WHY IT MATTERS.  Louis Menand reflects on a career that includes stops at an Ivy and a regional comprehensive.

Society needs a mechanism for sorting out its more intelligent members from its less intelligent ones, just as a track team needs a mechanism (such as a stopwatch) for sorting out the faster athletes from the slower ones. Society wants to identify intelligent people early on so that it can funnel them into careers that maximize their talents. It wants to get the most out of its human resources. College is a process that is sufficiently multifaceted and fine-grained to do this.

College is, essentially, a four-year intelligence test. Students have to demonstrate intellectual ability over time and across a range of subjects. If they’re sloppy or inflexible or obnoxious—no matter how smart they might be in the I.Q. sense—those negatives will get picked up in their grades. As an added service, college also sorts people according to aptitude. It separates the math types from the poetry types. At the end of the process, graduates get a score, the G.P.A., that professional schools and employers can trust as a measure of intellectual capacity and productive potential. It’s important, therefore, that everyone is taking more or less the same test.

The article is a review of Academically Adrift (which is awaiting review, pending a check of some of the supporting working papers) and In the Basement of the Ivory Tower, reviewed here.  His analysis of Higher Education's confused mission is more instructive than his review.  The confusion is a variation on the signalling argument (his "first theory") or the human capital argument ("second theory") as reason for higher education.

If you like the first theory, then it doesn’t matter which courses students take, or even what is taught in them, as long as they’re rigorous enough for the sorting mechanism to do its work. All that matters is the grades. If you prefer the second theory, then you might consider grades a useful instrument of positive or negative reinforcement, but the only thing that matters is what students actually learn. There is stuff that every adult ought to know, and college is the best delivery system for getting that stuff into people’s heads.

A lot of confusion is caused by the fact that since 1945 American higher education has been committed to both theories. The system is designed to be both meritocratic (Theory 1) and democratic (Theory 2). Professional schools and employers depend on colleges to sort out each cohort as it passes into the workforce, and elected officials talk about the importance of college for everyone. We want higher education to be available to all Americans, but we also want people to deserve the grades they receive.

The problem, however, is that higher education has mutated in such a way that the value of a signal, or the expected return on a human capital investment, has diverged among institutions.

Almost all the élite colleges saw a jump in applications this year, partly because they now recruit much more aggressively internationally, and acceptance rates were correspondingly lower. Columbia, Yale, and Stanford admitted less than eight per cent of their applicants. This degree of selectivity is radical. To put it in some perspective: the acceptance rate at Cambridge is twenty-one per cent, and at Oxford eighteen per cent.

But, as private colleges became more selective, public colleges became more accommodating. Proportionally, the growth in higher education since 1945 has been overwhelmingly in the public sector. In 1950, there were about 1.14 million students in public colleges and universities and about the same number in private ones. Today, public colleges enroll almost fifteen million students, private colleges fewer than six million.

There is now a seat for virtually anyone with a high-school diploma who wants to attend college. The City University of New York (my old employer) has two hundred and twenty-eight thousand undergraduates—more than four times as many as the entire Ivy League. The big enchilada of public higher education, the State of California, has ten university campuses, twenty-three state-college campuses, a hundred and twelve community-college campuses, and more than 3.3 million students. Six per cent of the American population is currently enrolled in college or graduate school. In Great Britain and France, the figure is about three per cent.

The maintained hypothesis at Cold Spring Shops is excess demand for perceived quality, excess capacity in access-assessment-remediation-retention. Nice to see a New Yorker reviewer corroborating that.

If you are a Theory 1 person, you worry that, with so many Americans going to college, the bachelor’s degree is losing its meaning, and soon it will no longer operate as a reliable marker of productive potential. Increasing public investment in higher education with the goal of college for everyone—in effect, taxpayer-subsidized social promotion—is thwarting the operation of the sorting mechanism. Education is about selection, not inclusion.

There's a subtler dynamic at work. The public investment often takes place with a mindset of we're-not-as-good-as-Harvard-[or Madison]-and-that's-not-necessarily-bad.  Thus might a university president fret about becoming too selective, or chastise the legislature for breaking the social compact by reducing appropriations, never mind his deans' and faculty's complicity in degrading the curriculum and calling it inclusion.  Thus does the place-bound or budget-constrained striver get shortchanged.

If you are friendly toward Theory 2, on the other hand, you worry that the competition for slots in top-tier colleges is warping educational priorities. You see academic tulip mania: students and their parents are overvaluing a commodity for which there are cheap and plentiful substitutes. The sticker price at Princeton or Stanford, including room and board, is upward of fifty thousand dollars a year. Public colleges are much less expensive—the average tuition is $7,605—and there are also many less selective private colleges where you can get a good education, and a lot more faculty face time, without having to spend every minute of high school sucking up to your teachers and reformatting your résumé. Education is about personal and intellectual growth, not about winning some race to the top.

Perhaps it is a tulip mania, but perhaps it is a flight to perceived quality.  Professor Menand concludes by recognizing precisely that the place-bound and budget-constrained are being shortchanged.

College was a gate through which, once, only the favored could pass. Suddenly, the door was open: to vets; to children of Depression-era parents who could not afford college; to women, who had been excluded from many of the top schools; to nonwhites, who had been segregated or under-represented; to the children of people who came to the United States precisely so that their children could go to college. For these groups, college was central to the experience of making it—not only financially but socially and personally. They were finally getting a bite at the apple. College was supposed to be hard. Its difficulty was a token of its transformational powers.

Read and understand.

NOW IS THE TIME TO RESTORE A STATE OF GOOD REPAIR.

In the wake of the Congressional hearings that exposed the Diversity Corollary to the Peter Principle in the Ivy League, people with bigger platforms than mine have been reacting and reflecting.  We'll start with Roger "Tenured Radicals" Kimball, whose thinking on the academic monoculture has influenced mine throughout the years.

It was a clarifying moment, wasn’t it? The presidents of MIT, Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania testifying for the House Education Committee about the wave of rabid antisemitism on their campuses. Representative Elise Stefanik of New York asked the same question of UPenn’s Liz Magill, MIT’s Sally Kornbluth and Harvard’s Claudine Gay. Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate your campus’s rule of conduct, yes or no? That was the question.

You might think it was a pretty simple question. Stefanik, exhibiting a mixture of incredulity and barely contained rage, stressed: “This should be be the easiest question to answer,” as one president after the next emitted a pained I-can’t-believe-this-unenlightened-pol-is-asking-me-me-the-president-of-Harvard/MIT/Penn-this-stupid-question.” Each in turn reverted to a script they must have worked out with their handlers/lawyers. “It all depends on the context.”

“Context.” It was the weasel word of the moment. We’re all champions of free speech, don’t you know, so we wouldn’t dream of intruding upon our flock’s exercise of that sacrosanct right in pursuit of their dream of self-congratulatory moral perfection — unless, of course, that dream involves some prohibited attitude, criticizing St. Anthony Fauci, for example, or St. George Floyd, or, heaven forfend, supporting Donald Trump or expressing skepticism about the 2020 election or January 6. Then, of course, it’s open-season on “free expression.”

I almost felt sorry for those three women. Almost. There they were, emanating the self-righteous demeanor they had perfected over years, and, bang, an angry congresswoman exploded that cheap facade in minutes. The upshot was not obvious to them immediately. But the world’s outrage at those moral pygmies instantly washed over the PR offices of those obscenely rich bastions of self-entitlement. “Uh, oh: the girls really stepped in it this time.” That was the universal reaction.

The way those presidents all acted for a do-over the next day, abasing themselves in the fashion of the grade-grubbing student attempting to wheedle a grade bump, or perhaps, as the populist websites have characterized it, in hostage videos strongly suggests either they, or their handlers, suspected that the common room commonplaces weren't going to cut it on Capitol Hill.

WHY IT MATTERS.

I'm not sure who first observed, "be careful what you ask for, you just might get it."At Inside Higher Ed, William Durden contemplates the consequences of changing the methods of higher education.

Nonprofit colleges and universities could adopt, for example, the business model of the rapidly proliferating for-profit universities. Colleges and universities could go totally online — no buildings or accompanying campuses. Athletics would be eliminated as would student life. Gone would be those pesky sources of purported extravagance in American higher education.

There would also be no expectation of original research by faculty or students — ironically the essential source of content for the for-profits to use in instruction. The course of study would be narrowed to include only those subjects that are more applied than those in a liberal arts curriculum and match more closely specific occupational needs — business, nursing, social work, health technology, information technology, and so on. The curriculum would eliminate those courses without immediate applicability to the workforce — English literature, poetry, art and art history, music, dance and theater. There would be no need to engage in “silly” research that deviates from what “someone” has determined a priori as essential topics of inquiry for a productive life. There would be no reason to invest in costly scientific equipment or the laboratories in which to house it.

He goes on to note that product variety can be efficient.

Numerous for-profit universities have taken these steps. This model is most appealing to busy adults who are both working and trying to advance themselves through education in the most convenient way possible. It fulfills an important “in-time” professional need. For-profits compete with other for-profits and non-profits solely on the competitive basis of tuition and still accomplish their mission fully. Their business model works because they forgo all the “extras” delineated above that non-profits must support through a combination of tuition, public support, private fundraising and cost efficiencies.

But can American higher education — indeed, can America as an enterprising, entrepreneurial nation — afford to have all its colleges and universities so defined? Is the for-profit business model more widely acceptable to the American public — especially for the undergraduate education of its 18-21 year olds? Wouldn’t some valuable defining elements of a distinctively American higher education — a global market asset — be lost in this brutal confrontation between cost and accountability?

He argues that some people are willing to pay a premium for a summer camp with a bit of education thrown in.

Would we as a nation accept no college sports? Would we accept the total absence of our effort, albeit sometimes frustrating (and understandably highly inefficient) to advance students in the practice of citizenship within a 24/7 residential community? Would we accept the total absence of student life — fraternities and sororities, club life and other extracurricular activities? Would our “consumer-students” accept residence halls, student centers and science complexes that were lacking in contemporary amenities and instrumentation?

He suggests that even the most careerist, or disengaged, of the consumer-students benefit from the exposure to Big Ideas.

Would we as a nation accept a curriculum that offered only those courses that translated directly to current workforce needs and neglected the arts and humanities — defiantly unaccountable courses of study? Would we accept a college or university that restricted its faculty from engaging in research, thereby keeping them one step removed from what they teach in the classroom?

I think not. To do so would completely undermine the global market distinction that has come to define American higher education. It is no coincidence that countries such as Germany and Britain are currently seeking ways to “Americanize” their universities. As central governments cut their considerable subsidies, they are finding it necessary to increase tuition — and along with it, the types of “amenities” that 21st century students demand. They are coming to rapidly understand that the American college experience in its totality creates an emotional identity among the student body, an identity that translates into a lifelong sense of ownership and a willingness to “give back” to their alma mater. This is an extremely powerful source of support for American higher education and it is necessary component of our business model.

There's also the possibility that the price premium such universities command reflects a flight to perceived quality: the last thing the land-grants and regional comprehensives and mid-majors ought be doing is emulating the online for-profits.

WHATEVER REMAINS, NO MATTER HOW IMPROBABLE, MUST BE THE TRUTH.  The dean at Anonymous Community contemplates the triune nature of dual enrollment (in the name of the gifted, and the bored, and the holy crap!)

Community colleges are colleges. I understand the temptation to try to be everything to everyone, but at the end of the day, they serve the community best by being colleges. If the high schools need fixing, then the high schools need fixing.

For that matter, colleges or universities with other modifiers also serve the community best by being colleges. A New York article titled "The University Has No Clothes" explains how higher education has struck out.

But the data gathered in recent years on the value of college has been mixed at best, blunting the moral edge of “college for all” and turning some higher-ed advocates into skeptics like [venture capitalist James] Altucher and [Pay Pal founder Peter] Thiel.

This new criticism of higher education comes from three main sources. The first is the reality that, while all parents want their kids to complete college, little more than half of those millions who haul their laptops to campus each fall actually end up with a bachelor’s degree. The United States now has the highest college-­dropout rate in the industrialized world, and in terms of 25-to-34-year-olds with college degrees, it has fallen from first to twelfth.

The high schools need fixing.  Strike one.

The second source is the quality of the education available on campus. Nearly half of all students demonstrate “exceedingly small or empirically nonexistent” gains in the skills measured by the Collegiate Learning Assessment, even after two years of full-time schooling, according to a study begun in 2005 by sociologists Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa. (Many education reformers have focused their attention to gains from investments on the other end of the spectrum, in pre-K schooling.) In 1961, the average undergraduate spent 25 hours a week hitting the books; by 2003, economists Mindy Marks and Philip Babcock recently found, that average had plummeted to thirteen hours. In a typical semester, one third of the students Arum and Roksa followed for their recent book, Academically Adrift, did not take “any courses that required more than forty pages of reading per week” and half did not take “a single course that required more than twenty pages of writing.”

Academically Adrift, which I have finished but have yet to compile some information for a review, is incompletely persuasive. But content-free and coreless curricula recentered for unprepared, uninterested, or disengaged students in pursuit of retention, completion, and favorable course evaluations does nobody any favors.  Strike two.

But it is the data on the economics of college that is most disturbing. It’s bad enough that our colleges are under­performing, one can’t help thinking—but do they have to charge so damned much? In the past 30 years, private-­college tuition and fees have increased, in constant 2010 dollars, from $9,500 a year to more than $27,000. Public-college tuition has increased from $2,100 to $7,600. Fifteen years ago, the average student debt at graduation was around $12,700; in 2009, it was $24,000. Over the past quarter-century, the total cost of higher education has grown by 440 percent. “Like many situations too good to be true,” Louis Lataif, the dean emeritus of Boston University’s School of Management, wrote in February for Forbes, “like the dot-com boom, the Enron bubble, the housing boom or the health-care-cost explosion—the ever-­increasing cost of university education is not sustainable.”

Among the public universities, the administrators blame the legislatures for breaking the social contract by cutting funding and the legislatures blame the universities for breaking the social contract by not teaching anybody. The presence of government-guaranteed student loans has the same effect as any other third-party payment on prices (just for grins, look at any detailed statement from your clinic and ask yourself how the price of a venipuncture, or a sampling tube, is determined). The flight to perceived quality, which allows administrators to quote high sticker prices and then discount individually in a way that would make a car dealer jealous, leads to a perceived demand curve that sustains those charges.  Strike three.

And the defenders of higher education defend a tradition that is more often honored in the breach.

This analysis, of course, takes a purely utilitarian view of college—higher education, as its many defenders hasten to point out, has a significance for students that defies the cost-benefit ratio. Last year, in response to a Times article titled “Plan B: Skip College,” The New Yorker’s Rebecca Mead published a rousing defense of college’s ability to, among other things, “expose individuals to the signal accomplishments of humankind.” In an essay published in March in The New York Review of Books, critic and professor Peter Brooks dismissed the swelling discontent with college as cranky and ­narrow-minded. The university is, he wrote, “one of the best things we’ve got, and at times—as when reading these books—it almost seems to me better than what we deserve.”

Yes, students have the opportunity to grapple with those signal accomplishments -- or with the long and winding road there -- should they choose to do so, but there's that annoying problem of retention or completion or Do We Have To Learn This?  (Yes, if you wish to call yourself educated.  But it takes a curriculum committee with a backbone and an administration free of faddishness to uphold that standard.  Beer 'n circus is an easier sell.)

SEPARATING EQUILIBRIUM. The dean at Anonymous Community contemplates the collegiate positional arms race.

If Iskabibble State somehow kept its f-t faculty ratio above, say, 90%, then it could market itself as Organic Free-Range Certified, or whatever they'd call it. Whether enough parents and students would care enough to pay the economic premium to cover the costs would be sorted out in the marketplace. Colleges that don't want to take that gamble could continue on down the path of cost-cutting.

Regular readers of Cold Spring Shops will recognize that the market test is precisely a revelation of preferences for higher education that is, well, higher. The persistence of U.S. News rankings (and higher education's acceptance of them: although the public position of presidents and such is negative, you should see the stuff I get from Wisconsin's alumni relations people) is itself evidence that such information is valuable: if not, that issue would not have the advertising content it has. The dean combines ideas from three articles. I focus on his invocation of Cornell's Ron Ehrenberg.

Finally, the Chronicle has a piece by Ronald Ehrenberg in which he can't quite decide whether pricy colleges are worth it, on a cost-benefit basis. He notes an aggregate correlation between educational spending and student achievement (and starting salaries upon graduation), but notes also in passing that the correlation largely breaks down on the micro level. So rich kids tend to cluster in rich schools, leading to better outcomes for grads of rich schools, regardless of what the rich schools actually do or don't do.

It's called assortative self-selection, and, yes, the dean is correct to characterize it as class sorting. The opportunities for the less well-known precincts of higher education, however, are not as grim as the dean makes them out to be.

The relevance for higher ed, I think, is that we'll see the elite institutions become progressively more so, marketing themselves more as boutique goods – the ocean liners of higher education. (Check out the student housing at Founders College! Yowza!) The non-elites will gradually descend into commodity hell, much like flying in coach; price and (surface) convenience will trump all other considerations. The elites will reject the adjunct trend, simply because they wouldn't want to dilute the brand. The rest will continue to embrace it, to balance the books.

What drops out is the vast middle. The flagships can probably sustain themselves with research money, high-profile sports, and double-digit tuition increases. Community colleges can sustain ourselves on occupational relevance, geographic propinquity, and low cost. But the regional public campuses and third-tier private colleges – the former teachers' colleges turned state universities that top out at master's degrees – have to make a choice. Move up, move down, or move on.

In aviation, it's less clear today that cost-cutting measures have lowered fares enough to compensate for shoddy service. Likewise, in higher education, it's not obvious that "move down" is the default option for the mid-majors, particularly with the selective institutions deliberately creating excess demand in order to appear more selective. That may be in Professor Ehrenberg's microdata. One never knows who the next striver might be: the muddle of college as a repeat of eleventh grade (my formulation) or simply thirteenth grade (the dean's fear), however, does not offer the striver an opportunity to self-identify. (That's where the comparison with cruise ships breaks down: there is a very real flight to perceived quality in those excess demands for prestige degrees, and it's relatively easy to hive off the impedimenta of an access-assessment-remediation-retention academic culture that savvy parents and students can all so easily see.) On that, the dean and I are in agreement.

If the midtier schools lose their viability, then the macro-micro disjuncture that Ehrenberg acknowledges but doesn't explore^(*) could easily dissipate. It may well be that the relative unimportance of attending a high-tuition college has been based on the better-than-you'd-expect quality of the middle tier. If that middle tier hollows out, then the relative bargain evaporates, and the up-until-recently-exaggerated fears of the Amazing Girls – that failure to get into a Name College will result in middling economic prospects -- will actually become true.

Quite so, but if that happens, the mid-majors will have left easy money on the table. More than a few of the faculty members at mid-majors recognize this, if their administrators don't.

There's a followup post by Dr. Pion that I recommend prospective collegians read.

^(*)As if Ron is going to use a Chronicle of Higher Education column to fully document the findings of several research papers.

A RECKONING FOR HIGHER EDUCATION'S VALUE PROPOSITION?

Nine years ago, the Ivies might have been able to get away with their foolishness, while institutions not so venerated bore the consequences of breaking the social contract.

That's long been a theme of mine.  "We find ourselves in a situation where universities are failing at their mission, and the People's representatives are questioning our efforts."  The Pope Center's Jenna Robinson now asserts, "All over the country, university campuses are out of touch with American culture."  She goes on to list ten ways in which higher education breaks the social contract.  The root causes include higher education admitting unprepared people and calling it access, and fostering a self-despising multiculturalism that denigrates the very institutions and traditions that make skeptical inquiry, including self-despising multiculturalism, possible, while celebrating all sorts of transgressions against mainstream America.  And yet ... it's more of the politically correct atrocities at the institutions that have the U.S. News problem.  Until people figure out that it's the interaction of the ambitious students at those institutions that provides the value added, trendy curricula or not, though, there's precious little incentive for the curriculum committees and the administrators to do anything differently.

Those politically correct atrocities have accumulated, though, in such a way that the Ivies might have piddled away their primary selling point.  Four essays raising that possibility came to my attention last week.  In chronological order, first came Nate Silver.  "The Ivy League and other elite private colleges are losing esteem — and they deserve it."  That's got Friday short take written all over it, but for his elaborations.

Just go to a state school. The premium you're paying for elite private colleges vs. the better public schools is for social clout and not the quality of the education. And that's worth a lot less now that people have figured out that elite higher ed is cringe.

Put another way, the Ivies have undermined the case for U.S. News selling those rating guides.

I've long maintained that those U.S. News guides exist because so much of higher education has gone down the rat-holes of access, assessment, remediation, and retention, and kids with ambition (or pushy parents?) buy those guides in order to identify institutions where students might pick up a respectable education (or at least validate their ability with a signal.)  "The issue, however, is precisely that the U.S. News rankings exist because at the margin, many parents and students seek an experience more like Harvard (or Wisconsin before it went sports-mad) and less like a diploma mill. Institutions of higher education that fail to grasp this point may be reinforcing social stratification."

That post continued with an observation on the state of higher education that neither Nate Silver nor the others who made similar points, with or without building on his post missed.

The U.S. News problem exists, though, partly because potential students understand that having a soul to sell might still be a better circle of hell than dealing with people having so much fun with beer-'n-circus that the notion of a soul never occurs to them. In addition, Professor Deresiewicz suggests students avoid the Ivies and the soulless students by considering ... the hundred or so private liberal arts colleges that are out of the top twenty?? That's clearly the upscale audience that has sent their spawn to Harvard Prep Day Care in the first place, and scant consolation for the parents of promising kids from the wrong zip codes.

It might be that for the moment going to a state flagship university with aspirations is an improvement over Woke Catechism at Columbia, Harvard, Yale, or Oberlin.  Mr Silver is for the moment of that mind.

Yeah, probably go with the top-flight state school — especially if she’s in a state with a very good in-state public school where the cost savings are much greater. Better that than to emerge with a mountain of debt and a degree from an institution that is likely to be viewed as highly polarizing. Public perceptions of higher education have declined rapidly, and I expect the problems to get worse.

In principle, that's valid.  In practice, bailing on the Ivies involves risks.  "Now, if we could get the land-grants and mid-majors to recognize that they are in the same business as the Ivies, and turf out all the irksome special education impedimenta that keep U.S. News selling those ratings ..."

Here's the problem:  George Will wrote a dyspeptic column, "The leakage of universities’ prestige amid protests is most welcome," in which the prestige dissipates all at once.

Still, suppose you want to hire a recent college graduate for your business. Suppose one of your applicants attended Harvard while it was becoming an incubator of antisemitic educations. And suppose the other applicant attended a large public university. The public-university graduate is at least marginally less apt to be enthusiastic about Hamas, which aspires to complete the Holocaust.

Or suppose you seek a young doctor to join your medical practice. You might reasonably hesitate before hiring someone from UCLA’s medical school. There a recent pro-Hamas guest lecturer in a mandatory course on “Structural Racism and Health Equity” led students in a “Free Palestine” chant, directed them to get on their knees and touch the floor in a “prayer” to “mama earth,” and warned the future doctors against the “crapitalist lie” of “private property.”

The leakage of prestige from politicized universities is overdue and wholesome. Those schools that once were preeminent and now are punchlines might soon have a bruising rendezvous with real politics, which, unlike the sandbox radicalism of campus playgrounds, can be serious.

He's pushing things too soon.  We've replaced hereditary aristocracies with credentialed meritocracies.  Over time, the institutions that have the U.S. News problem have evolved into tack-rooms from which a few people can draw the boots, spurs, and saddles to ride mankind; and that evolution is in part perceived quality, with Mr Will suggesting that perception is slipping, and part an abdication of the "higher" part of higher education by institutions including that "large public university," where the graduate might hold the degree, but might not have been held to any sort of rigorous standards.  That, dear reader, is why U.S. News sells those guides.

Consider also Joanne Jacobs's reaction to Nate Silver.  "I'd imagine that Wall Street firms would be wary of hiring students who hate capitalism."  And yet, will they come recruiting at Iowa or Northern Illinois or Marquette?  If not, why not?  Regular readers will recognize the answer, it follows at length below the jump.

EVERYTHING ELSE IS ELABORATION.

The "academic culture" label is, by a wide margin, the most frequently used label for Cold Spring Shops posts.  The margin would likely be even wider had such classifications been available in 2002, when we started.

A fair number of those posts are elaborations of points I raised a quarter century ago in an essay I was invited to provide to the Northern Illinois University Faculty Bulletin (long since withdrawn from print) that I titled "The Costs of Correctness."

I recently referred to the opening paragraph.

Universities are failing to carry out their mission. Contributing to this failure is a collection of ideas we call "politically correct." The intellectual foundation of these ideas is an extreme relativism that questions the possibility of objective knowledge and seeks to dispel "coherent beliefs of any kind." A university built on such a foundation cannot stand. "Politically correct" activists are actively correcting "insensitivity," especially on the part of white males, toward women and minorities. That activism may be misguided, and it diverts attention from other, more serious failings of universities.

The good news from that recent post is that people with bigger platforms than mine are paying attention to those more serious failings.  When I wrote the essay, it was with the hope of persuading people to pursue a different course from the one the trendy scholarship was pursuing.

The words university and universal have common roots: a university is a storage of universal knowledge. Its mission is to acquire, expand, and transmit knowledge. Universities are failing at that mission. For example, some students wonder why people refer to a "second" World War; and large numbers believe that "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need" is a constitutional right. Students in this country do not perform as well on multi-step mathematical problems as their counterparts in other countries. University graduates teach high school students, and, according to the National Association of Manufacturers, high school graduates write poorly (many cannot fill out a job application) and can't do simple mathematics.

Another quarter century of credential inflation, but at last Our President is making the case for the vocational arts (gripe about his speaking style if you must) and some states are naming the names of underachieving high schools.  I fear, though, that writing properly is lost, until voice-recognition writing programs become more accurate.  Essays that a columnist dictated to a smart-'phone leave clues throughout.  Try it.

I offered a defense of the Canon and the Curriculum, but what came in the next 25 years was beyond my anticipation.

Objective knowledge is all around us. It is costly to acquire and makes no allowance for "diversity." The Challenger crew, a diverse group of astronauts, all died when their shuttle exploded. This is objective knowledge in its starkest form: let a rubber gasket freeze, a joint fails and people die. Examples of objective knowledge abound in any course catalog. Divide by zero: most illogical. Promise "free" medical care without regard for the productive capability of your economy: welcome to Soviet life. Deny coherent beliefs of any kind: enjoy incoherence. Although objective, universal knowledge is difficult to grasp, to expand, or to transmit, imagine how much more difficult it would be for each generation to relearn it from scratch.

I could not have anticipated the Soviet Union shutting down for good, six months after the essay appeared, but the same thing manifesting itself in Venezuela and in the two-lies-for-the-price-of-one Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.  Heck, I wrote that essay before anyone seriously anticipated a Bill Clinton presidency, and Hillarycare.

Relearning from scratch, though, seems to be where we are headed.  Consider privilege.  We could apply the argument to any other emergent phenomenon.  Take seriously the arguments from outrage about "inherited" or "unearned" advantage or privilege or custom or what have you: aren't you reduced to having to construct your rules of interaction ab initio?  Just for fun, dear reader, consider a future privilege training session in which a novice, skeptical of the message yet alert to the irony, asks the trainer what he (or she, or it, or whatever the pronoun conventions are) did to earn the right to conduct the training and introduce that material.  Sometimes you undermine them with mockery, and sometimes, you undermine them by asking difficult questions.

I then shifted to the perceived wrongs the politically correct were endeavoring to right.

There is incivility on campus. It may be a continuation of past prejudices, a lack of good manners, or a reaction to the excesses of institutional reverse discrimination. The "politically correct" accept the first explanation and "solve" the problem by creating "protected categories" of people, in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment; by punishing "insensitive" statements about people in protected categories, in violation of the First Amendment, and by branding as "oppressive" some researchers who study problems facing "protected" people, in violation of the Fifth Amendment.

That's standard stuff, but a quarter century ago, the spats were in a few of the social sciences.  Is higher education better off now that mathematics is oppressive, and hegemonic masculinity taints the technical disciplines (and everything else?)

I then called for more research, as well as getting a zinger off.

In addition to being unconstitutional, the "politically correct" response to incivility may be the wrong therapy, since we have not yet established the cause of campus incivility. The therapy may nevertheless have value: the lack of basic skills in our youth will provide them with many opportunities to be "sensitive" to each others' ineptitude at work.

Unfortunately, the intersectionality disease has infected the human resources departments in the corporate world.  Left for future research: is the expansion of the gig economy and outsourcing a way for managers to limit the reach of the human resources types and deal more directly with the ineptitude they see?

Thus I called for rigor, as well as getting another zinger off.

Universities best serve their students through rigorous development of reasoning skills and respect for what we have learned. Rigor is likely to diminish incivility on campus, because students kept busy grappling with intellectual problems will have less time to fight with each other. Better that they be unhappy with a few demanding professors.

Alas, it has become easier to get rid of the demanding professors.  Complicating matters, though, is higher education's growing reliance on contingent faculty.

I also noted the trendy stuff crowding out the real learning once the high school graduates hit college.

The attention "correctness" receives is diverted from more serious problems in the university. For example, our Northern Star's editorializing on the "tenured radicals" of our English department who impose "political correctness" in writing conceals more serious problems. As an economist, I view language as useful if it is accurate. If women operate trains or win national sailing championships alongside men, an accurate language reflects those facts. In my experience, students are aware of those facts. They avoid using "him" or "his" as generic pronouns, but many have trouble spelling or arranging sentences coherently.

Yes, once upon a time student journalism asked difficult questions, rather than being complicit in the indoctrination.

I fear, though, that the difficulties I noted with speak-and-transcribe earlier are going to hamper the ability of students, going forward, to write properly.

The next quarter century was not going to turn out well for higher education.

We are only beginning to see the consequences of our failure to carry out our mission. The employers who hire our students and the legislators who underwrite our efforts are questioning our effectiveness. There is some evidence that those earning higher incomes in the U.S. are getting rich more rapidly. One explanation blames cuts in marginal tax rates. A competing hypothesis views incomes as rewards that reflect the relative scarcity of human capital. Rising incomes may be rewards to people who learned careful reasoning, mathematics, and science, and who sold their skills to employers who valued them. That others are losing ground may be evidence of the diminished skills of more recent graduates of high schools and universities. Economists are sorting out these hypotheses, and we will soon have a better understanding of what has happened.

Where are we now?  Regular "college bubble updates" on Pajamas Media.  A political economy of inequality that touches on tax cuts at the same time the U.S. News problem suggests a flight to perceived quality of higher education, a flight that I fear is more about being able to mingle with and form networks of high achievers, rather than to hear from the very best Mr Chips regularly.

I was pessimistic then, and I'm pessimistic still.

I have drawn most of my examples of objective knowledge from economics, engineering, and the physical sciences. The costs of "political correctness" may be highest in the humanities, from which its relativistic theory comes. That theory undermines standards. When protestors at Stanford University inverted civil rights to establish a Western Civilization course because of the color of the authors' skins rather than the content of their writings, nobody asked them to make a case that Aristotle, Bacon, or Marx had nothing universal to say. Given all the competing demands on our time, that people have continued to read and appreciate these dead white males suggests that their work has value. I am not persuaded that their works have been replaced by other works of equal or greater value. The University of Pennsylvania's Houston Baker argues that choosing between Virginia Woolf and Pearl Buck is "no different than choosing between a hoagy and a pizza." I'm sympathetic to his claim: specifically, I prefer any Tom Clancy novel to anything I've ever read in a literature class. But what Baker means is that art and literature are purely private matters. Universities therefore could replace humanities requirements in their catalogs with one sentence: "Satisfy yourself." They could close music, art, and literature programs. Governments could abolish programs such as the National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities. Imagine how many resources would be freed for further transmission of objective knowledge, or for further tax cuts. In addition to ruining the livelihoods of my colleagues in the humanities, such steps would hurt the rest of us. For example, Supreme Court opinions are full of allusions to classic works. Future students may never hear Dave Brubeck's rhythms or see Rembrandt's portraits, which were fringe benefits of my college years. As with the speculative philosophers, the work of some composers, painters, novelists, and poets continues to appeal to people, which suggest their works have value, and that there will be costs if those works are replaced by other works that do not have equal or greater value.

But others are making similar points, and perhaps the academy can yet be restored to a state of good repair.  The music, too.

That is where I stood.  That is pretty much where I still stand, although the School of Tom Clancy sometimes pleases, sometimes disappoints.

Time for a sabbatical.  Perhaps posting will resume early in the summer.  Thanks for looking in.

TIME TO SHUT UP ABOUT HARVARD.

Outside the Beltway's Steven Taylor puts the request more politely.  "Stop Conflating Elite Schools with All Schools!"

BUCKWHEAT, FLUMMOXED.

For years, Cold Spring Shops has been calling attention to the mistake many state-supported or non-selective non-profit colleges and universities were making treating the proprietary for-profit colleges as competitors to be emulated.  Yes, early on, there was the possibility that those institutions were expanding the market to students not well served by existing higher ed.  (That was true as well of the clients of correspondence courses advertised in the old Railroad magazine.)  I quickly noted that emulation became the strategy, all in the name of access, of course, and that only exacerbated the U.S. News problem.  "There's also the possibility that the price premium such universities command reflects a flight to perceived quality: the last thing the land-grants and regional comprehensives and mid-majors ought be doing is emulating the online for-profits."

UNIVERSITIES ARE FAILING AT THEIR MISSION.

I called them on it, over thirty years ago.  Four years ago, when I posted that essay in full, this is the way things stood.

Where are we now?  Regular "college bubble updates" on Pajamas Media.  A political economy of inequality that touches on tax cuts at the same time the U.S. News problem suggests a flight to perceived quality of higher education, a flight that I fear is more about being able to mingle with and form networks of high achievers, rather than to hear from the very best Mr Chips regularly.

Perhaps the academy can still be restored to a state of good repair, but it's going to take a lot of mugging by reality.

The value of the college degree, in my analysis, has reached its peak and is on the wane. There are a host of factors to blame, stretching from cost and affordability to curriculum relevance to rapidly evolving skill needs to advances in automation and technology. But playing the blame game only gets us so far.

Imagine if a company lost nearly 10 percent of its profits in two years. The situation would be catastrophic. Drastic changes would be expected. We have lost nearly 10 percent of our students, but where is our sense of urgency? What will it take for us to recognize that the status quo is not working?

That's current Temple president Jason Wingard.  Here's the mugging.

Who needs a four-year marketing degree graduate to run social media when you can instead hire someone fresh out of high school and sign them up for HootSuite’s Academy’s social media certification course? Why pay for a six-figure education when HootSuite can get you some of the same skills in just six hours and for less than $200?

We all know that a $200 certificate program does not remotely equate to a four-year education from a best-in-class institution like Temple University, but perception is everything. And the reality is that the perceived value proposition that was once a constant for institutions of higher education becomes cloudier day by day, with just six in 10 Americans recently surveyed saying college is worth the time and money.

I'm not familiar with Hoot Suite, and it's unlikely they have online modules for plumbing, welding, or air conditioner repair, but then, neither does Temple. On the other hand, it is likely that Temple (does that "best in class" refer to regional comprehensives, or all Carnegie I universities?) serves up a dose of radical gender theory and identity politics indoctrination that isn't in that six hour module.

In that ancient essay, I noted,

Universities best serve their students through rigorous development of reasoning skills and respect for what we have learned. Rigor is likely to diminish incivility on campus, because students kept busy grappling with intellectual problems will have less time to fight with each other. Better that they be unhappy with a few demanding professors.

Yes, I've always been provocative. Here's Mr Wingard, being suitably provoked.

We also must get back to basics. We are at our best when we promote discourse and the scholarly exchange of ideas. Companies deeply need high-level critical thinking skills that will never coalesce from a $200 online certificate program. This gets back to the importance of adapting curriculum on a yearly basis and, when doing so, specifically looking at our core curriculum with a fine-tooth comb.

I suspect there's a lot in what we used to understand as the core curriculum that would develop those critical thinking skills, which are something other than the instinctive trashing of practices of long standing that sails under the "critical thinking" banner these days.

LOSING THE GOOD OF THE INTELLECT. Perhaps the Southern Illinois University looking-glass lawsuit in which two professors are asserting it is unethical to make them sign a confession that they were unethical when the ethics training site authorized a certificate of completion that they obtained too quickly is a sign of a deeper malaise. An Inside Higher Ed column approximates a Fisking of the Daily Egyptian's criticism of the professors who correctly stayed away.

The attitude that education is, when you get right down to it, one more service industry.... this does not warm the academic heart, somehow. About 10 percent of faculty and staff actually showed up.

That "service industry" attitude contributes to higher education's failing its market tests, as regular readers understand. The column focuses on a clash of values.

But the editorial is also interesting for how it mimics management-speak. A motivational speaker provides “valuable information ... to improve the quality of the university’s product.” Not a hint of skepticism about the corporate rhetoric. No questioning at all of the idea that learning to answer the telephone in a pleasing manner will contribute to the manufacture of skilled and well-informed students.

(Need I note that one doesn't require a motivational speaker to develop a properly firm persona that does not start a class with AWRIGHT, MAGGOTS!)

More importantly, the motivation fad has numerous failures of market tests on its permanent record.

“For much of the eighties and nineties,” writes [Jonathan] Black, “the motivation business was all about making it, self-propulsion, getting rich quick. Athletic coaches ruled, because winning wasn’t everything – it was the only thing. The lecture circuit starred corporate titans like Malcolm Forbes, Lee Iacocca, and Ted Turner.” The ethos of this period was summed up by a pace-setting speaker named Zig Ziglar (something like the Stanley Fish of the motivation world) when he titled one of his books See You at the Top.

Around the turn of the century, though, something happened — several things, in fact. The tech bubble burst. Dubious business practices eroded corporate prestige. Murderous fanatics showed that globalization would not be all about getting and spending in peace and comfort. The old motivational messages started sounding hollow, and the market took a hit.

You'd think the folks in charge at Southern Illinois would have enough confidence in their core functions of teaching and scholarship to support faculty in maintaining standards and saying no.

What works to motivate workers, [Black] believes, is ‘an authentic cause that becomes the culture of the company.’ ” One example [Jason] Jennings offers is IKEA, with its proclaimed devotion to “furniture for the many – not for the few, not for the rich, not for design magazines.” The company’s president takes just two weeks of vacation a year, and stays at Motel 6 when he travels.

I don’t have statistics at hand about how many chancellors or provosts stay at Motel 6. It would hardly be surprising to learn that most do not. That sort of change might not be the solution to “pridelessness” or academic anomie. But there’s certainly no evidence that motivational bromides are, either.

(Can you say Nucor Steel, another of my favorite stories about the austere company that does what the later sold at a bankruptcy sale Establishment concluded couldn't be done?) The column goes on to quote a graduate student who identified some candidate opportunity costs for the Saluki Dilbert moment.

“Spending $20,000 on motivational speakers is absurd in the face of so many laid-off graduate assistants and deferred facilities maintenance. Let’s look at what $20,000 could do that would make a difference in the actual education of students. On my estimation, it could hire two half-time graduate assistants, purchase 31 new Dell computers (assuming no discount) or pay for any number of books. I suspect we could even make a big bonfire with money that would draw more than 50 people..... All this occurs in the face of raising fees and tuition are ion incoming freshmen and graduate students.”

That in a world where the positional arms races to get into brand name colleges is a flight to quality driven by the perception that Southern Illinois, and more than a few other public and private universities, are in thrall to various fads, whether from the corporate world or from the Perpetually Aggrieved, that have crowded out the higher learning.

CALCULUS, ETHICS, AND LOGIC. Chicago's Mayor Daley proposes to streamline college course offerings.

"They should cut half the courses. It would cut the cost down tremendously. What are the basic courses that you need in college? Cut some of the unnecessary courses out" to reduce administrative overhead and let students graduate sooner, he said.

I suspect, however, that my answer is not what he's looking for, as a strict enforcement of those requirements at a suitable level of rigor would mean more college dropouts (or perhaps, fewer applicants.)

The Sun-Times, unfortunately, trots out the worst possible defense for the current 120 credits = baccalaureate formula.

Judy Erwin, executive director of the [Illinois Board of Higher Education], said she wasn't sure many programs could be cut in half and remain as vital.

"We are trying to improve the rigor of teacher preparation," she said, as an example. "I don't know that can be done in two years."

No, under the current formula, the people who have taken two years of education "methods" would have to take another two years to unlearn that stuff, and another two years on calculus, ethics, and logic. (I digress.)

The mayor is attempting to address the perception that higher education is too expensive and takes too long. The suggestion he offers is unlikely, however, to help the people he would like to help. In shortening the time to completion (while cutting out "unnecessary" required courses, especially the ones that are hard?) he's treating the degree as a job market signal, and turning it into one that will be easier to acquire. Where the signal does not induce efficient self-selection, it loses value to potential employers. Accordingly, the mayor's suggestion is likely to diminish the life chances of the constituents he would like to help, as the flight to quality I believe is driving the positional arms races to get into the Ivies and the remaining flagship land grants will only be intensified by simplified graduation requirements. The mayor proposes to further encourage inefficiently optimistic enrollment leading to an intolerably low completion rate. (Yes, I'm repeating myself.)

OF POSITION AND EXCESS CAPACITY. I've long maintained that the positional arms race in higher education enrollments (until the recession brought austerity to the more affluent quarters) has been a flight to perceived quality in the presence of excess capacity in access-assessment-remediation-retention.

Think about it this way: would diners be better served if only 20 restaurants earned a five-star rating, or if (with no dilution of standards) they had a choice among 50, 100, 200 five-star restaurants?

Now comes Caroline M. Hoxby, currently with Stanford, with a related perspective that does not cause me to change my mind.

This paper shows that although the top ten percent of colleges are substantially more selective now than they were 5 decades ago, most colleges are not more selective. Moreover, at least 50 percent of colleges are substantially less selective now than they were then. This paper demonstrates that competition for space--the number of students who wish to attend college growing faster than the number of spaces available--does not explain changing selectivity. The explanation is, instead, that the elasticity of a student's preference for a college with respect to its proximity to his home has fallen substantially over time and there has been a corresponding increase in the elasticity of his preference for a college with respect to its resources and peers. In other words, students used to attend a local college regardless of their abilities and its characteristics. Now, their choices are driven far less by distance and far more by a college's resources and student body. It is the consequent re-sorting of students among colleges that has, at once, caused selectivity to rise in a small number of colleges while simultaneously causing it to fall in other colleges.

I'll be able to obtain the full working paper at the office, time permitting. An Inside Higher Ed column comments.

The number of high school graduates in the United States, from 1955 to today, increased by 131 percent, she notes, but the number of freshman seats in the U.S. rose by 297 percent. "This suggests that the absolute standard of achievement required of a freshman who successfully competed for a seat was falling," Hoxby writes.

She adds that the standard of academic preparation to gain admission could still have gone up over the years if the academic standards of all high school students showed gains. But using data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, and matching those results with college-going patterns, she finds the opposite. The number of college seats available to students who -- judging by NAEP scores and college admission records -- are only moderately or minimally prepared has gone up.

"[S]ince 1975, there has been more than one seat per minimally prepared student. In short, the achievement standard for obtaining a freshman seat in the U.S. is minimal and is falling," she writes.

The working paper, which I will have to read, provocatively excludes research expenditures, including those at the medical colleges, and still finds that the most selective universities have thrown more resources at students.

While there may be different policy responses to her findings, Hoxby concludes by stressing the need to shift discussion away from a framework that assumes most colleges are impossible to get into.

"Over the past few decades, the average college has not become more selective: the reverse is true, though not dramatically," she writes. "The reason that initially selective colleges are much more selective today is not that they have failed to expand to absorb greater numbers of extremely high aptitude students. In fact, they have expanded modestly, keeping up with the modest growth in the population of such students."

That reckoning of resources probably understates the effect on undergraduate learning: it's possible that Gary Becker's graduate assistant might do more to stretch introductory economics students' minds at Chicago than I do for mine.

At Minding the Campus, KC Johnson pursues one of the possible policy implications.

The clear policy ramifications from Hoxby's study: institutions that currently can't afford to spend the amount of money of students that we see from Ivy League schools ($92,000 per student, according to Hoxby) need to be more selective in both their admissions criteria and in their academic visions.

It's encouraging to read that. Motivated placebound students, and motivated students from modest circumstances, deserve better than to have their aspirations dragged down by unmotivated classmates.

According to the report, the willingness to attend schools far from home produced a "resorting" effect. High-aptitude students increasingly have clustered at the top schools. Decades ago, they were sprinkled more throughout the second-tier schools, but the increasing desire for Harvard-Yale-Princeton-etc. has driven them up the university ladder, resulting precisely in the lower selectivity of the remaining 90 percent.

The report doesn't pursue the implications of this stratification, but it does note that because of the application patterns of high-aptitude students, low-aptitude students increasingly encounter low-aptitude students in their classes. In other words, the resulting student bodies reinforce the division of selective from non-selective institutions. Low-performing students sit in class with other low-performers. They don't have the superior student who didn't want to travel far from home sitting next to them in English 101, raising the quality of class discussion and pushing expectations higher. We sometimes forget that much of the intellectual level of the campus depends not on the faculty but upon the undergraduates. Students often take their cue not from the syllabi but from their roommates.

In that post, author Mark Bauerlein, perhaps in a Swiftian way, proposes that students and professors periodically change places. I bet it's more productive for the land-grants and mid-majors and on down the status hierarchy to work on lifting their efforts. (As a side note, I think the author meant re-sorting, rather than some revealed preference for climbing walls and health clubs.)

COMPETENT PEOPLE?

Inside Higher Ed editor Sara Custer laments the new strings the Trump administration is attaching to funding the universities (news flash: there have always been strings attached, there's a post in preparation noting the same) and asks, "Who is going to rebuild higher ed after it’s dismantled?"

Higher education has been doing a pretty good job of self-dismantling for thirty years.

Where are we now?  Regular "college bubble updates" on Pajamas Media.  A political economy of inequality that touches on tax cuts at the same time the U.S. News problem suggests a flight to perceived quality of higher education, a flight that I fear is more about being able to mingle with and form networks of high achievers, rather than to hear from the very best Mr Chips regularly.

Maybe money-hemorrhaging jokes run by idiots might do better by reclaiming the good of the intellect and returning to the norms of civilized discourse.  If that means turfing out more senior administrators and the editors of the house organs for all wokeness, all the time, and for business as usual publishing acts of contrition and retiring to their wine cellars all the better.

THERE'S A HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE. But one must look in the right place for its evidence. Excess demand by itself is not evidence.

The crunch [as the bubble deflates] will be particularly bitter for the institutions that drained coffers to build "country club colleges" complete with luxury dormitories, spas and top of the line sports complexes to lure choice students, hoping that a sharper crowd would lead to more accretive diplomas, entering a profitable cycle of more successful alumni and increased donations.

Many had little choice. "If a college decides we're not going to have fancy dorms or build a shiny new gym, students are not going to that college," says [Skidmore College's Sandy] Baum. "People are not choosing the lowest price college, and that's a consumer issue, not a public policy problem."

Adds William Powers, the president of the University of Texas at Austin: "The market is choosing quality regardless of incremental costs."

The excess capacity is in access-assessment-remediation-retention, and perhaps in wannabe upscale colleges that invested heavily in student amenities and slighted their faculties. A paragraph from the article mischaracterizes the flight to quality as evidence of the bubble.

It's a scenario familiar to anyone who watched the housing bubble blow. "We are at a trend line that cannot be sustained," says Matt Snowling, an analyst at Friedman, Billings and Ramsey, who covers the student loan industry. "Tuition must go down, or there will be limited demand at high-priced private schools."

There's ample evidence that the highest-priced and highest-regarded private schools are pricing to generate excess demand (thus boosting their selectivity: what the rating services reward they get more of) and shuffling resources among students (thus boosting their perceived diversity). Those demand curves will have to shift inward in a nontrivial way before the high-priced and high-performance private universities change their behavior. The University of Texas recognizes this.

At UT Austin — a public university in a state with a $12 billion budget surplus and a football program that brings in $5 million a year — the only cuts Powers is looking to make involve thinning out the number of five- and six-year undergraduate seniors on his campus. Getting students to graduate "expeditiously" saves a bundle, he says.

One can work on that overhang of fifth- and sixth-year seniors in at least two ways. One can look at the transcripts and determine how many of those students spent their first year or two in remediation. And one can look at the majors and determine how many of the students have schedule completion troubles because their major departments are being denied resources. Those are not the adjustments one would expect of a bubble-economy hustle.

(Via Phi Beta Cons, where Candace de Russy inadvertently alerted me to Mr Snowling's howler.

BETTER WORKING CONDITIONS AND BETTER PAY

Chicago teachers remain on strike as a new school week begins.  Via Media offered a roundup of news and commentary from last week, with the suggestion that the strike means a fracture in the blue social model that Democrats pin their election hopes on.  It's true, as this Reason commentary suggests, that the troubles of the Chicago Public Schools, and struggling big-city schools generally, will not be cured by a new labor contract, or more testing, or a visit from a unicorn jumping over a rainbow, until the schools have an easier time inculcating middle-class habits in their students because the parents reinforce the code of the schools, rather than the code of the street.

SO CUT COSTS BY TOUGHENING STANDARDS. A weblogger posting as Adjuncts in Hell contemplates rising college sticker prices as a ruling-class plot to preserve social stratification.

So much social phenomena is coming to a head here. First, consider the revenge of the ruling class once threatened by a surging middle-class in the wake of GI Bill. By launching tuition rates at top-tier schools in the ionosphere, they can keep ambitious proles out and hold those pesky student-aid wannabes in check when they graduate in debt. Forget that current enrollment rates at colleges and universities hover around 45%, higher tuition (even at State U) guarantees that any middle class kid who dares to advance up the social ranks will be hamstrung by student loans. That's a twofer in places like Newton, Mass; it keeps them out of your neighborhood and their brats out of your child's private school.

That presupposes a conspiracy to restrict output and raise prices. Given the wide availability of information about the return on investment in human capital, the simpler explanation is a rightward shift in the derived demand for degrees.

It's relatively simple for socially-conscious curriculum committees and admissions offices to undo such a conspiracy, if in fact there were such a conspiracy. Hence the title of my post. The conspiracy theory has it part right and part wrong.

Second, by filling the ranks of lower tier colleges with overworked adjuncts, more and more students are deprived of the full and proper attention of dedicated professors who can focus on two or three classes. Instead, for $50,000 - $75,000 (before 7.5% interest over 20 years), they get harassed and overstressed freeway fliers who bolt in and out of eight classrooms on four campuses and consider "office hours" to be a dashed-off response to e-mail at four in the morning because they're up correcting a self-perpetuating mound of student papers. It may seem that "everyone" goes to college, but not everyone is receiving the same education. Can a students gain a first-class education at In-State Tuition U? Without question. But do they have the requisite curiosity and academic skills going in? That leads to the next issue . .

It has occurred to the poster that information about safety schools practicing the access-assessment-remediation-retention model is also widely available, and those high sticker prices (although, as at Gimbel's, nobody pays list price) at the seventy-five or so "top forty" universities simply reflect a flight to quality that could easily be accommodated by more of the seventy-five or so "next forty" universities emulating their "most selective" counterparts.

Our entertainment-addled culture is the modern equivalent of the drain-circling Roman Empire's "Bread and Circus." Business students see a bankruptcy-court-hopscotching charlatan like Donald Trump as a role model. Students spoon fed a watery pablum of pilfered Shakespeare plots turbo-charged with sex and celebrity on the WB and Fox openly disdain genuine literature and are openly hostile to books. Once they graduate, they at last discover they will not be able to afford that Hummer H-2, the trip to Cancun, a wardrobe of wage-slave-rendered Abercrombie and Fitch rags, or even a one-way ticket out of mom-and-dad's basement. When that reckoning comes, they're on the wrong side of the college walls with only a handful of dimes from selling back their Norton Shakespeare, a fuzzy idea of how punctuation works, and a nasty drinking problem. Ever really wonder why those 25-year-old second-chancers at the community college are as serious as a heart attack in the classroom? Consider them the lucky ones.

So cut costs by toughening standards.

UNFAVORABLE CORRELATION OF FORCES. Via Newmark's Door, an Economic Principals column illustrating what happens when state stinginess accompanies faction fighting, this time in the economics department at UCLA (motto: On! Wisconsin!)

Something is clearly wrong at UCLA. Some of the problem must have to do with the university's administration -- but not all. "Because of the way private university endowments are managed, they have grown substantially," says Gary Hansen, the current chairman. State budget appropriations haven't kept pace.

He's right, of course. Being a good economics department in a public university has gotten harder. The California system in particular has seen compensation become a political football. But Berkeley and San Diego economics haven't lost half their roster (though Berkeley's department, in particular, is besieged by offers.) And some outsiders maintain that the situation at UCLA is not so much a distressing sign of the growing disparity between public and private universities' funding than it is the kind of supernova that occasionally occurs in small organizations when big egos clash.

Do we really need more confirmation that there is a flight to quality in higher education? And that there are gains from trade between students and faculty? And there's excess demand for places at "selective" universities? That said, there still appears to be an excess supply of faction fighters.

"UCLA is a mess, no matter what the people you've talked to have to say about it," says one competitor. "It's not very much due to their public status, either, but to a cataclysmic split in the department. One group of true-believers blocks every appointment that the other group wants to make and vice versa. I've heard this time after time from the people there that we've interviewed. Still another example of people who think they're geniuses acting like pinheads."

Nothing quite like collective wisdom to make people dumb.

A-PRIME, C-PRIME, SUB-PRIME. Deirdre McCloskey criticizes much of the economics research effort, including the modification of assumption A in a model to an assumption A' such that the original model's conclusion C becomes the opposite conclusion C'. Now comes Econ Log's Arnold Kling, suggesting that the effort has crowded out work on more useful things, such as understanding the nature of financial panics as they might actually exist.

I've been thinking more about Joe Stiglitz's valid criticisms of what I call the Lost Generation of macroeconomists, and I'm getting more and more steamed. If you stacked up everything written by the leading macro folks of my generation and later (actually, starting a few years earlier also), you would have nothing but an enormous baloney sandwich. Ordinarily, I don't dwell on the fact that these people who were no smarter than me back-scratched each other into the best journals, the prestigious professorships, the important conferences, etc. But sometimes, especially now, I think about how badly they have failed intellectually. They are the precise academic equivalent of Wall Street executives who enjoyed golden parachutes while bankrupting their firms.

The cynicism about academic back-scratching has grown in recent years, although ProfScam alerted readers to its presence 20 years ago. If the back-scratching were a real-world Glass Bead Game, with no consequences, perhaps we could live with it. But while the humanities messed about with postmodernism and post-structuralism, the abolition of academic standards as oppressive social constructs fostered a collapse of elementary and secondary education and a positional arms race with elements of a flight to quality in higher education. And while macroeconomists modeled representative agents (part of the Stiglitz complaint is that a representative agent is both lender and borrower) and perfect risk-neutral hedges, and used transversality conditions to preclude rational expectations hyperinflations, actual investors who never heard of Merton or Sargent or Ito or Brock blundered into unfamiliar positions.

At the same time, many perfectly competent economists who were not Members in Good Standing of the back-scratching society disengaged, if they didn't change their own research efforts to imitate the latest fads, or adopt the fallback position that multiple articles in journals that nobody reads are better evidence of scholarly productivity than fewer but better articles in journals that a few scholars read, even if those journals are the back-scratchers' playing fields.

BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU ASK FOR. A College Affordability post hails a policy shift in Pennsylvania.

The Philadelphia Inquirer reported Thursday that the Pennsylvania State board of Education approved a proposal to explore the possibility of founding a new type of 4-year state university, which would focus on offering a “low-cost, no frills” bachelor’s degree. This “no-frills” university would forgo the extras, which have become common at other schools. No sports, no luxury student center, and even no climbing wall. The reduction in both capital and staff would, in theory, allow the university to run a much leaner operation and pass the savings on to the students.

Detroit Normal becomes Detroit Teachers becomes City University of Detroit becomes Wayne State University. Northern Illinois State Normal School becomes Northern Illinois University with the intervening steps left to the reader as an exercise. There's probably a community college that has become a state university somewhere. Perhaps the no-frills versions got their start in tough times and their mission crept over time, possibly assisted by greater prosperity. (That's received wisdom for the G. I. Bill - Space Race - Baby Boom era of local colleges becoming state universities with national aspirations.) If so, perhaps the Arizona and Nevada model of mission reversal is the simpler solution. Close the doctoral programs, end intercollegiate athletics, make no further upgrades to the residence halls.

I'm skeptical of that approach, because it adds capacity in a sector of higher education where there already is excess capacity. The folks at College Affordability make my point for me. The latest Chart of the Week disaggregates freshman to sophomore retention rates. These are highest at Ph. D. granting private universities, followed by Ph. D. granting public universities, M. A. granting privates, and M. A. granting publics. The lowest rates are at two-year public colleges. The quest for prestige degrees cannot be dismissed as a positional arms race by parents (although that exists) or as expense-preference behavior by faculty and upper-level administrators (although they indulge). There's a genuine flight to perceived quality at work.