Politics and Higher Education
The Moral Decline of Elite Universities
What Universities Have Done to Themselves
https://www.wsj.com/articles/what-universities-have-done-to-themselves-antisemitism-hearing-dei-woke-history-abf4901b
Peggy Noonan:
Regular people used to imagine what a university looks like—rows of gleaming books, learned professors, an air of honest inquiry. That isn’t now a picture the public can see. Now it’s something else, less impressive, less moving. Less important to our continuance as a people.
The elites who run our elite colleges are killing their own status. They are also lowering the esteem in which college graduates are held. Your primary job as a student is taking in. You read, learn, connect this event with that, apply your imagination, empathize, judge. It is a spacious act—it takes time to absorb, reflect, feel—which is why you’re given four whole years to do it. But if the public senses that few are studying like independent scholars in there, not enough are absorbing the expertise of their field, that they’ve merely been instructed to internalize a particular worldview and parrot it back . . .
Well, if that’s the case, who needs them? Is it even worth having them around in the office? The people of a country have a greater stake in all this than universities and their students understand. And the elite schools are lowering their own standing more than they know.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/what-universities-have-done-to-themselves-antisemitism-hearing-dei-woke-history-abf4901b
Peggy Noonan:
Regular people used to imagine what a university looks like—rows of gleaming books, learned professors, an air of honest inquiry. That isn’t now a picture the public can see. Now it’s something else, less impressive, less moving. Less important to our continuance as a people.
The elites who run our elite colleges are killing their own status. They are also lowering the esteem in which college graduates are held. Your primary job as a student is taking in. You read, learn, connect this event with that, apply your imagination, empathize, judge. It is a spacious act—it takes time to absorb, reflect, feel—which is why you’re given four whole years to do it. But if the public senses that few are studying like independent scholars in there, not enough are absorbing the expertise of their field, that they’ve merely been instructed to internalize a particular worldview and parrot it back . . .
Well, if that’s the case, who needs them? Is it even worth having them around in the office? The people of a country have a greater stake in all this than universities and their students understand. And the elite schools are lowering their own standing more than they know.
Why university presidents are under fire
https://www.cnn.com/2023/12/08/opinions/israel-palestine-antisemitism-american-universities-zakaria/index.html
Fareed Zakharia:
American universities have been neglecting excellence in order to pursue a variety of agendas — many of them clustered around diversity and inclusion. It started with the best of intentions. Colleges wanted to make sure young people of all backgrounds had access to higher education and felt comfortable on campus. But those good intentions have morphed into a dogmatic ideology and turned these universities into places where the pervasive goals are political and social engineering, not academic merit.
As the evidence produced for the recent Supreme Court case on affirmative action showed, universities have systematically downplayed the merit-based criteria for admissions in favor of racial quotas. Some universities’ response to this ruling seems to be that they will go further down this path, eliminating the requirement for any standardized test like the SAT. That move would allow them to take students with little reference to objective criteria. (Those who will suffer most will be bright students from poor backgrounds, who normally use tests like the SAT to demonstrate their qualifications.)
Academic Administrators Should Keep Their Politics to Themselves
https://www.chronicle.com/article/everyone-just-shut-up-already
Stanley Fish:
The bottom line, then, is that academic freedom is not a general license to say whatever you like on any topic under the sun. It is a limited freedom to follow where the evidence pertaining to an academic question leads. It certainly does not include the freedom to advocate for your political views or turn (or try to turn) your students into social-justice warriors or anti-social-justice warriors. You and they are jointly engaged in an intellectual effort to understand something, and that engagement is, or should be, intensely focused and has no legitimate room for activities that belong to other enterprises.
https://www.chronicle.com/article/everyone-just-shut-up-already
Stanley Fish:
The bottom line, then, is that academic freedom is not a general license to say whatever you like on any topic under the sun. It is a limited freedom to follow where the evidence pertaining to an academic question leads. It certainly does not include the freedom to advocate for your political views or turn (or try to turn) your students into social-justice warriors or anti-social-justice warriors. You and they are jointly engaged in an intellectual effort to understand something, and that engagement is, or should be, intensely focused and has no legitimate room for activities that belong to other enterprises.
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Is it Necessary for Every High School Graduate to Attend College?
The Quantity versus Quality Debate
https://www.chronicle.com/article/some-students-are-smarter-than-others-and-thats-ok
Fredrik DeBoer, author of The Cult of Smart: How Our Broken Education System Perpetuates Social Injustice, notes:
To say that everyone should go to college presumes that everyone has the aptitude and desire to go to college. We have every reason to suspect that isn’t true. Already today, the national college-graduation rate tends to hover around 60 percent. And that’s among students who start college; the many millions who don’t attempt college are surely among those least likely to succeed in higher education. What would happen to the graduation rate if millions of people who previously did not attempt college were to flood our campuses? I have no doubt that some of them would flourish, but on balance we can certainly expect more dropouts, more remediation costs, more debt, and more stress on colleges that already struggle to graduate an adequate percentage of enrollees …It also strikes me that if the inevitable outcome of significantly greater college participation rates is lower standards, then our national response to hordes of new college students would be to make college significantly easier to get through.
Some Colleges Don’t Produce Big Earners. Are They Worth It?
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/20/business/college-graduate-earnings.html
A good place to start is studying available government data for any school you’re considering to see whether people who attended earn more than they would have if they had gone straight into the work force after high school.
At many schools, the answer is no. Three years ago, in an examination that should have received a lot more attention, the center-left think tank Third Way put all available data for all higher education institutions together. It found that at 52 percent of the schools, more than half of the enrollees were not earning more than the typical high school graduate six years after they began their studies. After 10 years, the figure was still 29 percent.
https://www.chronicle.com/article/some-students-are-smarter-than-others-and-thats-ok
Fredrik DeBoer, author of The Cult of Smart: How Our Broken Education System Perpetuates Social Injustice, notes:
To say that everyone should go to college presumes that everyone has the aptitude and desire to go to college. We have every reason to suspect that isn’t true. Already today, the national college-graduation rate tends to hover around 60 percent. And that’s among students who start college; the many millions who don’t attempt college are surely among those least likely to succeed in higher education. What would happen to the graduation rate if millions of people who previously did not attempt college were to flood our campuses? I have no doubt that some of them would flourish, but on balance we can certainly expect more dropouts, more remediation costs, more debt, and more stress on colleges that already struggle to graduate an adequate percentage of enrollees …It also strikes me that if the inevitable outcome of significantly greater college participation rates is lower standards, then our national response to hordes of new college students would be to make college significantly easier to get through.
Some Colleges Don’t Produce Big Earners. Are They Worth It?
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/20/business/college-graduate-earnings.html
A good place to start is studying available government data for any school you’re considering to see whether people who attended earn more than they would have if they had gone straight into the work force after high school.
At many schools, the answer is no. Three years ago, in an examination that should have received a lot more attention, the center-left think tank Third Way put all available data for all higher education institutions together. It found that at 52 percent of the schools, more than half of the enrollees were not earning more than the typical high school graduate six years after they began their studies. After 10 years, the figure was still 29 percent.
Worker Retraining and Skills Trade
https://vivekjayakumar.blogspot.com/2021/02/worker-retraining-and-skills-trade.html
https://vivekjayakumar.blogspot.com/2021/02/worker-retraining-and-skills-trade.html
Is the US higher education bubble about to burst?
https://thehill.com/opinion/education/590971-will-the-us-higher-education-bubble-finally-burst
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The Scourge of Grade Inflation
Nearly Everyone Gets A’s at Yale. Does That Cheapen the Grade?
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/05/nyregion/yale-grade-inflation.html
Others worried about Yale’s grade inflation becoming public knowledge. They feared it could cheapen their degrees — or obscure their hard work to skeptical employers.
“If Yale and other Ivy League institutions start getting these reputations for grade inflation, students who were already feeling pressured to get these high G.P.A.s will then feel that their work is sort of devalued,” said Gustavo Toledo, 20, a junior who is majoring in political science and hopes to go to law school. “This obviously doesn’t help,” he said.
Related:
https://yaledailynews.com/blog/2023/11/30/faculty-report-reveals-average-yale-college-gpa-grade-distributions-by-subject/
https://yaledailynews.com/blog/2023/12/05/singh-the-real-value-of-an-a/
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/05/nyregion/yale-grade-inflation.html
Others worried about Yale’s grade inflation becoming public knowledge. They feared it could cheapen their degrees — or obscure their hard work to skeptical employers.
“If Yale and other Ivy League institutions start getting these reputations for grade inflation, students who were already feeling pressured to get these high G.P.A.s will then feel that their work is sort of devalued,” said Gustavo Toledo, 20, a junior who is majoring in political science and hopes to go to law school. “This obviously doesn’t help,” he said.
https://yaledailynews.com/blog/2023/11/30/faculty-report-reveals-average-yale-college-gpa-grade-distributions-by-subject/
https://yaledailynews.com/blog/2023/12/05/singh-the-real-value-of-an-a/
The Age of Coddling Is Over
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/16/opinion/coronavirus-medical-training.html
David Brooks:
But there has been one sector of American society that has been relatively immune from this culture of overprotection — medical training. It starts on the undergraduate level. While most academic departments slather students with A’s, science departments insist on mastery of the materials. According to one study, the average English class G.P.A. is above 3.3 and the average chemistry class G.P.A. is 2.78.”.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/16/opinion/coronavirus-medical-training.html
David Brooks:
But there has been one sector of American society that has been relatively immune from this culture of overprotection — medical training. It starts on the undergraduate level. While most academic departments slather students with A’s, science departments insist on mastery of the materials. According to one study, the average English class G.P.A. is above 3.3 and the average chemistry class G.P.A. is 2.78.”.
“Over the past decades, a tide of “safetyism” has crept over American society. As Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt put it in their book “The Coddling of the American Mind,” this is the mentality that whatever doesn’t kill you makes you weaker. The goal is to eliminate any stress or hardship a child might encounter, so he or she won’t be wounded by it … It’s been a disaster. This overprotective impulse doesn’t shelter people from fear; it makes them unprepared to deal with the fear that inevitably comes. …
Mitch Daniels (Former Governor of Indiana and Former President of Purdue University):
“The challenge for today’s college admissions officer is like the one faced by corporate recruiters: In an era of rampant grade inflation, which grades can you believe? Businesses began learning years ago not to put much stock in diplomas from schools where the average graduate’s GPA is 3.5 or higher and may not be at all indicative of real learning or readiness for the modern workplace...