This morning’s headlines are blaring the resignation of the president and chancellor of the University of Missouri after weeks of student protests regarding the handling of purported racism on the campus. Concurrently, a female student at Yale has gained some notoriety for “shrieking” at a professor who refused to back an effort to censor Halloween costumes, during which she accused the professor for not making the school a “safe space.” College tuitions have been spiraling ever upward, emerging college graduates are often crushed by six-figure debt (underwritten by taxpayers). Discourse and dissent are discouraged and banned in classrooms. Freedom of speech is limited to designated patches of grass, students veto campus speakers they dislike through loud and angry protest. Students, supposedly adults with the all the rights and responsibilities accrued thereto, are required to follow yes means yes protocols when involved in amorous encounters with other students.
Meanwhile, there are no jobs for many of these graduates, especially those who don’t pursue STEM degrees. Meanwhile, the trades are underpopulated and tradesmen are earning good incomes without the massive debt that a four year degree typically bestows.
Society has been telling young people for decades that the path to a prosperous future goes through college. That advice has been well heeded, but its validity is increasingly coming into question (noting, again, that STEM degrees are the exception). College seems to be morphing into an increasingly costly and hostile environment, and the tangible benefits (as opposed to the dubious “benefit” of delaying adulthood by four years) are being increasingly counterbalanced by the drawbacks.
Herbert Stein’s Law says “If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.” While there will always be a demand for STEM-degreed employees, and there will always be the elite (business, law, medicine) graduate degrees, it seems likely that the trends in tertiary education are going to result in collapse of the entire edifice as far as “the masses” go. Bubbles always burst, and they rarely burst benignly.
One of the uglier possibilities is that higher education devolves into chaos, with angry student mobs demanding “rights” that are anything but, and pandering politicians follow through on their promises to make higher education “free,” i.e. paid for by taxpayers (an increasingly endangered species) and printing presses (see Stein’s Law).
Another possibility is that second- and third-tier universities enter a death spiral, with enrollments dropping and the combination of tenure and bureaucratic bloat stand in the way of cost-cutting.
A third is that college admissions become more predatory, with for-profit colleges that offer aggressive marketing and a mediocre-to-worthless product competing with and crowding out traditionally structured schools.
All these possibilities are, in fact, happening today. Hillary Clinton has promised free education. Enrollments in smaller colleges are dropping, and a Harvard Business School professor has predicted that half of the 4000+ colleges and universities in the US will fail in the next 15 years. Daytime television is littered with advertisements for on-line and for-profit colleges (we’ve all seen the University of Phoenix ads).
As the collapse progresses, the divide between society’s elite and its masses will grow. While I expect some flow of workers into the trades (thanks to the disappearance of skills education from high schools reducing the number of DIY-capable people, thanks to fracking, thanks to Mike Rowe, and thanks to the increased uselessness of a $100K degree in creative basket weaving), there remain social pressures that work against that flow. Society i.e. politicians, the press and the best and brightest, will continue to urge young people to go to college, based on metrics of past decades rather than today’s realities. On top of that urging, there is the phenomenon witnessed in the dating world. Women make up a substantial majority of college graduates (one report indicates that in 2014, women earned 57% of bachelors degrees and 60% of masters degrees), and the traditional tendencies and social pressures for women to date and marry up have been slow to fade. This tends to add pressure to go to college rather than learn a trade, no matter that a man can do very well for himself and his prospects in the latter.
What’s the ultimate outcome? Things can go two ways. We can end up with an ever-larger dependent class, as the quality of non-elite college education diminishes and puts ever more skill-less young people into the world. Or, the entire educational paradigm changes, with young people developing skills, trade-, tech-, etc, outside the traditional college system, in innovative fashions born out of market dynamics. The latter is the optimist’s hope. The former is the pessimist’s dread. I fear the former is more likely, and with it will come the aforementioned expansion of the gap between the elite minority and the average citizenry. History tells us that this is a recipe for bad things happening, and I don’t see how history would be wrong this time.
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