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.

I'm back to Mr Wood.

That mixture is powerful enough to move more than 60 percent of high-school graduates to enroll in college instead of entering the workforce, joining the military, apprenticing for a trade, or dubious options such as idling at home, wandering around, online gaming, or a life of crime.

Going to college still looks to most Americans as a better choice than going to war or a life of dissolution, but recent evidence suggests that students completing high school are beginning to rethink the idea that college is necessarily the best path.

There are enough subprime party schools to provide opportunities to idle, wander (and hook up?) or go online on the taxpayer's wi-fi.  In sixty years, though, higher education has sufficiently lowered itself that what was my parents' experience (on the G.I. Bill) or mine (when a factory job in the summer and a commissary job during the school year covered expenses) no longer is.

We are witnessing the transition from “college is for everybody” to “college is unnecessary and often useless.” Going to college “to be able to get a better job” is likely to fade away as the primary reason students attend. And the institutions themselves—universities and colleges of various types—will have to accept a much less prominent role in our social and economic systems. They are in danger of becoming cultural relics.

To be sure, a large majority of American parents still believe that their children must attain a college degree for their welfare and happiness. Almost always, those parents are applying both their understanding of how the world works and their recollection of their own time in college. College as they knew it was the on-ramp to prosperous adulthood. But that outcome is steadily becoming less likely.

In part, that on-ramp worked because it was a limited access highway. Unfortunately, the people in charge misinterpreted more open access in a destructive way, or they misinterpreted the cause and effect of having the degree.  Even if you portray today's college experience in a favorable way, it's a less-than-satisfactory bundle.

Regardless of what they tell opinion surveys, most students who go to college seek “the experience.” That’s what they will tell you if you actually listen. The experience of college is that careless whole of meeting new people, attending football games, drinking to excess, falling under the spell of a charismatic professor, protesting injustices, meeting still more new people, having deep and meaningful late-night conversations, more parties, feeling you are part of something bigger than your high-school class, discovering life beyond your hometown, meeting yet more new people and forming what will be lasting friendships, falling in love, breaking up, reading some books, pursuing some internships, taking a semester abroad, feeling depressed, getting angry at oppressive structures, feeling smarter than the folks you went to school with, and thinking seriously about what you will do next, and refusing to think seriously about what you will do next.

Of course, that bundle is rife with contradictions, and some students want nothing to do with some of the items. Some won’t drink. Some focus on study rather than sports or parties. Some will pass through college like an arrow aimed directly at a target such as medical school. And all of this will be part of “the experience,” because those who don’t play are stage props for those who do.

It appears that the view book of the subprime party school, or perhaps the Princeton Review party rankings, has colored Mr Wood's world.

My list sounds dismissive because we aren’t used to talking about college as a passage through unstructured late adolescence and early adulthood. It is a time when most of the students will become (more) sexually experienced, and more psychologically friable. Contemporary college is a place that demands students take seriously their supposed quest for “identity” and their responsibilities to those of different “identities.”

It is a place where certain ideologies are so far in ascendency that they cannot be discussed let alone criticized: America’s endemic racism, climate-change catastrophism, and patriarchy lead the list. These should be understood not as systems of belief so much as symptoms of cultural confusion. Contemporary college is so lacking in a coherent intellectual core that anything that students run into that rings of passionate advocacy wins admiration. Black Lives Matter zealotry, transgender raving, antisemitic bloodlust, and postcolonial or indigenous fabulism each attract cultic worshippers who mistake their idols for “critical thinking.” Why not? They have been brought up to believe that “critical thinking” means attacking whatever stands in the way of today’s version of “social justice.”

But this is not to say that contemporary college is best understood as radical indoctrination. Radicalism is definitely present, but it is really just the helium that inflates the balloon of contemporary education. If it weren’t one vapid ideology, it would be another. The balloon itself is the emptiness of a college education.

Or perhaps the empty calories of Bud Light? It's not generations of Ward Churchills and Melissa Clicks that might have soured the public on what higher education has become, it's a Rising Star who Ticked The Right Boxes denouncing her customers as "fratty."

Disney, Target, Apple, Ford, and myriad other companies have their counterparts of [Bud Light's Alissa] Heinerscheid; graduates of “good” colleges who speak fluent “inclusivity” and yet have a tenuous grasp of their own society. The fabled aloofness of the university as an ivory tower cut off from the concerns of ordinary people has gone by the boards. We now have an institution dedicated to turning its students into missionaries of its vision of how ordinary people should live, and using American commerce as the tool to impose this vision on an unwilling populace.

Americans increasingly understand that the font of this new misery is the university, which has become an institution that regards their habits, preferences, and ideas—their culture—with disdain. There is a “status rebellion” brewing in which higher education will be the loser. An institution disdainful of the nation and even of the ideal of nationhood is not well-positioned to thrive. Much as it may emphasize that its students are “citizens of the world,” it depends on the support of actual citizens who are not amused by the idea that their country is just a construct, and one that oppresses some and privileges others.

It's that incoherence in denying coherent beliefs, isn't it?  If one understands "critical thinking" to mean "finding fault," as those previous paragraphs present things, are there not plenty of faults to find with business as usual in higher education?  Did it not occur to any of those supposedly smart people that there would be limits to calling out the clientele for its own failings?