, Irrespective of the impressive stats, this is the third article in a week I've seen on some variation of the theme that college is no longer worth it from Noah Smith: Ph.D U. Michigan, Bryan Caplan: Ph.D. Princeton, Richard Hanania: JD U. Chicago. Is the subtext that it's worth it for them, but not for the rest of us?
Secondly, I grew up relatively poor. There's no way I would've had my career if I hadn't gone to college. My kids both went to college and there's no way they'd have their respective jobs if they hadn't. What am I missing? It's worth it for me, but not for other people?
Having asked these two admittedly rhetorical questions, I understand there are lots of kids for whom college is going to be a waste of time and work/apprenticeship is going to be a much better option, but let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Remember, college can be good for the average student and bad for the marginal student!
When I was a prof, teaching the difference between average and marginal was an important part of the value I provided to my students... 😉
My hiring business experience over the last 15 years, albeit small sample, is that PhDs are a far better value hire than BS ME, and 10x better than generic BS Biomedical. The PhDs know how to multitask. Write effectively. Organize and initiate their work. Efficiently do it. Offer to more. Work harder. And today, with CAE, CAD, DOE, simulations, they can go start to finish on a product program or design.
When I started calling on automotive in 1977, I recall visiting the world's largest engineering group, Fisher Body at the GM Tech center. Then, it was as wood drafting tables, beziers, slope rules and 2 to 5 draftsmen per engineer.