LET THAT HARD RAIN FALL.

It has long been my position that the people who run higher education have broken faith with the students they are supposed to develop and with the intellectual tradition that made higher education possible in the first place.  If a reckoning comes, it will be one higher education brought on itself.  "Inside Higher Ed's Steven Mintz has been on a roll of late, acknowledging the malpractice of the English departments, suggesting the propensity of sociology and anthropology to defend their tight priors isn't advisable, and suggesting that activism isn't necessarily the best extension of one's scholarship."  That post continued, "A hard rain might be about to fall, he argues, although as long as those "less privileged institutions" fail to recognize they are in the same business as the Ivies and continue with their subprime party school or access-assessment-remediation-retention practices, they will continue to be slighted in the U.S. News rankings."

GET TO THE HEART OF THE MATTER.

I recently discovered two posts by Jeffrey Alan Johnson, a deanlet at Utah Valley University, and apparently a believer in free lunches.  But in the middle of his predictable fretting about the difficulties non-traditional students encounter, the message emerges, that Utah Valley, or Chicago State, or Wayne State, or Northern Illinois, or Eligibility Junior, are in the same business as the Ivies.  Let's start with his reaction to Our President's proposed performance rating system for higher education.  (Pretend for the balance of this post that the rating system will be more effective than the non-stimulus-stimulus, or the Tax Preparer Protection and Overpriced Insurance Act.)  A crappy university with a lot of Distressed Material failing to graduate, or to successfully execute an articulation agreement, is going to get a low rating.  That, Mr Johnson notes, will not turn out to the advantage of place-bound applicants.

Non-traditional students already have jobs and families, so they’re tied to a place. Their resources are defined by their own income rather than their parents, and their status as non-college graduates means that they are bearing the brunt of the decline in wages for those without college. And the fact that they didn’t go to college as a traditional student suggests they probably lack the preparation for selective institutions. Unless they are in a large urban area, odds are that non-traditional students are not in a position to choose which school they attend. That is especially true of those looking at two-year institutions.

We'll make some progress when advocates for the non-traditionals start looking at the root causes of failed attempts at second chances.  Those causes probably manifest themselves somewhere around second grade.  Mr Johnson, however, focuses on the death-spiral of returning adults with poor life management skills attending subprime institutions pretending to offer preparation for trades and professions, in an environment where "subprime" is no longer perceived or rumored, rather it now has a government stamp of approval.

So what happens to them when the only college in their area is a low-performing institution? That so many in these positions have knowingly opted for poorly performing but fiercely expensive for-profit institutions tells us that a low rating is unlikely to dissuade someone who sees the only alternative as not getting an education. They will go to low-performing schools. Those schools will likely perform even worse as the rating funnels away better students—and their tuition money—along with increasingly common state performance funding, and makes it even more difficult to recruit quality faculty. But they will still go. And if they graduate, their resume will have the name of a school dubbed, with all the pomp and circumstances that the National Center for Education Statistics can muster, “low-performing,” making it less likely that they will get the good job for which they came to school. And they will still go.

Perhaps. The reason U.S. News sells those college guides, and parents hire brain coaches, and your good public school comes bundled with a granite counter-top is precisely because more than a few aspirants to the upper middle class understand the toxic effect of disengaged, hostile, unprepared, surly, or simply dysfunctional people. Stratification is emergent, and until advocates for so-called social justice grasp that reality, the life of the poor will not improve. Contrary to Mr Johnson, a system of ratings, perceived or with the imprimatur of the Department of Education, can only reflect what others are doing.

And when the choice isn’t real, ratings only increase the stratification of higher education, and with it of American society. Don’t believe me? Look at primary and secondary education.

Yes. The common schools have been disrespecting bourgeois convention for years, and more than half the students in the common schools live in poverty because too many common schools are residually inhabited by people with poor or non-existent life management skills.

RESPECT THE MARKET TESTS.

In the Cold Spring Shops coverage of the pedagogical successes of Northwestern's lecturers, the unifying theme of all posts is the unsustainability of attempting to offer a college education on the cheap.

At the same time that story broke, longtime Duquesne University adjunct professor of French, Margaret Mary Vojtko, died alone, penniless, and effectively homeless at the age of 83.  She had served Duquesne for 25 years.

Arizona's Gary Rhoades, who directs that university's Center for the Study of Higher Education, wrote a commentary for CNN.

If American higher education says to students and society that a college education is the path to the middle class, how can we justify such treatment of these professionals, with advanced degrees, who are teaching the students?

We are living a lie that cheats these professors and the students they teach, particularly in access universities and community colleges where adjunct faculty numbers, like percentages of lower-income students, are highest and instructional spending per student is lowest.

Yes, it is the lie of access - assessment - remediation - retention. The pay and working conditions for "access universities and community colleges" -- often put more bluntly as higher education's subprime sector, are terrible.  But such institutions will claim they are unable to recruit against the more highly regarded institutions either with respect to pay or working conditions, and on the other side of the market, the good researchers and the star teachers will discover they have opportunities, and act upon them.

Rebecca Schuman of the University of Missouri at St. Louis proposes the next step.

We must provide tangible, capitalism-friendly reasons that college “consumers” are getting a very raw deal. The first step: not to bang our heads against the wall when referring to our students as “consumers.” The second: to examine the adjunct crisis from the perspective of the two industries in which the vast majority of today’s college graduates will find employment, if they ever do: service and retail. If that seems cynical, keep in mind that people who think language and literature professors are useless often have a hard time detecting cynicism.

There's an argument from equity in the above: it's the consumers of what passes for higher education at the dropout factories and subprime providers who are getting the rawest deal: lots of debt, little learning, last hired, and hired only at the peak of the business cycle.

It's counterproductive, Ms Schuman argues, to think of higher education as an upscale product.

So as long as college is viewed as a brand-name product, its workers’ wages will only get lower as  management wages soar. And as long as that diploma continues to confer what little status it still does, nobody will care.

Yes, in a world where Apple views Chinese prison labor as more dependable than North American burnouts, the Enhance Shareholder Value model probably has those consequences.  But that Enhance Shareholder Value doesn't always work for the for-profit loan sinks, nor is it likely to work well for the dropout factories.

On the other hand, to think of higher education as an upscale service instantly suggests a way around Baumol's cost disease (apart from a theoretical novelty due to Baumol himself that I recently rediscovered and hope to expand upon).

Consumers pay a ton; ergo, they deserve premium service—which includes, say, an office in which to meet with their professor instead of a 1998 Subaru, and a professor who is rested and showered because her home has heat and hot water.

If, instead of viewing a diploma like a $500 purse (one we don’t care was made by Vietnamese 4-year-olds), we view the college experience as, say, CrossFit or a Brazilian bikini wax, but for the mind, then tuition payers might actually start getting up in arms that so little of their tuition goes to instruction.

The rat-hole model of management is a false economy.

PROFSCAM AFTER TWENTY YEARS.

Charlie Sykes's denunciation of coreless curricula, pointless research, and excess access was among the opening shots in the twenty years war on, and in, higher education. At the time, Mr Sykes was in recovery from an early liberalism, and Higher Education could shrug off some of his observations, much as the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers could shrug off the Association of American Railroads lobbying for repeal of the full crew laws.

Now comes Andrew Hacker, a professor at Queens College of CUNY, public intellectual, regular reviewer in The New York Review of Books; and Claudia Dreifus, with Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs, "Science Times" columnist for The New York Times, collaborating on Higher Education? How Colleges are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids -- And What We Can Do About It. Short form of Book Review N^o. 29: the Academic Establishment will have a harder time shrugging off a criticism from within, even if, as Peter Sacks (who also reviewed The Five-Year Party) notes,

[T]oo many chapters that regurgitate the many well-worn complaints about higher education: Students are subjected to uncaring and unsupportive professors -- if they are taught by full-time faculty members at all, since most college instructors are part-timers, adjuncts and graduate students; professors themselves are overpaid, underworked, and preoccupied with the "virus" of research that is consuming colleges of all stripes; and colleges have become simply too expensive relative to the diminishing value that institutions actually provide students.

Perhaps so.

GETTING THE MODEL RIGHT.

Kevin Carey looks at the effects of the Wayne State model for higher education.

People may vehemently disagree about how to help minority students in K-12 education, but nearly all agree that the students need help in the first place. Yet in every big city with a headline-making, underperforming school district, there’s a public higher education system receiving not 1/100th of the scrutiny. Detroit, for example, is widely seen to have the worst public school system in America—so bad that U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has said he “lose[s] sleep over” the plight of the city’s 50,000 students. But how many people know that Wayne State, Detroit’s main public university, has an 8 percent—yes, 8 percent—graduation rate for black students? Who’s losing sleep over them?

Detroit is, no surprise, a worst case. But it’s hardly the only city with a pervasive and largely ignored higher education problem. In Duncan’s hometown, 19 percent of black students who enroll full-time at Chicago State University graduate within six years. At California State University, Los Angeles, it’s 22 percent. The University of the District of Columbia matches Wayne State for futility, with an 8 percent graduation rate for black students. The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee? 19 percent.

Regular readers will have noticed the Cold Spring Shops solution.

I submit that higher education has broken the social compact with the citizenry, by substituting a misguided inclusiveness and access-assessment-remediation-retention for common standards, in such a way as to antagonize precisely the well-to-do people who in previous years would have sent their kids to the local state university.

That same post concludes with an evaluation of the effects of providing lots of subprime college to disadvantaged kids.

[S]tudents from poorer neighborhoods aren't getting the educational fundamentals or the life-management skills to enroll at the land-grants, let alone to make an impression at the job fair.

It's encouraging to see Mr Carey, who has elsewhere pointed out the folly of focusing extensively on the top of the U.S. News rankings to the exclusion of what most collegians encounter.

America’s higher education system is comprehensively failing to give minority students what they need, and this has little to do with elite college admissions. Including community colleges, fewer than one in ten undergraduates attend colleges with admissions rates below 50 percent. By definition, affirmative action only affects the small percentage of students who are qualified to attend elite schools. Many of the minority students washing out of public universities in droves are the survivors of our infamously substandard K-12 schools, attending local, open-admissions institutions. Their problem isn’t getting into college—it’s getting out with a quality degree in hand and no terrible loans on their backs.

Mr Carey's policy prescription is one that critics of higher education arguing from a different perspective might agree with.

States need to start practicing financial affirmative action by devoting more public resources to colleges that enroll students with the greatest academic needs. Along with the federal government, they should also penalize institutions with terrible graduation rates, student loan repayment rates, and post-graduation employment and earning rates, compared to peers with similar student populations. Those who set the national education agenda need to look past the handful of universities that graduate the ruling class and focus on improving the neglected institutions that educate future minority school teachers, scientists, doctors, and engineers.

Those are the same institutions that provide most of the degrees, and there are probably substantial gains from trade between the legislators and the universities, as both sides restore the social contract that once prevailed.

THREE SCORE YEARS OF INSTITUTIONAL DRY ROT?

It's not as if we haven't noticed higher education has a problem.  Peter Wood, who is my favorite former college administrator, offers "The coming cultural collapse of American higher education."  I've long suspected that the lamentations about students being too careerist are self-made purgatories.  But why else might anyone matriculate?

Why does anyone go to college? The most popular answer given by American college freshmen from 1991 to 2019 was, “To be able to get a better job.” The Higher Education Research Institute (HERI) at UCLA, which conducted an annual survey of full-time students at some 200 four-year colleges, routinely found 75 to 85 percent gave that answer, though many also said, “To make more money.” The next most popular answer during those decades was, “To learn more about things that interest me.” Trailing these answers but still widely endorsed was the ambition, “To gain a general education and appreciation of ideas.”

I don’t have access to more recent results but I suspect the students are still saying much the same. Those answers, however, merely scratch the surface. The real reasons, then and now, that students go to college are hidden in a mixture of social expectations, family dynamics, ambitions, emotional longing, and inertia, covered with a veneer of socially acceptable rationalizations.

The beginning of that UCLA survey coincided with the more cheerful bits of the Consciousness Revolution, but after those first heady summers, reality came to bat.

Especially notable are changes in two contrasting value statements: The importance of “developing a meaningful philosophy of life” and of “being very well off financially.” In the late 1960s developing a meaningful philosophy of life was the top value, being endorsed as an “essential” or “very important” goal by more than 80 percent of the entering freshmen. Being very well off financially, on the other hand, lagged far behind in the late 1960s, ranking fifth or sixth on the list with less than 45 percent of the freshmen endorsing it as a very important or essential goal in life. Since that time these two values have basically traded places, with being very well off financially now the top value (at 73.6 percent endorsement) and developing a meaningful philosophy of life now occupying sixth place at only 43.1 percent endorsement.

Yes, and the tenured radicals might have completed the long march through the English Department and installed all sorts of Diversity Weenies in Student Affairs and otherwise let their freak flags fly, and yet, once they filled the area studies departments with their star students, Starbucks hired their other graduates.  Ever since, though, that shift from "meaningful philosophy" (perhaps assisted by pre-herpes casual sex and Acapulco Gold?) to "being well off" (because more than a few hippies of the Sixties became yuppies in early middle age during Morning in America?) has been something that the Student Affairs types lamented, but (read that philosophy essay in full) failed to address in a meaningful, meaning rigorous, and therefore oppressive, or hegemonic, or downright evil, way.

THAT U.S. NEWS PROBLEM.

The departing head of Wisconsin's English Department, Caroline Levine, is leaving to seek other opportunities.  The university's political masters, attempting to strike balances among extracting revenue from Coasties, developing human capital for Cheeseheads, holding the line on tuitions, and asking less of taxpayers, have prompted Professor Levine to shop her resume.

Low prices might be a great way to compete, but politicians have also artificially limited the UW’s pool of consumers. There’s huge demand for Wisconsin higher education around the world. But politicians insist that the university must limit the number of students admitted from out of state to no more than 27.5 percent of the university’s total enrollment. They’ve also capped tuition for out-of-state students to a price much lower than that of our peers. The University of Michigan charges $43,118 to those from outside of Michigan. The University of Wisconsin charges $29,665 for out-of-state students.

This is something like telling Toyota that they must not only charge between a quarter and a half of the market price for an excellent product, but also that they have to send away many thousands of eager customers who are willing to pay much more.

What a bargain! But Wisconsin’s leaders are not praising faculty for managing to offer a world-class product at a fraction of the market price. They are scolding us for failing to deliver value.

This is what creating excess demand for prestige degrees looks like! Michigan (which has long been known in the Wolverine State as particularly tough to get into, because those full-fare matriculants with great credentials from Illinois or India help with the organization's revenue goals) understands the value proposition: we'll charge less than the Ivies, but enough so that we can creditably be a safety school for the spawn of the nomenklatura and still offer the kind of education and networking opportunities the Ivies do, plus an entree to the Liberal Establishment for a few Michigan residents.  Wisconsin isn't yet grasping that market opportunity.

Thus it's time for her to go.

Walker’s contention is that the university’s costs are just too high — bloated with too many overpaid workers. So let’s talk about salaries. I don’t like the big disparities between professional wages and those of other workers myself, but I can assure you that salaries for faculty are a response to a globally competitive marketplace.

Faculty are not unionized. Five colleagues in my own department have been wooed away to other universities in the past year with salary offers between 50 percent and 100 percent more than what they were earning at the University of Wisconsin.

Imagine blasting workers at Toyota because they were asking to earn salaries equal to the pay of peers with similar skills at Honda or Chevy.

I myself am now leaving the University of Wisconsin after 14 years. At my new university in another state, I will have stronger tenure protections than I now have here. I will earn about 50 percent more than my current salary for the same job. And I will be free from the strange crazy-making double-speak that on one hand demands that higher education deliver value like a business, and on the other hand, methodically prevents it from doing so.

At Right Wisconsin, Charlie (Profscam) Sykes suggests Professor Levine check her privilege.

Perhaps she should have stayed with English, since the economics here is shaky. As I write in my upcoming book, Fail U., paying for a college education at some schools is the equivalent of buying a BMW every year – and driving it off a cliff. A more apt analogy – more in line with Ms. Levine’s argument – would be a car company that sold Yugos, but priced them like Lexuses.

True in part and false in part. Yes, a professor of English is in a bad place -- how many financial engineers do you meet parking cars, pumping gas, or making espresso?  And yet, there are market tests for higher education -- the U. S. News problem -- and people pay for those BMWs as a way of keeping themselves or their spawn away from the Distressed Material at the regional comprehensives and mid-majors and all the rest of higher education's subprime sector.  Let's end with Mr Sykes's own words.

[I]t is increasingly obvious that the burden of the failure of academia tend to fall not on the elites, but on the large middle class and on students at the lower end of the economic spectrum for whom a college education is the only hope for upward advancement. To a large extent, the middle class is stuck in the academic gulags created by the professors' culture.

That's from page 261 of Profscam.  Whether Professor Levine's departure from Madison is a wake-up call to the people of Wisconsin, or evidence of creeping Oshkoshization throughout the state university system, is the more important question.  That's where the Yugo analogy matters.

NOW WORK OUT THE PROPER VALUE PROPOSITION.

A recent Washington Monthly article might be offering praise for the regional comprehensives and the mid-majors.  "New research shows that regional universities deliver the greatest return for our tax dollars."  Unfortunately, the concept of "greatest return" in the research is an ancient mercantilist myth.

Colleges and universities are under enormous pressure, from demographically driven admissions declines to accusations of “wokeness” to mounting public doubts about the value of a four-year degree. Public universities like [Grand Valley State] took big hits to their budgets after the Great Recession, and while overall per student funding has returned to pre-recession levels in most of the country, debates continue over whether higher education is a sound investment. Many Republican state lawmakers, especially those representing rural areas, argue that public universities contribute to “brain drain,” when students earn college degrees on the taxpayer’s dime and then move out of state to pursue their careers. Those dollars would be better spent, they say, by cutting taxes and subsidizing companies to relocate to their states.

Are they right? The Upjohn Institute, a nonpartisan research organization focused on policy-related issues of employment, set out to answer that question. Using innovative research methods, a group of scholars led by the Upjohn senior economist Brad J. Hershbein found that students at brand-name public flagships—places like the University of Michigan, University of Wisconsin–Madison, University of Kansas, and University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, to name a few—do tend to leave those states after graduation. But alumni of less-renowned regional public universities, like GVSU, generally stick around.

There's a lot going on in those two paragraphs, and in 22 years of Cold Spring Shops we've looked at a number of them.  It is a sobering thought that Illinois was once a destination state for ambitious graduates of Michigan's institutions.

Shiver me timbers, there are drawbacks in attempting to capture 25 years of creative destruction in two data-points. One state has a manufacturing economy dominated by motor vehicle assembly. The other has a diversified economy including much of the financial and logistical infrastructure for Michigan. Does it surprise that the incentives to finish high school and attend university are different?

The balance of trade in higher education obsesses policymakers in the upper Midwest, as my beggar-thy-neighbor series of posts points out. University administrators throughout Wisconsin fret about graduates accepting jobs out-of-state, particularly in Illinois (but did any of their campuses see fit to offer me a post as space-cadet-theorist-in-residence?) and Amtrak's Michigan corridor service exists to transport flatlanders to Kalamazoo and Ann Arbor.

The comparison of Michigan with Illinois misleads in another way. Consider Michigan, Michigan State, Wayne State, and Michigan Tech. At one time Michigan attempted to maintain four research universities in-state. There are also three Mid-American members and a number of regional state universities and colleges. (It was clear that Wayne was going to lose out to the other three in the retrenchments that were in progress 20 years ago.) Public policy in Illinois has tended to favor Illinois at Urbana as the research university, with perhaps a few specialty programs in Chicago. But there's enough discontent among students good enough for Illinois who don't get in, and their parents, that Northern, Southern, and Illinois State can make the case to be additional research comprehensive universities. But that public policy has not maintained academic departments in Urbana at the same level that Ann Arbor has managed to maintain, let alone competitors that could be viewed in the same way as Michigan and Michigan State. Question: if not for Michigan, State, Tech, and Wayne, would the exodus from Michigan have been worse? Different question: How much Illinois human capital is being developed in Madison and Ann Arbor and East Lansing and Kalamazoo?

Michigan continues to attempt to maintain more university capacity than they can support, and the rent-seekers predictably are wetting their beaks.

Robert Genetski, a former schoolteacher and Michigan state representative, provided one explanation: political clout. Larger universities have more money to employ highly paid lobbyists to influence state appropriations. For example, in 2011—the year that the legislators considered the 2012 budget—the University of Michigan, Michigan State University, and Central Michigan University together outspent every other school combined on lobbying in Lansing. These lobbyists can have quite an impact. Genetski explained to me that while the original higher education budget for the following year, 2013, contained the largest increases in state support for high-performing regional universities like GVSU and Ferris State University, lobbyists for more influential universities successfully killed his budget. Instead, the legislature boosted overall higher education spending by a bit, but with the largest research universities receiving the overwhelming majority of the new money. Over the next few years, [former governor Rick] Snyder signed additional modest increases in higher education spending, but at levels below what they had been when he was first elected, and with the lion’s share going to the universities with the best political connections, not the highest performance.

That Upjohn study, though?  That Institute, which has hired some solid economists over the years, comes close to making a mercantilist argument.

On a basis of return on tax dollars, regional universities outperform flagships. For every $100,000 of state funding, the researchers found, regional universities retain nearly two college graduates in the state for every one flagships keep. “From the lens of a state policymaker,” they concluded, “we show that regional public institutions tend to produce the greatest number of graduates who stay and work in-state per dollar of state funding, suggesting investments in these institutions could have particularly high local returns.” (While the best community colleges have similarly high ROI, many others don’t because their students graduate at lower rates and earn less after college.)

I've never been a fan of keeping the human capital home.  "Michigan exports human capital to Washington. Washington exports jet planes and computer software to Michigan. If Washington's products improve life, including work life, of Michigan's residents, the proportion of adults with degrees in Michigan does not have to signal a decline in the economic health of Michigan."  I've also urged caution in evaluating the degree programs at those regional comprehensives, as well as caution in comparisons involving community colleges: "Note the distinction between a four year college and a community college or vocational school. The Five-Year Party also cautions readers not to conflate a subprime party school with a community college: open access does not equate to open kegs."

HIGHER EDUCATION FAILS MARKET TESTS.

Our favorite recovering administrator, Peter Wood, detects intellectual smallness in higher education.

His hypothesis: that the academic left has destroyed higher education's credibility.

Partly this has happened because the academic Left is scared. Having completed its long march through the institutions, it has noticed that fewer and fewer people are accepting its rule. College enrollments peaked in 2011 at 21 million in 2011 and are now down to 18.8 million in fall 2017, and will drop again this fall. This has prompted colleges and universities to redouble their marketing. They are trying to entice more “adult learners,” more international students, more illegal immigrants, and more and more academically under-qualified students to enroll. Generally, that means pitching programs tailored to the interests and abilities of busy adults, nervous illegals, and bewildered blockheads.

Plummeting enrollments would be of concern to college administrators no matter their politics, but politics has exacerbated the problem. A large majority of conservatives now view the university as hostile to free speech and free inquiry. The traditional humanities are now so dominated by the race-class-gender-is-everything crowd that students shun their courses and elect instead to major in less polluted subjects, such as nursing and accounting.

The academic Left thunders that students are deserting the “liberal arts” in favor of “vocational training” because the business community and right-wing philistines have led them astray. But the real reason is that students are simply turned off by the Left’s incessant monologue about injustice and oppression. Is there nothing else?

I'm inclined to agree with the broad outlines of his claim, and would add that, although running a university (or some kinds of eleemosynary institutions) like a business is a mistake, there is still a market for higher education, not to mention a marketplace of ideas, and that "incessant monologue" is a failure of the stewards of the market to deliver on some kinds of ideas.  Teach the controversies.

Furthermore, I've groused, repetitively and at length, about Distressed Material and the follies of access-assessment-remediation-retention and the proliferation of subprime party schools and the chutzpah of griping about vocationalism after peddling that "to get a good job, get a good education" starting about the same time the first Interstate Highways opened.  Mr Wood is simply making a point that regular readers will find familiar.

“Emergent coherence” is the sure path to post-modernism, where the controlling narrative of Western civilization gives way to a prevailing sense of randomness and disorder. We can hardly blame the students for that. It is what the universities offer. Sometimes they offer it straight up as part of a cultural studies course. Mostly it is conveyed in the form of curricular entropy: the lack of a comprehensive intellectual vision of what is worth learning, why, and in what order. The lack of such a vision is masked by the emphasis on such fatuities as “diversity,” “multiculturalism,” and “critical thinking,” and by the promise of small packages of useful skills, which is the substance of “micro-credentials.”

All of these together may seem to those who don’t know any better a perfectly good agenda for the American college or university. But they do not add up to an adult who understands much about history, civilization, or culture—which is to say, a liberally educated person.

Put more simply, emergent coherence has its place, but that's at odds with paying forward the accumulated wisdom born of lots of prior mistakes.

I wonder, though, if there isn't more at work.  Our President's impromptu diplomacy has caused no end of consternation for the Front Row Kids who might be confronting their irrelevance, and that consternation appears to have motivated Mr Wood's essay. "Why has the vanguard of world history and multiculturalism suddenly settled into a fascination with the equivalent of collecting intellectual lint?"

Perhaps the Front Row Kids among the diplomatic corps and the establishment press, and the lint-collectors of higher education are in the position of the operators of seminaries and monasteries five centuries ago.

The elite keep getting the basics wrong.

And when the old gatekeepers preach the old creeds, and urge the sinners to change their ways and pay their indulgences, and recant or be excommunicated, the deplorables say, pound sand.

I'm seeing enough parallels to the upheaval in the one apostolic and catholic church to consider additional posts on this theme.

EVENTUALLY THEY'LL MISS THE SENIOR NONCOMS?

I've been beating that drum for years.  "[T]he presence of a senior professor in an introductory course sends the right signal: the basics are too important to leave to novices. (Visualize a boot camp without lifer sergeants as drill instructors.)"  It's possible I suggested the same idea using different terminology before then, but the message is simple.  Beginning students deserve an encounter with a senior professor, someone who is properly a steward of the curriculum.

From time to time, Inside (the woke part of) Higher Ed picks up the message. "Marc Stein argues declines in tenure density constitute the greatest threat U.S. higher education has ever faced."  Professor Stein, an historian at San Francisco State, has to sound all the woke notes in his column.   The concept of "tenure density" has long been a thing.  One reason tenure at the highly regarded (or highly self-regarding) departments all of a sudden became harder to get, years ago,  is that many of the academy's stars were well connected to the various granting agencies and foundations, which meant a lot of the department's payroll was on outside money, and assistant deans that calculated the "tenure density" of the departments often found themselves in a position where only a genuinely high achieving scholar with lots of external funding could gain tenure.  A grant once in a while, or evidence of having sought funding, didn't cut it.

ENSURING THAT THE U.S. NEWS PROBLEM WILL PERSIST.

I've long been on the case.  "Cold Spring Shops has called attention to the folly of admitting unprepared students and calling it access."  For all the good it has done.

According to the American Association of State Colleges and Universities, roughly 70 percent of all U.S. undergraduates enrolled at public four-year institutions attend RPUs. Yet declining enrollments and years of austerity measures have left these workhorse universities particularly vulnerable. Writing about the difficult financial decisions many of these campuses have already made, Lee Gardner warns that “if many regional colleges cut at this point, they risk becoming very different institutions.”

But those who work at regional public universities will tell you that they are already very different institutions. Rarely, however, have these transformations been the subject or result of open campus discussion and debate. Often, they are not even publicly declared by the administrations spearheading these shifts, though it’s not always clear if that is by design or because administrators are unclear about their own priorities. An unsettling likelihood is that we no longer know what these workhorse universities should be working toward.

My position has consistently been that the regional comprehensives and the mid-majors and the like think of themselves as being in the same business as the Ivies, which these days might mean offering a better value proposition than the Ivies can.  "[T]he U.S. News problem exists in part because some potential students, and more than a few of their status-seeking parents, would prefer their spawn not be trapped in academic gulags or subprime party schools."  When Harvard introduces remedial math, perhaps there's an opportunity to brag on having something resembling standards.

What might have happened, instead, is the revelation of the regional comprehensive universities as the stroads of higher education.  "The challenge for the state institutions in keeping up their perceived quality is two-fold. Administrators would like to put the failures to keep up on stingy legislatures, ignoring their own complicity whenever beer-'n-circus or access-assessment-remediation-retention crowds out calculus and statistics and economics and chemistry."

But perhaps, to continue the stroad comparison, the strip malls aren't what they used to be.

Higher education is navigating a significant demographic evolution. The once predominant “traditional” student is now part of a broader, more complex picture known as the “New Majority learner.” This diverse cohort is not an outlier but rather a core component of our academic communities. For institutions committed to meaningful reform and fostering student success, understanding and proactively supporting this group is a fundamental imperative. We are being called to truly equip, empower, and encourage all who are a part of it.

Put another way, what I refer to as the Wayne State model, with all its shortcomings, might be the future.

A third of a century after I left, and they're still pushing their urban mission and first-generation, non-traditional, all the rest, with the same dismal results.  And a new slate of deanlets and deanlings.  I mean, what is a Senior Assistant Provost of Student Success without a Junior Assistant Provost and a Division of Student Success without assorted Special Assistants and Assistants To?

We used to do better.  Once upon a time, Wayne State, and its counterparts, e.g. the City Colleges of New York in New York, and Temple in Philadelphia were unapologetically all about providing strivers with the same sort of intellectual challenges their more privileged counterparts were getting at the more famous destinations, whether in Ann Arbor or Ithaca or on the other side of the tracks in Philadelphia.  These days, at Temple maybe the athletes get that kind of nudging.  Everybody else?  Not so much.

Perhaps, Wayne State and its urban counterparts elsewhere had little choice.  During my seven years there, I heard from some of the old heads how the Ivies were able to diversify their faculty by hiring the right sort of faculty away from Wayne.  That might have happened at Temple and the City Colleges.  Meanwhile, they could diversify their student bodies (a little bit) by waving scholarships at selected graduates of Cass Tech or Bronx Science.

In that Minding the Campus essay, author Dave Tucker, who appears to be in the educational consulting business, the tables and charts that follow his calls to "equip, empower, and encourage" look a lot like the enrollment breakdowns Wayne State's administrators called attention to in their state of the university messages to faculty and their budget requests to Lansing.

NO SOLUTIONS TO THE U.S. NEWS PROBLEM.

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."

Let the record show that I was sounding off about those things while still on faculty.

Thus, when Chicago State is a dropout factory with a corrupt administration, when Valdosta State sells itself as "endless possibilities for outdoor fun" while sanctioning a student for protesting a parking lot, when Palm Beach State is a dropout factory with thought police, it is these academic gulags that deserve special attention, for operating academic gulags that promise but fail to deliver upward advancement, it matters. To repeat: students at Dartmouth or Berkeley or Northern Illinois know how to stand up for themselves.

And when (to scroll through University Diaries) Louisville or North Carolina or Kentucky or Mississippi State or Tennessee put beer-'n-circus and seat licenses ahead of academics, it matters.

Unfortunately, neither former Yale professor William Deresiewicz, in Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite & the Way to a Meaningful Life (breathe!) nor Santa Clara's John M. Ellis, in The Breakdown of Higher Education: How it Happened, The Damage it Does & What Can Be Done does much, either about fixing higher education or about the social stratification that those rankings reinforce.

JEFF MACNELLY WAS CALLING ATTENTION, NOT ADVOCATING.

Fifty years ago, he was taking a dig at the United Nations.

I've been carrying on about education so inclusive nobody learns anything for years.

[C]ontemporary efforts to make writing and figuring more "inclusive" sure look like efforts to compensate for something other than biases in standardized tests.  "The disparity year after year, decade after decade, in math competency, reading proficiency, test scores, honor roll status, and graduation rates, in virtually every U.S. school system, between African American students and other students is disturbing."  That's Townhall columnist Jeff Davidson, with a reiteration of something I've only told you what feels like every week.  "This disparity encompasses such issues as the number of hours the television is on in given households, family or parental encouragement for completing homework assignments, a regular workspace, and established hours for studying in a quiet environment, among other factors."

Instead, what the critical studies types do is propose approaches to education suitable mostly for mockery.  In mathematics, being called upon to "show your work" is culturally biased, or something, probably intersectional.  "Thus, requiring students to show their work reinforces worship of the written word as well as paternalism."

Perhaps it's not so much the written word, though, as it is those pesky rules of construction. “[S]ubmissions will not be judged on traditional literary or grammatical standards.”  The projects must still conform to length limits, and be compelling.

It's almost enough to make one think that the people pushing "inclusive education" have among their priors that their protected-class charges don't have the necessities to write a coherent essay or derive a proper proof.

And the beat goes on.  What the United Nations did very publicly, the National Council of Teachers of English did in obscurity.

The battle over how to teach English has been going on since 1974, when NCTE’s Conference on College Composition and Communication issued this stunner:

We affirm the students’ right to their own patterns and varieties of language—the dialects of their nurture or whatever dialects in which they find their own identity and style. Language scholars long ago denied that the myth of a standard American dialect has any validity. The claim that any one dialect is unacceptable amounts to an attempt of one social group to exert its dominance over another. Such a claim leads to false advice for speakers and writers, and immoral advice for humans. A nation proud of its diverse heritage and its cultural and racial variety will preserve its heritage of dialects. We affirm strongly that teachers must have the experiences and training that will enable them to respect diversity and uphold the right of students to their own language.

That was the NCTE’s earliest warning that endorsing only one standard of English is “immoral” and need not be the goal of a college education. That notion betrays the very students whose “varieties of language” the NCTE meant to uphold.

Years ago, John Molloy offered young adults "dress for success" advice, which, paraphrasing broadly, meant presenting yourself the way the corporate Establishment did, and that might have extended to taking up the hobbies and sports they pursued and the way they spoke.  That was building cultural capital.  His phrasing included a passage, again paraphrasing, to the effect that the people who will offer you a job wear those clothes.  That might not always be true: if you seek work in information technology or entertainment, Brooks Brothers might be a turn-off.

GETTING THE MODEL RIGHT.

In a tulipmania, there are still gardeners who want to plant flowers.  So, too, might be the case with higher education, where a bubble in the subprime sector coexists with genuine demand for something.  That something, however, has not developed in a market environment.

I do observe that education and medical care are the two large sectors in which the private market did not have a strong presence a century ago and are also the two large sectors where market competition does not seem to produce lower prices. And I feel that there must be some connection.

Has there ever been market competition, or has market competition always been tamed by accreditation and licensing? (There's a summer project ... what would a higher education Staggers Act look like?)  There are consequences for writing the wrong policy prescription.

American universities really are the best in the world, and the European model of taxpayer financing of higher education really is going through a massive and inevitable restructuring. This makes figuring out what to do about higher-education cost inflation harder, to my mind, than figuring out what to do about health insurance. There don't seem to be alternative models that sustainably deliver equivalent value at lower cost.

Somewhere, the parallel to railroading breaks down.  In the years before Amtrak, the western and southern carriers that were more successful at ridding themselves of passenger trains fared better than the carriers that continued to serve passengers.  These carriers, however, sought commercial freedom to deliver premium services at prices that were mutually beneficial to carrier and to shipper.  (The old Interstate Commerce Commission had all sorts of powers to obstruct shipper-specific contracts for unit trains or intermodal service.)  There were no bottom-feeding carriers going after the low value traffic the way the proprietary universities are going after unprepared students.  Lexington's Notebook reports an intriguing observation by Berkeley's W. Norton Grubb.

Now, it may be that higher education has become too expensive for some people - working-class/moderate income - and they will not be able to afford it. Many of these potential students now go to community colleges, but they may be squeezed out when regional universities cut back on their slots, and community colleges can't expand to accept more students. But this is a problem of undercapacity, not overcapacity. It may be that fly-by-night privates have over-expanded - the U of Phoenixes of the world - but it would be a good thing to get rid of them. In California ... everyone is worried about how to accommodate all those who want/need higher ed, and I haven't heard any fears of over-capacity. Look at the Pubic Policy Institute of CA - they have been screaming about under-capacity for a long time. So the over-capacity argument in general is absurd, though it might apply to specific niches.

Shorter form: the excess capacity is in access-assessment-remediation-retention, and community colleges and regional universities are in the same business as Harvard or Berkeley and ought to be guided accordingly.  And supply curves slope upward, the pessimisim of Howard Hotson in the London Review of Books notwithstanding.

Wherever a small and strictly limited supply of a highly desirable commodity – such as places at Harvard – is introduced into a genuinely open market, the wealthiest cohort in society will drive its price up to levels only they can afford. This is essentially what has been happening at the upper levels of the US university league since the income gap began to open up in the 1980s. For several decades, tuition fees have been rising at double, triple and even quadruple the rate of cost-of-living inflation, first at the most exclusive universities, and then throughout the private sector, so that there are now more than a hundred private colleges and universities in the US charging students at least $50,000 annually for fees, room and board.

That's Richard Vedder's create-excess demand hypothesis, but where dollars or pounds chase goods, there are opportunities to provide the goods.  The applicant rejected by Harvard or Berkeley or Madison isn't presumptively not good enough for that university; likewise the professor interviewed but not hired by such a place isn't presumptively incapable of competing for the same journal space or grant money.

Oxford and Cambridge have a 600-year head start on their English rivals. Many of the advantages they enjoy are the product of their long histories: their architectural settings, their libraries and archives; their unique systems of tutorial teaching, collegiate organisation and self-government; and the academic prestige accumulated by two dozen generations of scholars, philosophers, scientists, poets and prime ministers. Their competitors cannot produce these things at any price, much less one that undercuts theirs. And because the ‘student experience’ they offer is one that many find uniquely attractive, they could, if freed from the constraints of government legislation, charge as high a price for this experience as the market would bear, without the risk of being undercut by anyone but each other.

Once upon a time Harvard and Yale and Princeton thought of Duke and Chicago and Stanford (the horror: heavy industry money) as the upstarts.  I'd be surprised if the emergence of UCLA (motto: On! Wisconsin) and San Diego didn't prompt some hand-wringing in the Bay Area.  And Urbana is just not secure enough in its prairie for any of the cardinal compass point universities in Illinois to get too good.  But we persevere in spite of those difficulties.

HIGHER EDUCATION BREAKS 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.

Meanwhile the shakeout in higher education's subprime sector continues.

STOP ENABLING HELPLESSNESS, YOU'LL GET LESS OF IT.

As if I needed any more reasons to have left higher education.

The house organ of business as usual in higher education has provided a forum, "Dear Student," giving faculty an opportunity to vent in response to requests from students who lack adult life-management skills, such as "I know it's past the add-drop deadline, but I need your class to graduate."

But apparently an in-house gripe board on a web-site maintained by a trade journal for professors and administrators is too much for one Jesse Stommel. who gives up his Chronicle writing gig in protest over "Dear Student."

The concerns the series has focused on are petty and pedantic, and nobody is being well-served by the content on display (not students, not professors, editors, the Chronicle, the other writers for Vitae, the job seekers visiting the site, or the job advertisers using the service).

Boo-effing-hoo.

Giggling at the water cooler about students is one abhorrent thing. Publishing that derisive giggling as “work” in a venue read by tens of thousands is quite another. Of course, teachers need a safe place to vent. We all do. That safe place is not shared faculty offices, not the teacher’s lounge, not the library, not a local (public) watering hole. And it is certainly not on the pages of the Chronicle of Higher Education, especially in Vitae, the publication devoted to job seekers, including current students and future teachers.

I won’t stand beside this water cooler. I won’t encourage anyone else to come near to it. Until “Dear Student” has ended its run and the Chronicle has published a public apology to students, the words right here (in this “Dear Chronicle” letter) are the only words of mine the Chronicle has my permission to publish on Vitae.

The good news is, College Misery is back, offering that space to vent, and with a proper response to the oh-so-sensitive Professor Stommel.

It is what we folks around here call Smackdown.  If you were to read the Dear Student articles (by typing the URL, not clicking on a link), you'd find them to be very mild in their condemnation of the student.  The authors sign their own names so I suppose they can't bring it like we do here.

What intrigues, though, is that the responses to the "Dear Student" questions tend to come from faculty in "studies" disciplines at "less selective" institutions.  Working hypothesis: it's hard to be a professor in higher education's subprime sector.  Fight back: you have nothing to lose but the assessment and retention coordinators.

FAILING THEIR MARKET TESTS.

Brian Rosenberg, president of Macalester College, which once had the chops, or something, to induce failed presidential hopeful Eugene McCarthy to hold down a faculty gig there, takes to the house organ for business as usual in higher education to decry a widening stratification in higher education.  "Applications are up, and acceptance rates down, at the nation’s most selective colleges and universities, as the number of students applying for early admission there continues to climb."

Ah, the U. S. News problem.  Unfortunately for the Hampshires and Antiochs (and Macalesters?) of this world, there might not be enough matriculants to make payroll.  "According to a recent survey of admissions leaders, a majority of colleges and universities do not expect to fill their new classes by June 1. Meanwhile, Columbia University had an acceptance rate of 7 percent in 2018."  The regional comprehensives are getting hammered, as well, with the retrenchment at Wisconsin - Stevens Point meriting mention.

It's just another opportunity to trot out the class struggle, or something.  "Telling students at Hampshire or Stevens Point that we are living in a golden age is a bit like telling teachers in Los Angeles that life is good because Jerry Jones, owner of the Dallas Cowboys, recently bought a $250-million yacht. Great news — it has two helipads."

CATASTROPHE IS WINNING.

The Superintendent has reacted favorably to shorter observations by Rutgers sociologist Jackson Toby, and Book Review N^o. 40 commends his The Lowering of Higher Education in America: Why Financial Aid Should Be Based on Student Performance. That's his policy proposal in a nutshell, and in the concluding chapter he suggests that on balance it is not a policy that encourages whining and grade-grubbing by entitled but underprepared students. He provides ample documentation, with proper endnotes properly placed at the end of each chapter. That's so refreshing compared with the slapdash or non-existent documentation so many publishers provide allegedly in the interest of economy.

Cold Spring Shops management must endorse a book that includes chapters titled "How Colleges Undermine High School Education" and "Maximizing Access to College Maximizes the Enrollment of Underprepared Students" and a subsection headed "Low Admission and Retention Standards Encourage Goofing Off". Professor Toby recognizes that the effects of the various G.I. bills, Sputnik, and the baby boom include excess capacity in higher education. He neither rebuts nor proposes that at least some of the less-highly-regarded institutions respond to the excess demand for slots at the institutions heading the league tables by raising their academic profile. That might be material for another book, his own Rutgers having slipped up in the academic rankings and missed the brass rings in football and basketball. In Lowering, he's nailed the problems with access-assessment-remediation-retention. Turn to page 52.

Colleges sometimes talk about "high-risk admissions," which shows their intellectual recognition of the lower chances of success for underprepared students. But the colleges have, by and large, recoiled from the implications of high-risk admissions: low "retention" rates. "Retention" is a peculiar word that suggests the college rather than students bears the responsibility for students leaving before graduating.

It's a bit of misplaced business thinking: a repeat customer is a good thing. But the business thinking neglects something else: the wrong kind of customer depresses the value of the business. (Did you ever notice that the businesses that warn customers "no shirt, no shoes, no service" don't offer much by way of service, and if the business is a so-called convenience store you're queued behind multiple people buying lottery tickets and Marlboros? Information content. So it is with lowered higher education.

Yet the evidence is clear that the worse the academic preparation of admitted students at a college, the lower the college's retention rate on the average.

Milepost One on the road to subprime party school land.

Once they have given remedial courses to underprepared students, colleges feel obligated to graduate them even though they may not have corrected their initial weaknesses. Graduating such students exacerbates the problem, because other underprepared students infer from their graduation that everyone can make progress toward a degree without committing himself or herself to repairing weaknesses in preparation. They lack a strong incentive.

That's an incomplete evaluation. On one hand, students assigned to more remedial courses have a higher propensity to drop out. On the other hand, students who complete McDegrees are less likely to face the highest marginal tax rates. Rising income inequality coexisting with rising collegiate enrollments is a statement of inadequate supply of people with ability.

Professor Toby contemplates a number of other influences on higher education's slide, including the role of third party payments in wishful-thinking enrollments (there's an entire book waiting to be written on the effect of third party payments on tuitions and amenities), the role of grade inflation in producing unemployable majors, at the same time that some departments are able to find jobs for all their graduates, and he recognizes that apprenticeships to the trades are not for intellectually disengaged men and women, particularly men and women who lack proper life-management skills.

(Cross-posted to 50 Book Challenge.)

NO BOUNDS ON ACCESS-ASSESSMENT-REMEDIATION-RETENTION.

I don't make up this stuff.

Here is a new trend: college for people who can't read or write. And no, that doesn't mean the one out of three freshmen whose literacy and numeracy skills are so poor that they have to take remedial courses before they are deemed ready to do college-level work. It means students who literally can't read or write because they are severely cognitively impaired by Down syndrome or some other mental disability. Yet an increasing number of campus administrators have decided that even the "intellectually disabled" (as this group is now called) deserve a college education.
Well, not exactly a college education, since even the most egalitarian administrators concede that people with severe cognitive disabilities can't handle even the most rudimentary of course offerings. Instead, what a host of new programs for the intellectually disabled offer is what the people who run them call "a college experience."
Some 250 campuses around the country offer such courses. Students enrolled in the programs sit in on a class or two per semester that regular students are taking for credit, but they don't receive grades, and their assignments are drastically tailored to fit their limited abilities. Batteries of counselors and tutors (the latter are typically volunteers from the regular student population) help them through, and they fill up the rest of their time with "life skills" seminars and workshops designed to help them use a debit card, take the bus, or get through a job interview, with internships at participating nonprofits, and, presumably, with making friends and soaking up the ivy-covered atmosphere. They don't receive actual college degrees---indeed, according to the U.S. Department of Education, no student enrolled in any college program for the intellectually disabled has to date received even a two-year associate degree---but if they complete their programs in a process that can take years, they typically receive certificates of completion that they can show to prospective employers.

There is a school of thought that a high-end university is summer camp, and 250 institutions providing internships for counseling majors as well as an opportunity for the unlucky sibling in a rich family to spend some time on campus probably isn't the end of higher education as we know it: the subprime side of the land grants, mid-majors, community colleges, and proprietaries does more damage.

Such sentimental linguistic trafficking in "dreams and aspirations" and "a college experience" in contrast to actual college can be viewed as a harmless if expensive exercise in philanthropy by university administrators---although it does help dilute the value and meaning of a college education, already threatened by grade inflation and the collapse of core curricula. It would be more honest to describe the programs as charity rather than college. The programs may also do some psychological good for the ultra-select group of people they serve (the Vanderbilt program, for example, enrolls only five students at a time). They also likely teach the volunteer tutors and classmates of the cognitively impaired important lessons in compassion for their less fortunate fellow human beings. But it is hard to assess their practical value. Although advocates cite studies showing that intellectually disabled students who complete some sort of postsecondary education earn 1.7 times more per week than their peers who receive no postsecondary education, no students or administrators interviewed by the Chronicle or other newspapers pinpointed any specific better-paying jobs offered to enrollees in the programs. One cannot help but wonder whether the programs simply help cognitively impaired students coast along at their parents' (or university) expense in a respectable academic setting instead of going to work at the low-prestige jobs for which their limited abilities qualify them.

That last sentence might also explain the 1.7 times weekly earnings. The column notes that subsidies and litigation are coming.

A recent article on the US News website about such programs was followed by angry comments from parents of intellectually disabled students taking issue with critics who questioned the programs' usefulness or propriety.
"Should [my daughter] work at Walmart and live below the poverty level for the rest of her life?" wrote one mother. Wrote another: "Why should [my daughter] have to wait on me at McDonald's"? Those comments said a lot---about upper-middle-class disdain for honest but entry-level service work and about the kind of employment for which those with severe cognitive disabilities can realistically qualify even with the best of "life-skills" coaching on a college campus. Such are the perils of deciding to offer a "college experience," or indeed college itself, to people who lack the intellectual qualifications to benefit from higher education.

What the comments also indicate is a lack of understanding about the benefits of technical progress. The monotony of the assembly line made individuals who couldn't carry a patternmaker's water productive enough to be able to buy a house in the patternmaker's neighborhood. During flush economic times, the counter help at fast food joints is more likely to be from the vocational service. Smart cash registers make people who otherwise would be relegated to pushing a broom more productive. I suspect additional improvements are possible.

Those improvements are less likely to be forthcoming if higher education fails to offer ordinary students the intellectual challenges that might develop their talents in such a way as to invent those improvements.

PAYING FOR HIGH SCHOOL, TWICE.

A commenter asks me to square my assertions about where higher education's excess capacity is with the recession-induced increases in community college enrollments. A Brookings Institution position paper that purports to make the case for greater support for community colleges (which need not be the same thing as greater support for College Lite) states my case for me.

Faced with high tuition costs, a weak economy, and increased competition for admission to four-year colleges, students today are more likely than at any other point in history to attend one of the nation’s 1,100 community colleges. Annually, community college enrollment is increasing at more than twice the rate of that at four-year colleges, by 2.3 million students in the first half of this decade alone.

Presumably those students had the option of attending community colleges during more prosperous times. It's the recession, not some new enthusiasm for access-assessment-remediation-retention, that's shifting the demand. I therefore repeat this suggestion.

Hive off anything that hints at dumbing the programs down.

The Brookings essay puts it slightly differently.

The rise of these institutions reflects their important roles in training workers, especially first-generation college students, for well-paying, high-demand jobs and in providing students a bridge to even higher levels of education.

That's what the high schools used to do, but I want to hold that thought for now. (I've never fully grasped that first-generation notion anyway. There are plenty of first-generation collegians in the flagships and the mid-majors.)