BY THEIR OWN STANDARDS, THEY'RE FAILING?

What, dear reader, is the proper value proposition for the university?  It used to be that the academy was a place where people could play with ideas, maybe one in twenty of which might work when taken from the common room or chalk board to real life.  But even in my youth, I recall the public service commercials on the three television stations we had, and the car cards on the buses exhorting people to get that good education.  Was vocationalism thus the default value proposition?

It probably came to this when higher education sold itself with the slogan, "to get a good job, get a good education" back in those Prosperous Early Sixties.  Likewise, it probably came to this when the competition for prestige included the competition for grants, whether federally funded, or by politically-motivated foundations, or by Big Pharma and the corporate interests Ms Scott invokes.

Then came the return of the Holy Inquisition, or perhaps the understandable tendency for people to stop looking when they reach a conclusion that makes them comfortable with their priors. "It's probably a little late in the game to start defending 'care and precision' in academic writing, given the past thirty years of increasingly tight priors and epistemic closure."  That was a reaction to a culture-studies type attempting to introduce yet another euphemism.  It doesn't matter that the word to be banished was "pedophile".  There's a lengthy list of these, and it's easy enough to pronounce any of them the way Mark Anthony rendered "honorable" in that funeral oration.

Here, now, in leave of Brutus and the rest, let us consider Caesar's will.  Oh, sorry, it's a new policy study from the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty.

We make the case that public universities must serve as good stewards of taxpayer money, and those that are putting students on career paths where they’re unlikely to be able to pay their student loans ought to be held accountable. Moreover, universities should aid in solving the growing workforce crisis by steering students towards careers where there are shortages in the state. Using extensive data on college defaults and the return-on-investment from various degrees, we highlight the schools and programs that are a net positive for would-be college students, and those that are not.

That report focuses on Wisconsin, and it includes a few private colleges and universities.  Make of it what you will that cosmetology degrees are among the biggest net losers for students, with dance also being a poor financial risk; and that Lawrence University, a wanna-be high end private liberal arts college in Appleton, offers almost no majors with a positive return on investment.  It engages in the usual sort of fretting about graduates of Wisconsin seeking employment elsewhere.  That sort of mercantilist illiteracy has spawned periodic attempts to indenture students.  I repeat, because repeat I must.  "Midwestern politicians cannot get their brains around the idea that graduates of Big Ten universities competing in the global economy by relocating elsewhere on the globe attest to the strength of those universities."  Yes, that includes those performing arts degrees.  High risk but high returns for the successful.  Just like football.

The caviling over reports like Wisconsin Institute's is likely to go on until the fall of the house of Harvard.  "Markets exist to value risks, and there is likely a balance of luck and merit in a market outcome. Efficiency, on the other hand, depends on agents having the incentives to do efficient things. In the academy, nobody has spelled out what those efficient things are."