America’s universities have failed badly. The cost of tuition has dramatically outpaced inflation. They’ve abetted crippling financial mistakes for millions of students. They’ve become incubators for bad ideas and cultural norms. Worst of all, it’s not clear how much value they’re creating to offset these costs. Why would anyone attend one?
Because they maintain a de facto monopoly on economic opportunity in this country. While universities and their role in our society are in some sense an emergent phenomenon, allowing them to maintain this role is a policy choice.
Where Universities Have Failed
There’s little value in repeating all the ways in which universities have become dysfunctional. This dysfunction is clearly apparent and has been described at length elsewhere. Still, the best way to arrive at sound design goals for new policies and institutions is to look carefully at where the current ones are failing.
The universities serve two functions: education and credentialing. Zoom classes and discussion board posts are fine if all you want is the credential, never mind that a shoddy education renders the signaling function of the credential useless. Academic programs become a convenient, if crude, way to assess people at scale, not a reliable means of promoting human capital formation. And increasing the supply of degree holders without an accompanying increase in economic growth only drives credential inflation.
Even to the extent that quality instruction is available, credit requirements for most degrees place far too much emphasis on such fuzzy goals as engendering “well-roundedness” and “critical thinking skills” in students. The purpose of formal instruction should be to spur differentiation in the workforce and to help students develop specific skill sets that they couldn’t easily develop in other contexts.
And of course, these skill sets should, in the vast majority of cases, be geared towards remunerative work. Art, literature, and history are worthwhile pursuits, and we shouldn’t eschew the study of these things for the sake of perfect economic efficiency. However, we also shouldn’t give every 18-year-old carte blanche to choose just any course of study, especially given the federally-backed access to credit that comes with a degree program of any kind. There are reasons we don’t let teenagers buy alcohol, and those reasons are applicable here too.
This is where some will argue that the purpose of higher education isn’t to prepare students for careers but to broaden their horizons or to make them better citizens. Frankly, this argument is out of touch with reality. Whatever the original purpose of universities may have been, that is not their function today. That is not how most students understand their decision to pursue a college education. Even if higher education were primarily about personal edification, there would be better and cheaper ways to achieve that.
In practice, at least contingently, time spent in academia seems to be corrosive to one’s character and critical thinking skills. What’s come to be called “wokeness” originated in the universities and has only taken root in our society because the universities serve as the most important bottleneck for entrance to the professional-managerial class, the members of which have a disproportionate influence on our culture. The first step in the modern cursus honorum is almost always a seminary for bad ideas.
All of this is to say nothing of the extraordinary expenditure college represents both in individual and societal terms.
Why the Market Won’t Fix Education
A college education is mainly about indirect signaling to employers, and most employers aren’t evaluating the education that their applicants have received on any basis other than name recognition. Consequently, the market doesn’t select for high-quality instruction or relevant curricula, at least not primarily.
One can imagine vastly better models for higher education, but new, experimental programs will struggle to compete with more prestigious, entrenched players. While the higher education space is decentralized and students have an abundance of options on paper, universities are generally not competing on the merits, and most of them have converged on a single, flawed model.
Policy Responses
The most important lever federal and state governments have for reforming higher education is the power of the purse. Public universities depend on state funding for much of their operating budgets, and students at virtually all universities depend on federal financial aid to help cover their tuition. These sources of public funding already come with strings attached, and there’s no reason we couldn’t revise these requirements to rein in the universities, and where possible, to bring them back into alignment with the needs of students, and with the national interest.
Some possible instantiations of this approach should immediately come to mind. J.D. Vance has proposed cutting funding to universities that teach critical race theory. Even more exciting, financial incentives could be used to nudge universities towards developing streamlined, more relevant, and more modular academic programs.
In 2019, Josh Hawley authored two pieces of legislation that at least gestured towards this possibility. One of these bills would direct the Department of Education to make Pell Grants available for non-traditional training and certification programs, with the goal of increasing the number of vocational options that students have access to. The other would make universities liable for 50% of the bad debt they generate. This would not only help address the student debt crisis, it would also incentivize universities to put more thought into admissions decisions, guidance policies, and curriculum design. More generally, it would guarantee alignment between the interests of universities and the professional outcomes of their alumni.
At a more structural level, there’s something to be said for legislation such as the Higher Education Reform and Opportunity (HERO) Act. The HERO act, cosponsored by Senator Mike Lee and then-Congressman Ron Desantis, would have allowed states to form their own accreditation boards. While greater decentralization alone will not fix higher education - indeed, reform will rely in large part on a more intelligent use of what centralized control exists - there may be value in sending accreditation authority back to the states. At least theoretically, this would permit a greater diversity of approaches, and it would give Republican state trifectas the chance to pass reforms with greater latitude and speed than would be possible federally.
Of course, beyond reforming the universities, we need to address the outsized role they have in our society to begin with.
The Brookings Institute estimates that 15% of the American workforce is employed by a government entity at some level. By revising degree requirements for certain positions, state, federal, and municipal agencies could erode the power of the university system in a non-trivial way, and it’s possible that some of these changes would trickle out into the private sector as well.
These same agencies could also lend their standing to emerging alternatives to the university system. Given enough political will, it isn’t inconceivable that government agencies might someday accept a diploma from Lambda School (or a similar program) as an alternative to traditional credentials for the purposes of hiring developers, for instance. Particularly in tech, such programs are often much better than any comparable academic course of study. Having arisen in the private sector, sometimes in close coordination with employers, they tend to emphasize real-world skills rather than nice-to-have academic knowledge.
An executive order signed by President Trump directed federal agencies to reconsider degree requirements for federal positions and to develop new means of assessing applicants. While mostly symbolic in practice, this executive order could serve as a starting point for future executive and legislative action, hopefully with more teeth.
Finally, it’s worth asking whether the preeminence that universities enjoy isn’t due to the shortcomings of other types of institutions. Though K-12 education is beyond the scope of this piece, consider for a moment how strange it is that after over a decade in the classroom, the average student graduates from high school completely undifferentiated and qualified to do nothing in particular. That is and always has been a policy choice.
A Time for Choosing
Like so much of what ails America, the problems of higher education should have been addressed decades ago. Instead, our leadership class ignored, and sometimes did things to exacerbate, these issues. America’s universities do not enjoy the mandate of heaven. Believing that they can’t or shouldn’t be brought to heel reflects a failure of imagination.
The first step towards solving fundamental societal problems is learning to think of them as being within the rightful purview of politics. If populists seek to broaden national debates to encompass issues other than marginal tax rates, let’s start here.
If you enjoy this kind of material, one of the best ways you can support The Populist Memo is by sharing it with your friends or social media followers. Please consider doing so.
Twitter:
https://twitter.com/realmfoster
Youtube:
https://www.youtube.com/c/michaelfostercommentary
Subscribe to The Populist Memo:
Tax the endowments. Don't need a special law - just decertify them as non-profits, since they are for profit enterprises to employ as many cat ladies as possible, using the credentialist rent seeking structure as an income grift.