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American Colleges Are a Valuable Resource. But Not for America.
Conservatives love higher education. The whole point of conservatism is to attempt to give all American citizens equal opportunities. So affordable higher education is important. And Republicans like the economy to grow. And if you understand the value of engineers, doctors, computer programmers, and so on, a good way to get more of those is to subsidize their education. So subsidizing higher education makes sense, from a conservative point of view. It grows the economy while helping young people of modest backgrounds improve their lives. For a conservative, that’s a win-win.
Until you stop choosing the smartest and hardest working college applicants, and start selecting students based on other criteria, like skin color or 40-yard dash time. And then, of course, most of the students who aren’t capable of majoring in chemical engineering start majoring in Psychology or something. And things continue to deteriorate over the years, so now they have to invent new areas of study for this ever-growing influx of “students” who wouldn’t even have been in college a few decades ago. So pretty soon half the college is majoring in Petty Jealousy Studies (PJS).
And then the chemical engineering majors start to wonder why they’re studying 80 hours a week to try (and often fail) to keep a “B” average, while they lose out on all the academic awards to PJS majors with 4-points. So more and more STEM majors switch to various grievance studies departments, and understandably so. So now, a large majority of the college is engaged in activity which is far, far removed from the original goals of the university.
The Republicans who proudly tout their endorsement of public subsidies of higher education (“Investing in our children!”) are now starting to wonder what they’re getting for their tax dollars. Where are all the engineers and computer programmers? And what the heck is going on in the Department of Trans-Gender Canadian Bagpiper Studies? Why are we paying for all this again?
So Republicans are starting to view American higher education as a failure. Or at least, a very poorly utilized resource.
Democrats, as you might imagine, take a different view. Many leftists have traditionally viewed college more as an opportunity to “find themselves” rather than learn a trade. So the left has long held a somewhat less pragmatic view of higher education than conservatives. But over the years, this college thing has worked out better than any Democrat could have dreamed.
By taking millions of kids right out of high school, and having four of their most formative years to indoctrinate them into leftism, Democrats have stumbled on one of their most valuable resources. If Democrats move so far to the left that they start losing voters, it’s no problem – they just make more. Why develop policies to satisfy your constituents, when you can just create new constituents who have been trained to support your policies? Combine this will illegal immigration, a reliably leftist administrative state, and a leftist media, and the policies of Democrats can really be whatever they want. The views of the American voter thus become much less important.
Democrats no longer need to fear elections like they once did.
If the American system of higher education collapses (or, at least, is drastically transformed), that would be a major setback for the Democrat party.
As the safety-obsessed leftists who run universities decide to close their campuses for fear of COVID-19, but still bill students over $50,000 a year for a glorified Netflix subscription for video lectures, many students are deciding to drop out. And as that income stream dries up, many of these poorly run organizations will move from illusory solvency to financial crisis in a matter of months. Many schools will not survive this sudden drop in revenue.
Look for Democrats to do all they can to preserve their most valuable resource.
Republicans, who typically are eager to “invest in our children,” should stop and think for a moment before agreeing to increase educational subsidies in the upcoming college apocalypse.
College is not what we would like it to be, and it is not what it once was. Our higher education system was once a valuable resource for the United States. It is now a valuable resource for the Democrat party.
There will always be a market for engineers and programmers. Thus, there will always be a market for educating them.
Subsidizing Petty Jealousy Studies is unhelpful. You’re wasting the time of the students, and wasting tax dollars that could be better used.
American tax dollars should not be intentionally used to create voters for one of our political parties.
The upcoming collapse of American higher education will appear sudden, but it’s not. It’s been building for years. What’s about to happen to American colleges has really already happened.
We should just step back, and let it happen.
Published in General
Let me expand on this. People get paid to work because the work produces something of value to the employer, either because it is valuable to the employer’s customers, or the employer is the customer themselves. People who are capable of valuable work as a server can be paid for that work. If they can be paid for other work they enjoy more, and fulfills their own economic needs, more power to them. If they cannot, I expect them to do what they are capable of, whether they like it or not.
We’ve created a class of over-educated but unemployed elites. They are not unemployable. I would argue the resentment is not just due to having to do work they don’t enjoy, but greatly increased by the discovery that their diplomas aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on, much less the tuition they’ve paid. They want to be given what they were promised. It isn’t possible, and isn’t going to happen. Their whining may destroy their own society, though.
In this particular instance, lawyers, Keynes’ reformulation of Say’s Law is apt. “Supply does create its own demand.” So, we definitely don’t need to subsidize that.
On the other hand, I’ve got to hire a couple of staff attorneys, and at the state’s pay rates. I’m counting on the left side of that second bell curve to have a little quality.
Right on…(Oh geez, I lapsed back into my 60s jargon; always have to be careful about that.) I was a completely indifferent student in a rural high school and then went into the Army at the age of 17. When I was discharged at the age of 20, I had no job skills (who knew that carrying a grenade launcher had no civilian equivalent?)
Fortunately for me, I had a college advisor who quickly grasped the fact that I didn’t know a d*mn thing. She steered me into a liberal arts curriculum and that turned out to be one of the best things that ever happened to me. I had the whole enchilada; Philosophy, Mathematics, Foreign Language, Political Science, Natural Sciences, Art & Music Appreciation. In short, it was a liberal arts education the way it was meant to be. (I picked up a minor in Information Technology during my Sophomore year.)
Today, I would probably have dropped out after one year (or less). I really feel bad for today’s students. They’re being cheated in the worst way; being taught what to think instead of how to think.
I’m not convinced by this. A lot of service jobs aren’t strictly necessary — as some McDonald’s workers in states with high minimum wages have discovered. Yes, we’ll always need cooks. But the cashiers could be replaced, and so, too, could the waiters (though not without sacrificing some of the restaurant’s ambiance). And then, there’s the problem of income. Sub-managerial-level service labor is simply not valuable enough to sustain a household.
But all this is beside the point, which is that people aren’t profit-maximizing homines economici, but rather social animals who seek to flourish in political society. Men have expectations, and these expectations, for better or worse, lead them to perceive service labor as inimical to their own flourishing. If the best you can say to them is, “Get over yourselves, and get thee to a Wal-Mart!” then you can expect to go the way of the dodo.
Suppose we raised the next generation to expect nothing from life. Suppose we kept them illiterate and made them no promises about their futures. We’d still have millions — and maybe tens of millions — of resentful Americans who’d influence our politics. Millennials and Generation Z aren’t dying out any time soon.
The resentment is natural. “That’s unfair!” is among a child’s first observations, even if they fail to see that the unfairness tends to work in their favor. I was excited to start at every restaurant I’ve work at. It was petty coworkers who wore me down. Careers sound especially good to people who haven’t a clue how demanding they are.
Of course they aren’t necessary–eating out is a luxury, a luxury enhanced by being served by real people. There will always be gradients of luxury in the market. Minimum wage laws distort that gradient, but don’t eliminate it. Since most people can satisfy food, clothing, shelter, and utilities on a fraction of their income, it isn’t a surprise that the bulk of the economy is comprised of luxuries. Keep in mind that one key to the social perception of wealth and luxury is having people serve you.
So? People at the bottom of the economic ladder tend to live communally until they can climb higher. And/or form permanent communal living partnerships. Why should they be excused from the requirement to do work valued by others?
So you say, but my lifetime of work has equipped me with both tools and allies to prevail against such adversaries.
Moving the goalposts. Sorry, I’m out, as you are no longer arguing in good faith.
Interesting, but my preferred solution it to have the college or university co-sign the loan and make them responsible for any defaults. I suspect you would suddenly find a large number of colleges Councillors pushing business and STEM degrees and handing out brochures to the local Technical College(want to make a very nice living get a certificate in Plumbing, HVAC or Welding these days) rather than degrees less likely to provide a steady income…
Here’s the problem: Everyone knows that there are forms of value which are, as it were, invisible to the market. (I assume you don’t think that the only valuable things in life are those things which can be assigned a price.) Some people have an aptitude for these things. They know that others value them, and they know that, in general, humans are compensated at the level of their talents. But nobody pays them, despite their talents, because the kind of value these things have isn’t the kind of value the market trades in. A lot of academic and cultural knowledge is like this — it doesn’t have intrinsic value within a market (which is, after all, concerned with the maximizing of profit), and it acquires market value only to the degree it can be treated as a commodity.
What am I trying to say? That it’s not unreasonable for a person to resent the fact that his own ability to create value is going uncompensated. It’s not as if he has no value-creating ability. It’s just that the kind of value he’s capable of creating isn’t the kind of value the market can compensate.
Why shouldn’t they destroy their own society? It’s made them fundamentally incapable of flourishing, after all. A society which produces broken humans is a broken society. So, what’s wrong with tearing the whole thing down?
Actually, I do. If it is something for which one wishes to be paid, it must have a value assigned by someone who will pay it. I do think there is value in work beyond what the market will pay, but the value is entirely personal to the person doing the work.
So? Some of the greatest art we know was created in abject poverty, not recognized within the life of the artist. If that’s a bad thing, how would anyone know in advance in order to correct it?
Then he’ll have to do the stuff he loves and is good at on his own time. And do something of value for someone else so he can eat and buy clothes and sleep under cover. Like anyone else in history who was good at something not yet recognized as valuable.
They aren’t incapable of flourishing. They’ve just confused jobs with hobbies. Because a chunk of society wanted them to be confused, and therefore angry enough to be political fodder.
This is relatively new to me, but I’ve never heard until recently of college students wanting to work for NGOs. This is essentially paid charitable work. A pays B to help C, whether C wants or values the help or not. If anything, B seeks to satisfy A, and that is all. And there are no checks against poor or unnecessary work.
I can’t fathom the appearance of this penchant in the young. Other than it’s something for nothing and and the chicks are free.
Insofar as the college educated have been let down by society, I’d attribute it to adults (mostly parents) failing to prepare young people for the dissatisfactions of life. The participation trophy mentality is carried with them into their own adulthoods. I received a liberal arts degree just last year. I would not trade it in for the business degree I pursued during my initial, unsuccessful, attempt at a university – unsuccessful because I was a typical, unserious student. The students who get their degrees and then complain about its limitations of opening doors probably overestimate the extent to which they’re already educated – they still haven’t figured out “how to think,” as the professor says.
I don’t say that to be mean, nor am a without some sympathy for them. (Not so much for the tear it all down types, but for anxious young people, absolutely.) Failure is a part of life, one which people who ought to have known better tried to protect them from. The ones whose reactions to it are to destroy things aren’t worth what they think they are, but that doesn’t mean that they won’t have to pay for their choices.
An example of value-creating that no one’s interested in paying for would be apropos.
TANSTAAFL.
If you eliminated tenure, universities would go completely woke much faster than they do already. You may not think that’s possible, but try it and see. The woke commissars already control much of hiring, but if they can control firing, too, then watch out.
In other words, Kephalithos is right.
Back in the late 80s I attended a night course at the local community college about starting your own business. One of the instructors was taken aback when he found that a couple of the participants were there to learn how to start their own non-profit. He was used to people who wanted to learn how to operate at a profit, and wasn’t sure what to do about those two.
Of course, non-profits do have profits, just not the kind that’s taxed by the IRS.
No, I don’t agree with Kephalithos’ conclusion about resentment driving politics. It will always have a place, but that place is outsized today due to our educational system’s lies to children.
I question whether it would be different if the educational system told them different lies than the ones that are now told. Well, it would be different, but not necessarily good.
There are a lot of career fields other than blue-collar hands-on work and STEM. For example–business-to-business sales, which can be very profitable and a good path to promotion…depending on what is being sold, some level of STEM understanding can be worthwhile, but less so, usually, than actually practicing engineering.
And there is the whole field of K-12 teaching, which employs millions of people…unfortunate that many good people are being kep out of this field by credential craziness and the political tolerance for dangerously disorderly classrooms.
Read some responses to your comment, and had to put in my two bits: I’ve learned that it isn’t so much what you do, it’s with whom it’s done. Spent some years doing a job I enjoyed with folks I didn’t, but for the most part I’ve been given to work with people I enjoyed even when the work wasn’t so cool and I know which I prefer.
I wonder if that could create an in for discrimination lawsuits. I don’t know much about the process, but I’d guess that case would be harder to make if one is denied tenure.
What if they told the truth? That a college degree isn’t worth what it used to be because it no longer signifies that a person is educated and willing to learn challenging new subjects. Today it generally signifies that a person managed to not drop out, and all too often the wielders of them are self-satisfied and have a sense of entitlement. It’s no disadvantage to have one, and plenty of graduates don’t have these problems. It’s best to be one of the ones who don’t have these problems.