No One Knows What Universities Are For

The history of universities, especially the American system, are a fascinating study in a century plus of institutional evolution.

Even the universities with particular mutations (New School, Olin) have evolved in fascinating ways.

Broadly, university evolution is:

1. Real estate development 2. Sports 3. Research grants 4. Brand 5. Source of vetted early talent 6. International tuition dollars

Almost none of what a university is economically designed to do is ensure students are trained for success in their career and life.

If there’s any directly relevant student benefit, it is certification - a fairly benign benefit.

What’s critical to grok is that universities are quite literally accredited based on how similar they look & behave to their peers.

I've commented before about Stanford's Redwood City "campus"[1] It's all administrators. No students. No faculty. Just administrators.

Recent events (March-April 2024)

* BeWell fair - visit with therapy dogs.

* Fire drill.

* National Pet Month.

* Automated External Defibrillator training.

I wonder how much of what happens there could be done by LLMs.

[1] https://redwoodcity.stanford.edu/

Kind of reminds me of the Yes, Minister episode "The Compassionate Society"

Bernard: In fact, there are only 342 administrative staff at the hospital. The other 170 are porters, cleaners, laundry workers, cooks, etc.

Hacker: And medical staff?

Bernard: Oh, none of them.

Hacker: None?

Bernard: No!

Hacker: We are talking about St Edward's Hospital?

Bernard: Yes. It's brand-new and fully-staffed. Unfortunately, there were cutbacks, so there was no money for medical services.

Hacker: A hospital with over 500 non-medical staff and no patients?

The first university, the University of Bologna, always seems like the ideal to me. It was a guild, or what we might today call a trade union, of local tutors, who colluded together to regulate prices and amount of time spent teaching for their own benefit. Out of this emerged the modern concept of the research university, because having colluded on acceptable prices and labor limits, the professors then had amply ability to work on whatever problems they wanted to. And being smart people they started to work on unsolved problems, began traveling across Europe and helping similar institutions, and collaborating across the continent in Latin.

Fundamentally this seems the best approach, the professor-centered one. The professors who are extremely knowledgable in a single field exchange some of their time to undergraduates who provide them with enough money so that they can continue learning about their specific field. This professor-undergraduate relationship is mutually beneficial, and also aids society by increasing the number of experts in the world. Things begin to deteriorate when other influences such as administrators, real estate agents, financiers, donors, politicians, and so on get in the mix, because their goals are oftentimes only tangentially related to increasing the total amount of knowledge in the world.

It's a big feedback loop. You go to college, you get a degree, you become a middle manager or administrator of some type, you go work at a university since you didn't learn the skills to actually do anything.

On a serious note, I worked in research and education for nearly a decade. The real question isn't whether all the staff actually work (I was staff myself!), they do. It's whether or not that work actually aligns with the mission of a university. IMO, this is research and _education_, but that's an unpopular opinion. Hence the poor return on investment so many graduates are seeing.

The problem is that universities can't really be "disrupted" by newer, leaner startups, because what they sell is intangible prestige, not something more concrete and objective.

If the purpose of university was only to prepare you for professional exams, or something similar with projects, it would be straightforward to start a new one that managed better results for its students on less money. But how do you rapidly develop prestige as a new business, on a budget? It's practically impossible.

The system as it is massively favors incumbents. States can still start new universities because they can easily subsidize them, and people usually have some trust in their states to provide an okay education. But a new private entrant? Good luck!

If anything, I think it's the opposite: there are too many ideas about what a university is for.

It's a shame we've lost a lot of the alternative educational "systems" that existed alongside higher-ed. Things like journalism was learned in journalism schools, not universities. Trade schools used to be common place and target far more industries. No one used to get a degree in "business".

The university/high-ed, unfortunately, has a monopoly on cultural cachet. Certain schools now function as the main gatekeepers into whole industries. Corporations have handed over the entire idea of employee training to universities, while demanding frequently arbitrary degree requirements when hiring, allowing particular universities to exert enormous power over someone's life and future prospects.

They also have to be finishing schools and boarding schools for young adults hoping to get the "college experience".

UK perspective here: we had a huge push to get "everyone" into higher education with the idea being that university attendance is correlated with higher income, so more degree holders = better economy.

In reality it's just created a large not-quite-elite that consider themselves "underemployed", when in reality there never were any jobs for 80%+ of them.

I feel that instead we should have promoted self employment / small businesses and created the environment for that.

That is to say - housing and building policy that ensures reasonable rents for living and shops, taxation policy that rewards taking risks, etc. Trade schools teaching people useful skills that they can apply without relying on some sort of ever-expanding bureaucracy to slot in to.

The focus on credentialism is backwards in my view. Most employers don't use it other than as, basically, a glorified signifier of IQ.

University administrative bloat is a popular topic here, and certainly one that I’m concerned about. But I’m not sure that this article adds much to the discussion.

Unless I am mistaken, Derek Thompson, the author of the short article, does not once mention Cardinal Newman's The Idea of a University[0]. Really, that's a shame as it's one of the foundations of how we view universities and, honestly, I don't think much has changed since then 1852 in those respects.

The good cardinal lays out his vision about a university, quite secularly for the time period, and spells out 'what a university is for' very explicitly: Intellectual development, formation of character, unity of knowledge, freedom of inquiry, and life preparation. I don't think even some 170 years later that things have changed all that much for us in respect to those overarching goals.

Though it is The Atlantic, a rage bait magazine for nearly a century, it doe make the point that the admin of many universities is just too much. That higher education has become a make work program of sorts, fueled by the government's goal of more college grads and a lot of debt.

I'd say returning to the ideas outlined by Newman would be a great start to burning off the admin bloat.

[0]https://www.newmanreader.org/works/idea/

It's easy to say, if I'm spending someone else's money, that asking what a university is for is the wrong question.

(I feel like this is something that Terry Pratchett would have said better)

>No One Knows What Universities Are For

People do know what they are for - education and research. The problems listed in the article seem mostly an American thing where the administrators are allowed to say should we give the money to teachers or ourselves? I know let give it all to the administrators.

I'm from the UK and went to Cambridge and you wouldn't get away with that stuff over here - there'd be a huge outcry. I'm not sure how it got quite so out of hand in the US. I mean there is quite a lot of government control but places like Cambridge ran ok on private money for centuries without the hundreds of administrators disease.

Universities should be forced to publish their unemployment, underemployment, and successes of their recent grads.

In high school the local university was doing a presentation and they said their grads were 92% employed. I immediately asked the obvious question, 'since unemployment is 4%, university makes you less employable?'

They had no answer and so I got to follow up. If I got a physics degree, how likely is it that I would get a job using the degree. They were a biologist, but knew how to answer. "If you get a physics degree, you'll need to get your phd otherwise there's no jobs for you.'

Boy did I ever get in trouble.

A deontologist cannot figure out what a University is for.

A consequentialist and virtue ethicist can figure it out.

I suppose the issue is that you need rules for funding. Deontology only solves that.

I get the feeling that a PhD is the only degree that a university should offer. All else is a money-grubbing scam that enslabes people in debt. Moreover, the PhD should be publicly funded or by donations. Regarding specialist degrees like MD and nursing, I think they too can be rolled into a PhD. It should take 5 to 8 years to complete after high school, and no more. Everything else can be learned on one's own.

Someone explain to me why these not for profit institutes charge so much money?

I think there is a big piece that is left unsaid here: capitalism. If we had to boil down a university to one imperative, it sadly seems to make money (ideally, for some, as a means towards the true ends). Lots of good points raised, as I can say from direct experience, but too often capitalism is just assumed or ignored as the underlying principle at work.

I don’t know. Is there not massive administrative bloat everywhere? It can’t be all misallocated.

And anyway, if I take a $300k salary you might see in industry, and split it between 1 associate professor at $150k and 2 admins at $75k, the admins get to WFH and all three get to have enriching time with their families where a single partner isn’t the sole caregiver, is that not the kind of community that educated people are agitating for anyway?

Universities are the future of work, not some sort of flawed or regressive past. I don’t know for certain if it’s a bullshit job. I know those people are happy though. You can argue all day for paying adjuncts more, or whatever, and I agree, but in principle, the admins are the community. They are the spouses and recent grads, they are the moms and dads.

The place where it is harmful is not the bloat. Like everyone’s income is someone else’s expense. It’s such a reductionist view, to complain about anyone who is getting paid to do something that isn’t exactly the same thing as you are doing. It’s harmful because those admins are shutting down communities, be they fraternities or co-ops, as a sort of vengeance plot against the people who wronged them when they were in college, which students never asked for. These college aged vengeances are the same thing motivating angry commenters against education in HN threads. No matter what the party, the sense of exacting vengeance is the nasty and bad part. Not the money.

Such is the problem of not exposing the industry to market forces.

The same perverse incentives have permeated into healthcare, which is no longer about owning the patient's health journey, vs administrators handling contracts, billing , benefits, claims, and shifting responsibility elsewhere

This, more than anything, is why we need student loan forgiveness. The elected officials that were supposed to be supervising universities were asleep at the wheel, and the last two generations have had no option to get affordable education at the same quality of pre-1990 university. It’s great that some states are cutting university DEI programs, but why only deal with a tiny part of the problem? We need more professors and academic staff, not what we’ve frittered away loan money on to bump our US News rankings.