The Misuses of the University
publicbooks.org
publicbooks.org
There's a great student op-ed about _a_ proposed solution (firing the deans): https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2022/11/29/anderson-burea...
It's a small city, so a lot of people have experiences with real estate held by Hopkins.
It's nice to point fingers at the people who are taking very heavy paycuts to remain in academia, but the result of that finger pointing is devaluing education
The right approach - in my eyes - is to share the land Harvard, Stanford, et. al. sit on with 10x the number of students. This simultaneously increases efficiency of the entire P&L while providing a higher quality of education to everyone
As we've seen with the UC system (and the excellence of IITs + Chinese research universities), high density education can be synonymous with top tier research outcomes - Ivory Towers are not needed
I understand that, if you have a current and active polo club running, then you either have to keep it going or run the risk of pissing people off.
But, if I can ask you to speculate, why might Harvard have revived its club in 2006?
I used to have a view of a baseball field out my office window until they rolled up the astroturf to start construction of the new computing and information science building.
They got some money to build a really nice fan-friendly facility off-campus. Still the thing about baseball is that the season is early in the year and starts before the weather is comfortable for home games so they spend the first half of the season going to away games down south, far enough away that they're probably buying airline tickets instead of riding the bus the way that Ivy League (or ECAC) teams usually ride the bus to go to other Ivy League (or ECAC) schools.
If it wasn't for Lacrosse we wouldn't have anybody using our football stadium in the spring and hey, Lacrosse is both a men's and women's sport. (At Cornell we're lucky enough to have two football teams to keep it busy in the Fall)
Critics would say that Lacrosse is a boon to rich students since poor students don't go to high schools that have Lacrosse and it largely escapes the notice of the marginalization-industrial complex because those folks are aware that there is an industry in SAT test prep and not so aware that there is Lacrosse.
As in the article, it changes how you might use the land. A grove is a beautiful place to go and read or relax. But if you could replace that grove with a structure worth of hundreds of millions of dollars it changes things.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glebe (for Northern Virginia residents who have always wondered)
Stanford,—and I would hazard a guess many other HYPSM schools,—are already minting out too many students; this is especially true when it comes to non-PHD masters degrees, which are essentially an unbecoming cash cow for departments. Actual "quality of education" mostly comes from a low staff/student ratio and direct access of students to elite researchers: this difference in education mostly takes the form of better research labs to work in, with some spillover into office hours; increasing matriculation would only lead to more auditorium-sized classes that are run by lecturers or postdocs—these classes are essentially at the same level as trudging through online material.
Your proposed "solution" would have a Procrustean effect: I can't speak for Chinese or Indian universities, but while schools like UC Berkeley, UT Austin, University of Michigan, et seq... have good reputations, they have a noticeably lower reputation than the ivy leagues and certain private colleges like Stanford, MIT, and Caltech—and a worse reputation for being degree mills.
If you think that Stanford having 180,000 students matriculated will give everyone a quality education, then I think that you fundamentally misunderstand the markers that make an in-person education higher quality. The only benefit that would come of it would be popping the degree bubble and prematurely ending the current moribund trajectory that universities are on; where they are already treating degrees as if they were artificial-scarcity NFTs, rather than providing the actual scarcity that is access to,—and direct training from,—high-level researchers.
This would make sense if all what an elite university did were providing elite-level education. Of course exclusive schools provide other benefits, often more valuable for the target audience than the education proper: a highly filtered student body, networking and bonding with the right, upwardly mobile people (either mega-talented, or just smart kids of rich and influential parents), a luxury-grade diploma that few can afford. Maybe you could theoretically 10× Stanford or MIT, but likely not Yale.
Also, a number of the schools we're discussing are older than the US itself; Harvard predates it by almost 150 years.
I don't really care that UC has a lower "reputation" than Harvard or Stanford. The fact is, the UC system has produced more fundamental research and more actual value for the population and the world at large than Harvard or Stanford. Even if a UC degree is not quite the "golden ticket" that an Stanford degree is.
Concentrating individuals into a smaller and smaller elite benefits them and only them. The U.S. has done this with capital allocation in its economy and it has and will continue to be a century long arc bending toward utter disaster.
What do we actually care about here? Education?
My public alma mater was a tremendous force multiplier for upward mobility. Many of my peers were first generation college students. They’re now scientists, doctors, and engineers. Few of them will become famous—they mostly just make the world tick.
My current private institution concentrates already wealthy people. These folks mostly go out and become consultants. They’re consumed with the idea of becoming “thought leaders.”
Which one really provides more value? I have strong opinions.
Despite rising costs, a college degree is still a positive lifetime investment for students (not to mention the positive externalities educated populations have on society at large). The bulk of US college students attend colleges who do not have the resources to build high-quality, industry relevant curriculum, train teachers to teach with modern pedagogy, and efficiently manage dorms, student affairs, and other administrative infrastructure
HYPSM choosing to share land, curriculum, expertise, and administrative infrastructure through network'd partnerships would lead to massive economies of scale and a broad reduction of educational costs. Another way to think about this - is one city of 1 million people more efficient to run per capita than 10 cities of 100k people? The answer is a resounding yes due to urban scaling. Colleges are effectively mini-cities
"I think that you fundamentally misunderstand the markers that make an in-person education higher quality" -> I founded an in-person college with regional accreditation that had a lot more 1:1 and small group teacher time than HYPSM and an average starting salary on par with CS grads from these schools. Our alumni have gone on to become YC founders and can be found at most top tech companies and startups
It is a choice to value exclusivity for exclusivity's sake (eg. withholding JSTOR data from students of colleges who can't afford those costs). The best institutions (eg. YC, Apple) care a lot more about what you can build than what school you got into at age 17
I would like to see a source on this: your claim appears ungrounded when considering American colleges.
https://www.philadelphiafed.org/-/media/frbp/assets/working-...
https://www.stlouisfed.org/open-vault/2025/aug/jobs-degrees-...
Ideas for solutions here:
For people who aren't financially independent, education is a means to an end. Pretending that's not the case or worse, shouldn't be the case, is absurd to ask of anyone running a school and highly damaging to society in general, and the mix of "vocational training" and "classic academia" provided by most US universities seems to work extremely well.
We have vocational trade schools. We have professional guild schools (medical, dentistry, etc). At least some subset of students attends school with the intention of becoming professional researchers (ie pursuing a PhD, then a postdoc, then finally general employment).
I think it would be reasonable to expect undergraduate institutions to set unambiguous goals for each program. Students should know what they are signing up for. It would be fine to graduate with a certain amount of time spent explicitly on general education and a certain amount spent explicitly on vocational training with a specific target.
If you claim that education is a means to an end then what of (for example) history majors? I think the bachelors diploma itself is what became a means to an end much to the detriment of "pure" academia. The CS program at my undergrad spent time teaching us how to use version control. That's fantastic for a professional programmer but how does that have anything to do with CS as an academic pursuit? You can literally do much (perhaps all) of actual CS with nothing more than a pen and paper.
I'm not trying to put words in your mouth, but I don't see what other conclusion can be drawn from your statement.
> We have vocational trade schools. We have professional guild schools (medical, dentistry, etc). At least some subset of students attends school with the intention of becoming professional researchers (ie pursuing a PhD, then a postdoc, then finally general employment).
> I think it would be reasonable to expect undergraduate institutions to set unambiguous goals for each program. Students should know what they are signing up for. It would be fine to graduate with a certain amount of time spent explicitly on general education and a certain amount spent explicitly on vocational training with a specific target.
I agree that undergraduate institutions should be required to set unambiguous goals for each program, but what are done with the many, many attendees who have no goals for themselves beyond "go to college and get a job when I'm done"? I think there is value in having these multi-faceted institutions that are a combination of finishing school, classical academic study, and vocational training that can (and do) produce sufficiently educated and mature adults who can independently function in society.
That is the mission of the undergraduate portion of the Arts and Sciences school at basically every college/university. Professional schools have a slightly more specific mission.
> If you claim that education is a means to an end then what of (for example) history majors?
Excellent question, and it's one for the history department to answer. Maybe things stay as they are now and it's a home for the many people who don't have specific career goals while attending college, and that is their goal.
> I think the bachelors diploma itself is what became a means to an end much to the detriment of "pure" academia.
"Pure" academia only exists for those with a patron (which could be themselves), which is non-existent at any meaningful scale.
> The CS program at my undergrad spent time teaching us how to use version control. That's fantastic for a professional programmer but how does that have anything to do with CS as an academic pursuit? You can literally do much (perhaps all) of actual CS with nothing more than a pen and paper.
Good for them, because anyone applying their CS knowledge in any capacity needs to know that.
If you want to go major in purely theoretical CS at a place that offers only courses that are effectively a specialization of a math major, there is value in it but the department offering them has to answer the same questions as the history department.
Observations of inconsistencies, dysfunctions, and similar are not necessarily calls for any particular course of action.
> I'm not trying to put words in your mouth, but I don't see what other conclusion can be drawn from your statement.
I merely observed that many of the issues people point out can be traced back (at least IMO) to having a set of confused and inconsistent goals. I wouldn't expect it to be a particularly controversial observation to anyone who's had significant contact with US academia within the past few decades.
> what are done with the many, many attendees who have no goals for themselves beyond "go to college and get a job when I'm done"?
They probably don't belong there. Most of them only attend because you need a diploma to land a job. Not because the education is particularly useful to the job, but rather because of what diplomas historically signaled about a candidate before everyone had them. Now it seems to just be a holdover (ie we require them because we've always required them and at this point everyone worthwhile has one). At least that's my (admittedly quite cynical) view.
I'm all for a more educated populace but if that's what we want then we should directly implement that.
I notice that you didn't address my remark about "adult daycare service". The presence of directionless "students" attending only to tick a box has serious negative impacts on the rest of the system. Add in student loans that can't be discharged and you've created an absolutely bizarre and (IMO counterproductive) set of economic incentives.
> I notice that you didn't address my remark about "adult daycare service". The presence of directionless "students" attending only to tick a box has serious negative impacts on the rest of the system. Add in student loans that can't be discharged and you've created an absolutely bizarre and (IMO counterproductive) set of economic incentives.
I didn't, because it seemed like a cheap insult. I don't know that directionless students have serious negative impacts on the rest of the system. They can have serious negative impacts on themselves due to student loan debt and a lack of a financially viable skillset when they stop attending college (with a degree or not).
What do you propose people who are 18 - 22 or so do to figure out what they want to do with the rest of their lives? And I'm not defending the status quo, which certainly can be improved.
Loans that can't be discharged removes lender hesitancy thus removes some degree of downward price pressure from the market. Institutions then have an incentive to capture this money due to the sheer quantity of it - ie not to let marginal students wash out. Hence the changes.
They even start attempting to attract based on amenities rather than prices. I won't belabor the subject. Others have written about it in incredible detail over the past several decades.
> What do you propose people who are 18 - 22 or so do to figure out what they want to do with the rest of their lives?
I don't know but bending what were once rigorous academic programs to accommodate them seems like the wrong answer to me. Do these people see any real benefit from taking on debt rather than working for that period? It seems to me the "benefit" is the diploma and that the requirement of a diploma to apply for a job is most often an arbitrary one these days.
As a thought experiment. Is there any particular reason an AA wouldn't have sufficed for the jobs that don't require specialized knowledge?
Fair, though the solution there is to just flunk them out.
> I don't know but bending what were once rigorous academic programs to accommodate them seems like the wrong answer to me. Do these people see any real benefit from taking on debt rather than working for that period? It seems to me the "benefit" is the diploma and that the requirement of a diploma to apply for a job is most often an arbitrary one these days.
I'm not convinced this is happening at the scale you think it is, but higher education is an arms race to some extent and you'd need to get all parties to agree to de-escalate, but only for the ones who don't get much value out of the experience (a group that is somewhat hard to identify a priori).
> As a thought experiment. Is there any particular reason an AA wouldn't have sufficed for the jobs that don't require specialized knowledge?
For the jobs, probably not. I still think a portion of the "college experience" is just maturing, which I agree could be done while working in theory but there is some personal opportunity cost there.
It's not an easy problem or one that can be solved individually IMO. Something like mandatory public service could be an answer, but I don't have high hopes of that being enacted.
I don't agree with this at all. Quality of education imho comes from being surrounded by fellow elite students so that the pace of the syllabi can remain high.
lower tier universities have excellent faculty, they are selected from applicants from the elite universities as well as excellent students from lower tier universities who have floated to the top. Their problem is, as the elite-ness of the students goes down, the pace needs to drop.
Not trying to be a jerk, but we see the same thing in athletics, elite athletes are significantly above the next tier, and so on. the worst professional team can beat the best college team, because the worst professional team is still made up of the cream of the college teams, with experience (i.e. more education) added on.
at a lower tier university, a dedicated student can still work in labs if they want, but as you move down the tiers you simply get fewer autistics and more partiers. University of Michigan is an excellent univeristy, but do you think the students are studying on weekends, like they do at MIT? no, they're not.
Only if the school mandates a quota of passing grades. Not sure about HYPSM but anecdotally at my (Canadian) alma mater no such quota existed: the pass rate for 3rd year fluid dynamics was in the 40% ballpark, for example.
I feel a better question is what entities that are in continuous operation since the 1630s do not resemble a real estate holding company? If you analyze only the extremes of any distribution you'll find weirdness.
They tore down a building less than twenty five years old to build a fancier one with fewer actual teaching spaces. There are many "temporary" Quonset huts around here twice that age. This institution is the top recipient of federal research funding. Their fiduciary responsibility with our tax dollars appears to be in name only.
It's not how I would choose to use $250M+ of my money, but it appears to have nothing at all to do with federal funding (nor would it even if the building was financed by the school, but especially not in this case).
Your imagined scenario doesn't apply to this very real example in the article in question though.
"Johns Hopkins Labs" would be a more accurate name as less than 10% of revenue is tuition related.
I'm not sure why folks including professors continue to view these places as primarily about teaching students or academics. These $100-$250 million building projects are pretty inconsequential when research grants and contracts bring in more than $4.5 billion per year.
The author's electricity bill went up and his cat got stolen in part because his colleagues working under the university incentive systems (i.e. don't publish stuff that pisses off the interests that fund your lab) created work that legitimized those policy decisions so that those decisions could be made and the funding interests, whatever they may be, could benefit from them.
One wonders if there are similar incentives in the university ranking, administration and consulting that legitimize the university's otherwise questionable decision to engage in these seemingly irresponsible ventures.
Nobody is waterboarding the money down their throat. They can say no. The actual question is: why don't they?
What is the downside to the school of a nicer student union or a public policy/international relations campus in the nation's capital?
So the researcher intentionally changes some of the ways the data is collected and poof, it looks like the policy works. Extra funding comes your way but now you have committed academic fraud. Not that anything will happen to you for this, but still, you know you did it. That's what the GP is talking about and it happens quite a bit in the humanities and economics. Its why private economists and public economists almost seem like different species.
Whether you believe what he said or not, my questions remain.
Your question didn't bother me in the least, but I don't see why people are so surprised that a school or any other organization would accept millions and millions of cash to upgrade their surroundings.
I'm not saying it can't happen, or even that it's never happened, but I see no evidence from personal experience or news in academia that would indicate it's anything other than extraordinarily rare at most, and it certainly shouldn't be assumed to be the case for all donations unless proven otherwise.
When the means are dropped in their lap, people act on those interests.
Leaving aside that metaphor, the obvious answer is that they either like or need it. Most likely the former, because many of these well known universities are swimming in money already.
Teaching mostly by TA, not Faculty.
Not a "college".
If you want the best teachers you can always go to Liberal Arts Colleges where this isn't really an issue.
I went to a small liberal arts school for an undergrad degree in STEM, and to a R1 research university for graduate work.
The absolute best classes at the big-name research university were about as good as the average class at my small undergrad. The classes at the small school were of distinctly better quality: more engaged teachers, more engaging work, and simply higher quality teaching.
Most undergraduates don't realize it, but the purpose of going to an R1 is access to an alumni network and (for the small percentage that are interested) access to people performing cutting edge research in a discipline and their physical resources.
I suspect that honesty in their marketing materials would not increase applications though.
(For the benefit of students reading this: go to office hours, especially early in the term, even if it's just to shoot the breeze. If you don't, you're cheating yourself out of the main advantage of that institutional model.)
Where your take is correct, and even demands greater emphasis, is the value of the alumni network, and the "name recognition" of a degree from somewhere people, well, recognize. As someone who deeply believes in the value of education for its own sake it pains me to be this cynical, but those are the only things that matter in the world at large.
That's the honest take, which, indeed, no one in higher education will ever put so baldly.
Disclosure: graduated from, and also spent five years teaching at a (very) non-elite liberal arts college. The education was good - even great, in some programs / by some professors - but the professional advantages absolutely nil. I will council my own son not to attend a similar school (should any of them even survive by the time he gets there - they're by and large on life-support right now); even tuition-free it wouldn't be (economically) worth it, and at the actual price it's the worst life decision many of those students will ever make.
But that deal has also shifted. Duties have changed and often many of the academics do not get to do much research, instead being managers of grad students who do the research. Being a professor is a lot of work and it is a lot of bureaucratic work.
I'm not sure why you're complaining about researchers. Think about the system for a second. We've trained people for years to be researchers and then... make them managers. Imagine teaching people to program, then once you've decided they're fully trained and good programmers we say "you're free to do all the programming you want! But you have to also teach more programmers, grade their work, create their assignments and tests, mentor the advanced programmers, help them write papers, help them navigate the university system, write grants to ensure you have money for those advanced programmers, help manage your department's organization, and much more." This is even more true for early career academics who don't have tenure[0]. For the majority of professors the time they have to continue doing research (the thing which they elected to train to do! That they spent years honing! That they paid and/or gave up lots of money for!) is nights and weekends. And that's a maybe since the above tasks usually don't fit in a 40hr work week. My manager at a big tech company gets more time to do real programming work than my advisor did during my PhD.
I'd also mention that research has a lot of monetary value. I'm not sure why this is even questioned by some people. Research lays the foundation for all the rest. Sure, a lot of it fails, but is that surprising when you're trying to push the bounds of human knowledge? Yet it is far worth it because there are singular discoveries/inventions that create more economic value than decades worth of the current global economy. It's not hard to recognize that since basically the entire economy is standing on that foundation...
[0] Just because you have tenure doesn't mean you don't have a lab full of graduate students who need to graduate.
Teaching graduate students. Most undergraduate teaching is done by "adjuncts" who do not do research.
Salaries are a mixed bag. Scientists who want to continue doing research in the private sector also give up much larger paychecks. Many work in facilities that are barely nicer than sweatshops.
Disclosure: Adjunct for one semester, 30 years ago.
My experience around universities (as an academic) is that, generally, the number of adjuncts scales linearly with overall funding/skill at grantsmanship in the department. That is, the smaller universities I know saddled professors and their graduate students with substantially more non-research work, including teaching and administration.
It definitely depends on the size of the university and the size of classes. As I was graduating a few grad students started becoming the official instructor. These were only the lower level courses though (freshman and sophomore). My partner's department had grad students teaching some classes for longer and they had a similar pattern.
My undergrad was at a small university with essentially no grad students. As far as coursework, I'm confident I got a better education than my peers that went to top schools like Stanford and Berkeley (I did physics). But they got more internships, connection to labs, and connection to research projects. YMMV
i've seen so many "our tuition pays your salary so you you need to XXX" type rants I've seen from disgruntled students/parents over the years and i've always bit my tongue when it comes to setting the record straight.
Not to take away from your point - I agree and the current fall makes it more tangible.
https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/
Certainly the fall of the Breton Woods monetary system was part of it.
Post-war, we embarked on a number of massive and economically-inefficient expeditions, driven largely by xenophobia and racism, which inflated the labor and time costs of American life across the board, both in the short and long terms, and made monetary inflation a necessity in order to forestall an economic collapse. The most prominent of these are the creation and expansion of suburban America and the car and consumer cultures required to make it possible, and the expansion of the military-industrial complex in the midst of the Cold War.
An America that had spent the 40s, 50s, and 60s continuing to build densely (reaping the benefits of efficient servicing of public needs), and focusing industry on export-ready products and services (preempting trade imbalances), would not have incurred the ever-rising costs of creating and maintaining sprawl, and would have benefited from pro-trade spending that actually delivered a return rather than falling into a black hole.
If I might be slightly hyperbolic: American hubris and intolerance blew up the American experiment about 80 years ago. It's just been exploding very, very slowly.
I have a more sanguine feeling about America's development through its short history. It embarked on a series of many experiments, many which were successful and many which had terrible externalities. At the time, most people thought they were doing the most reasonable thing. For example, the huge benefit one family got from owning a car, it would follow that all families owning one would have even more benefits. It turned out that suburbanization hits scaling limits, but it was not immediately apparent at the time.
Overall, the standard of living for the median American is higher than it was in the 1960s and 1970s. However, the immediacy of information has caused widespread anxiety. In the 1990s and 2000s, we thought the same optimistic thoughts about interconnected information networks.
I have faith that we will adapt to this new reality, just in time for the next technological wave to catch us off guard. Maybe it will be cheap artificial intelligence.
When I think of the current social and political trends, I'm reminded of Asimov's quote about anti-intellectualism in 1980. Or Douglas Hofstadter's Pulitzer-prize winning book, "Anti-Intellectualism in American Life", published in *1963*.
These things aren't new. They just wax and wane in power, over time, and recombine in new and interesting ways to yield long-term trends.
It's an unfortunate truth that decisions to attend a given university are often made based on an image in the student's (or their parents) head about what a university should look like, rather than things like academics.
I agree with your main point, but see a different cause, though. The problem is that parents and students use these reports as a bellwether for identifying prospective schools. Campus visits (short visits) where you see what the campus looks like, but don't actually learn what its about is the second problem.
There is too much PR and not enough focus on substance in higher education, just like there is in many, many, many areas of life in the United States today.
https://www.pushkin.fm/podcasts/revisionist-history/lord-of-...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Building_20
Building 20 was razed to build the Gehry-designed, donor-named Stata Center (incorporating a donor-named Gates "tower"). Breaking with MIT tradition of calling buildings by number, IME most people call it by donor name. (Gehry's reflective surfaces could blind biologists in building 68 across the courtyard, at least before the donor-named Koch building was installed nearby.) Stata has its merits, but I think grad students who punched a hole in the wall would be in trouble.
> The university’s vice provost of student affairs gives the final speech. She has the students stand up and applaud the university president, to thank him for the hats. From the podium, she turns to face the president and applauds along with the audience. Here’s a woman who knows on which side her bread is buttered. The professor recognizes the name: she’s the official in charge of disciplining students who protest genocide in Gaza.
These days, I think often about the historical turn of events in Doctorow's Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, where the reign of the adhocracies started by taking over buildings like Convocation Hall (mid-lecture) at University of Toronto...
I always assumed that the research being done at these schools was done by top tier scientists with grad students who cared deeply about the research, had excellent attention to detail and impeccable scientific process.
From talking to my friend, I realized:
- most of the grad students were people who didn't want to get a corporate job
- they wanted to extend their college experience as long as possible
- the absolute lack of discipline and rigor they showed to their experiments was astounding
- the lead academic was usually someone passionate and dedicated and often had to "herd cats" to get anything done ON TOP OF coordinating funding, lab space etc
Really opened my eyes to "how the sausage is made" when it comes to research.
No King of Siam needed when the executives running the place competently wield their foot guns.
https://www.motorious.com/articles/highlights/don-bolles-car...
But it had the same problem. They spent a fortune on the physical plant and never had the foot traffic to justify it.
Standards seem to be falling everywhere...
"In 2017, the institute was endowed with a $150 million gift from a Greek shipping fortune..."
Here is Johns Hopkins' problem in a nutshell. Taking money from billionaire "philanthropists" and global organisations to put an intellectual veneer onto their vested interests. Johns Hopkins has done this in a number of areas.
What kind of "stronger global democracy" would this be? There is no global democracy and no global government, yet. How interested are shipping magnates in democracy as opposed to plutocracy?
(EDIT: Even if a few B-school professors have real-world business management skills, why would the university listen to them? They're just employees, and they're not nearly expensive enough to be credible.)
What they are-- first foremost-- is academics and fad surfers.
In case it wasn't clear, I don't agree that the original article explains it well.
I like the delusions of subtlety
The concept (and aims) of university faces the same headwinds of any business based on intellectual property in America: artificial moats of IP law.
China's manufacturing success partially stems from the government's inability to enforce IP law.
Thankfully, ideas want to be free, and LLMs give us the best-yet UI to information.
To me, Hacker News is a university. It's a place where I come to learn (from thousands of "teachers") and these "teachers" are actually also students, learning as well.
Qatar $7.7 billion
China $6.4 billion
Saudi Arabia $4.7 billion
These countries are not making donations to support democracy and freedom.
https://www.npr.org/2026/02/12/nx-s1-5711359/us-colleges-5-b...
I got an ad the other day for a school (a mostly reputable one). They were talking about their award winning dining hall food... and the photos are over the top.
Borrow a pile of money, to help fund a pretty campus, and get a degree with limited job prospects, then wonder why you're drowning in debt for decades seems to be the trendy thing to do.
he said something like "seems like we're all expected to make a decision based on how nice the weather was when we visited and the architecture... and I don't care about either one."
somebody made a conscious decision to turn college into a little utopian island divorced from reality to quell protests. students get their own on-campus entertainment venues, sports teams, luxurious dorms and dining halls, rec centers and gyms, on-campus health services. for some students this is designed to keep them content and docile, but for others its designed to let them learn about the injustices of the world while being quarantined away from it so they cant affect change.
and the most insidious part of it is that they're the ones paying for it (with interest!). by the time they are kicked out of this little cocoon, they're saddled with enough debt that they have no choice but to grind away at a job they hate for a few decades
From the 1950's to the 1990's there was basically no way to avoid standing in the lines, everyone was in it together and you just had to stand in the lines. Then in the 1990s they added FastPass and you could, if you were clever and planned a bit, skip some lines but you were still going to be standing in lines with everyone else, and they were free and reasonably fair process. Then in the 2010's they started to do book ahead FastPass and if you were staying in a hotel on site you could book all the good times for all the rides, to try and encourage hotel stays. And now with Lightning Lane's they are incentivized to make the line process so onerous to get you to fork over $25/person/ride to skip them. And that's where we are today: an enshitified product that is designed to give a good experience to the very wealthy, while making it worse for everyone else.
And that's the same path we've gone in entertainment, in housing, in education, in healthcare, in so much of modern American society.
-signed someone baffled a 16 year old stared at me like I had 3 heads when I asked them to open a folder
I was astonished to learn from my friends that they saw not one, not two, but a percentage of young people who went through colleges but still don't know how to do simple things like printing from a desktop or using a word processor.
My understanding is that they are so used to mobiles and pads, that their parents actually did not buy a computer for them (sometimes it is ignorance and sometimes it is poverty). The kids did take a couple of computer classes in colleges (you know they are everywhere, like basic MS Office or simple programming), but they were not interested enough to make any effort other than getting a D or C, and sometimes they just cheated it through.
I'm still struggling whether I should introduce DOS or Linux to my son. On one hand, DOS is a dead thing and Linux is the present and the future. On the other hand, I really don't agree with the philosophy of Linux cli, and I still think DOS and early Windows (up to XP) presents the best for that P in PC.
Of course, he is going to be 6 when I gift him the box, so I won't teach him programming. Instead, I prepare to go 100% offline with a Rpi 4B + DOSBian (https://cmaiolino.wordpress.com/), buy a used QBASIC manual, and program QBASIC completely offline, and invite him to watch. I'll program a typing game and ask his input into it so he might feel some "ownership".
I'm not sure how he will react, because there will not be instant sanctification. I want him to feel my frustration (fake a bit) and know how to handle it. But man, my son is not someone with patience, so I'm not sure...
Sorry, didn't mean to distract from the serious topic at hand.
I learned a new word today!
Of course, the university lost its way quite some time ago. Indeed, education in general has. But if we focus on the university, the basic question we should be asking - one that should inform all of our decisions and actions - is "for the sake of what?".
What is the university for?
If you ask most people, perhaps especially since the War when university attendance exploded, the answer will likely be "to get a job". So, the university, it is supposed, is primarily an institution centered around career training and preparation. Indeed, if you grew up during the last half century, you might have grown accustomed to hearing a certain negative encouragement to attend university, namely, that if you wish to avoid working at McDonald's - which is taken to be the worst fate imaginable - then you must have a college degree. This was an unquestioned iron rule that insinuated a certain conception of the primary purpose of unviersity education. In communities dominated by blue collar workers, the university was sold as one's ticket out of the ostensibly dreary world of manual labor into the ranks of the white collar professional classes.
(Gen Z begs to differ; interest in the so-called trades has increased by 1500%.)
Now, assuming university education is job training, we might wish to ask whether they are effective at this task, especially given the astronomical costs of tuition to which students are yoked after graduation. Here, the answer is far from clear and one suspects negative for most graduates.
Even so, the concept of university-as-job-training-center itself is a debasement of the original purpose of the university. The primary purpose was historically embodied by the liberal arts, which is to say, the free arts. These are opposed to the so-called servile arts. Guess into which "job training" fits best. The liberal arts as originally taught were not the liberal arts as we imagine them today. The foundation of what you might call undergraduate education was the trivium and the quadrivium. The first taught grammar, logic, and rhetoric in order to prepare students to be able to reason, evaluate arguments, and to make arguments themselves. It freed a person by developing basic intellectually competence. In the second, students were taught arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy. Despite what are for us today some strange names, these prepared the student for quantitative reasoning: quantity as such, quantity in space, quantity in time, and quantity in space-time. From there, students continued onward to study philosophy, medicine, theology, law, and so on. The purpose of these liberal arts was to produce a free man, free because he is enabled to pursue the truth.
Even the so-called research university demotes the primary function of the university by making pedagogy a kind of afterthought or concession. Eduating students is secondary; the primary aim of faculty is research.
Of course, people used to attend university at the age of 14, the age at which we typically enter secondary school, so the boundaries have shifted, but I would nonetheless argue that education - and especially the university - should return to its roots as an intellectual community of faculty and students oriented toward producing free human beings capable of seeking the truth. Research should take place in dedicated institutes. Students are a long way from research anyway, which in any case tends to be specialized. The trades should be taught in trade schools and institutions focused on producing competence in those areas. Institutional function should be clear so that an institution can acheive its end successfully instead of trying to be everything and nothing. Focused study of specialized academic fields should be postponed until postgraduate study.