I agree with you, but I also worry about sending my daughter to a college where she will be faced with extreme, faculty-approved antisemitism; antizionism; gender ideology; a quasi-Marxist view of society; and contempt for her parents. She is currently only a few months old and I just hope that the situation on campus improves over the next eighteen years. My wife and I (both graduates of humanities degrees at elite universities) find ourselves asking whether we even want her to go to university in this environment, a conversation neither of us would have predicted having when we were undergraduates. We don't disagree with the idea of a university humanities education, but we worry that the current model of the university imparts extreme brain rot instead of "the best which has been thought and said."
Who will debate and refute the ideas of marxists, gender studies students, etc. if conservatives stop enrolling in humanities programs at universities? There will be no ideological shift in universities if conservatives stop going there.
This has to be one of your best articles yet. I agree with it completely. The best way to increase your chances at success is by continuously learning and improving. I’m left wing but would like to see more conservatives in college, because I actually want to try understanding why they believe what they believe in. And even though there’s a lot of stuff that they would consider “woke” now lol, it still remains the best place to be educated in the humanistic tradition. And even if you’re not in college or you’re not a humanities student, your quality of life can still be greatly improved by reading literature or philosophy or studying other languages in your spare time. Some techbros understand this that’s why you’ll catch them reading Marcus Aurelius or Machiavelli in their spare time for their personal edification lol. Perhaps you could write a post on how people should self-educate even if they can’t study the humanities at a university.
I have a degree in Political Science, as well as an MBA. I agree there are still valuable things the humanities can offer.
But there are a number of “woke” ideas that strike me as very unwise. The notion that we should abolish or defund the police would create large numbers of crime victims. DEI for pilots or air traffic controllers will increase the number of plane crashes. Ideas that masculinity is toxic, or that “whiteness” is evil, or that immigration laws should be ignored, or that the government should control the economy, as it does in China - these strike me as just absurd.
They have nothing to do with reading Gibbon, or Machiavelli, or Herodotus, nor with studying statistics, or calculus, or physics.
Why would universities promulgate them? Worse, why would so many students believe them?
This was such a great piece, Liza that reminds us of why the higher education system whatever its flaws, is still worth it and still matters. Does the university system need reform? Yes. Does a good chunk of academia have a problem with left-wing bias? Yes. But that doesn't mean we should just defund it and do away with it altogether as conservatives would like us to do. A college education can STILL open doors for you and the skills you learn from it can certainly be valuable. Are some degrees worthless? Yes. But many are not! College degrees are admittedly, not as valuable as they once were but that doesn't mean they aren't helpful at all. Far from it, the highest earning individuals in our society have college degrees and got a good liberal arts education for the important skills that they gain from it like critical thinking for example. Ben Shapiro, Matt Walsh, the late Charlie Kirk, and the Tuttle Twins tv show all tell conservatives college is a scam and waste of time. But this just isn't so! Ivy League graduates gain much from what they learn in the liberal arts in school. Many of those you went to school with at Columbia University studied English so they could use what they learned in the field to the lucrative careers in fields like the law and consulting.
You yourself gained a lot of useful skills for your business Invictus Prep from your vigorous English education warts and all. The Humanities can teach you things like again, critical thinking, how to write, proper spelling and punctuation, how to understand the world around you, seeing complexity, analyzing things, and being able to emphasize with others and broadening your mind to be open to other world views, adaptability, interdisciplinary knowledge in other words seeing how two different fields connect to each other, creativity, innovation, moral and ethical reasoning, and understanding yourself and your own thoughts. Plus, as you rightly point out, colleges can connect you with resources, networks and invaluable professional connections one wouldn't be able to find as readily otherwise.
The left is to be condemned for turning Matthew Arnold and the Ancient Greek's wonderful idea of a humanistic, classical education that makes us into well-rounded human beings, and turning it into an ideological battleground. But the right is also to be condemned for throwing the baby out with the bathwater and just telling young people to give up on it altogether. Conservatives are supposed to you know...conserve our institutions, so shouldn't they be leading the charge to protect the general, liberal arts education and the university? If college was just all about job training and what was "practical" that would just drive higher education down even more and make it boring. By the way, I agree closing the Department of Education while not as catastrophic as some make it out to be, would still be a horrible idea. It wouldn't solve the problem and would create a whole new set of them.
Liza's article has inspired me to leave you all with some titles I think it would be good for all of us to read about why college is still important and needed:
* Literature and the American College: Essays in Defense of the Humanities by Irving Babbitt and Russell Kirk
* In Defense of a Liberal Education by Fareed Zakaria
* The University We Need: Reforming Higher Education by Warren Treadgold
* Reforming Our Universities: The Campaign for an Academic Bill of Rights by David Horowitz
* College: What It Was, Is, and Should Be by Andrew Delbanco
* The Liberating Arts: Why We Need Liberal Arts Education by Jeffery Bilbro
I have some sympathy with this argument, but I can't help pointing out that it presents a picture of a long period of academic peace in which most people went to college as a matter of course. But that is not the case. College was traditionally the preserve of the rich, many of whom were there for the connections, not the education. True scholars were few, whether rich or poor. Most people did not go to college. That changed after WWII, and there was a vast college build-out program through the sixties designed to extend college education to the masses, or at least to the middle classes.
There were not, of course, enough good scholars, let alone gifted teachers, to keep up with this vast build-out of universities and vast influx of students, and so the character of university education was bound to change, as much in the character of the teachers as in the character of the students.
Aspiring professors mobbed PhD programs in much the same way people have been mobbing computer science departments for the past few decades, resulting, inevitably, in oversupply and the infamous taxi-driving PhDs. There were not nearly enough reasonable research projects for all these doctoral candidates, resulting in the glut of rightly-mocked weird disciplines and thesis topics.
There were not enough true scholars among those recruits to permit the development of any rigor or discipline in most institutions. Such rigor was a threat to jobs and so had to be eliminated, with the results we can see now. That it was the ideas of the left that subsequently came to predominate can be explained simply by the fact that people of a more rightward inclination were off building companies rather than research chairs.
There may indeed be a value in a scholarly education of at least the brightest middle-class children, but to suggest that there has ever been a stable and mature system in place to deliver it is misleading. The university system grew like a weed, which led inevitably to its current corruption, and to the disdain that people who see no value in its strange and corrupt curriculum now have for the institution as a whole.
Is it possible to develop a robust scholarly institution for the education of middle-class youth, and to do so on a scale that can include most of the middle class as well as the brightest and most motivated of the working class? Perhaps, if it is in fact possible to develop genuine scholarly interest in so wide a swath of the population, which I doubt. But the universities at the moment are arguably further from being able to do that than they were in 1945.
In those days, the proper place for producing educated citizens was elementary school. High school was for more advanced learning, and college for more advanced learning yet. Obviously there was filtering because these were not needed or suitable for all children.
We should return to that. Down to the idea that not everyone should be graduated from eighth grade.
Good post because I feel that conservatism is no longer an ideology with principles but is just a political movement based on resistance to social change and even just government itself . It no longer has leaders like Reagan or Bush who at least tried to have some notion of standing up for average people or of compassion. Now it’s based on resentment of any hint of civil rights and a liberal attitude or policies. Sure liberals have gone too far with some of the DEI policies but it was to correct mistakes of the past. And like that the Ivy League and other liberal arts colleges do not have a vocational track like some of the state colleges. People there can do just as well as the vocational schools . But might the success of the Ivy League schools be just a result of their insanely high standards and connections with elite alumni that give many graduates an edge in the job market?
The right is correct to attack college education but does so in the wrong way. The problem is not college education per se but is instead the ugly effects of the flow of government money into education which tends to be controlled by the left at all levels. Until the government is out of the schools, our tax dollars will continue to pay for teaching communism, trans worship, and all manner of left wing nastiness at every grade level. Trump and the right are correct that something is very wrong with education including the colleges and universities but they are not fixing the problem correctly.
Would really like to see thoughtful people on the right being better students of our problems in higher education. I teach at a pretty woke school. But nobody is teaching communism. Very few have ever read Marx. But please do go after anti-intellectualism on the left. You'll want to know your opponent better.
I’m glad I had conservative friends at college in 2015-19. They likely prevented me from going full commie. You could say I was woke-curious back then. I still lean left but am committed to knowing & being able to dialogue with people of all stripes; never being in an echo chamber in those formative years, I think, has kept me intellectually honest.
A lot of us DO value it in theory. And if they were places that valued knowledge, which she dismisses the ideological capture part despite Harvard/etc. famously deciding “nah, keep your money, we’ll keep DIE”, we’d value them in practice.
I think what she’s conflating with “not valuing college in theory” is the fact that many of us don’t believe college/university is for everyone, and that it should not be.
"The point of college is and always has been to educate the general populace to produce better citizens of the world"
The idea of college as for the general populace is new and people didn't put them themselves into debt to become better citizens of the world, they took loans believing they would make enough to easily pay them back.
Going to college to make yourself a better citizen of the world is for people who have money to spare. I don't think those in debt and underemployed find much comfort in thinking themselves a better citizen of the world.
Even without that issue, I think grading may deter those less academically inclined. For the general populace, we should look elsewhere. Maybe community theatre and libraries?
(So many excellent comments!) I share the essay's concerns about College. I also agree with the thrust of the essay--that ideally students who attend college should develop skills in abstract reasoning and critical thought. I also agree that there are voices on the right who encourage students (particularly young men) to look at alternatives to University degrees, and there are others (whom you've named) who tend to discourage college altogether. Fortunately, there are also those on the right who want to improve University educational standards (such as Christopher Russo) as well as others who are concerned with schooling at the K through 12 levels (e. g., Moms for Liberty). (Of course, those who concerned with academic standards are not typically "influencers" of young adults who are making these kinds of academic decisions.)
One tangential point--I think a distinction should be made between cutting educational funding and dismantling the Dept. of Education bureaucracy. Having a Dept. of Education does not necessarily translate into a better education. The DOE was founded in 1980, and from personal observation, I would say that educational standards have not improved since then (although I realize that correlation is not causation).
A look at the texts and primers from the late 1800's gives an idea as to how far reading standards have declined over time.
Below is a link to a poetry text from 1892. The first 42 pages are for beginning readers. If you read the preface, it says that these poems are to be committed to memory--in other words, children were not supposed to simply read these poems, but learn them well enough for recitation. See the Longfellow poem on page 42-43:
I realize that there are some first graders who are capable of reading much more complex texts than shown in these examples, but I would guess that they are relatively few. From personal experience, the reading material that I had in first grade (decades ago) was much more basic than these examples, and unfortunately, the establishment of the DOE has not stemmed the general decline in standards.
I mention the decline in early educational standards because they form the basis for college. (And frankly, a high school education in the early part of the 20th century is equivalent to a bachelor's or even a master's degree at some universities today.)
The good news is that reading standards can improve (with or without assistance from DOE) as discussed in the following article.
The following are excerpts from another article on the same subject:
Southern States of Mississippi and Louisiana Go Back to Teaching the Basics in School – Now Lead Liberal States Like California in Literacy
...In California, for instance, only 30% of public school fourth graders can read proficiently. Fully 41% cannot even read at a basic level — which is to say, they cannot really understand and interpret written text at all. Eighth graders, as you might expect, look almost as bad…
But scores are not slipping everywhere. In Mississippi, they have been rising year over year. The state recovered from a brief decline during COVID and has now surpassed its pre-COVID highs. Its fourth grade students outperform California’s on average, even though our state [California] is richer, more educated, and spends about 50% more per pupil.
The difference is most pronounced if you look at the most disadvantaged students. In California, only 28% of Black fourth graders read at or above basic level, for instance, compared to 52% in Mississippi. But it’s not just that Mississippi has raised the floor. It has also raised the ceiling: The state is also one of the nation’s best performers when you look at students who are not “economically disadvantaged.”
First, it’s not just Mississippi — Louisiana, Alabama, and Tennessee have adopted the same strategies, stemmed the bleeding affecting states elsewhere, and seen significant improvements…
This is the part of the story that has gotten the most attention — teach phonics! And you should, indeed, teach phonics. But making schools adopt the approach took more than a mere nudge. The Southern Surge states have tried earmarked funding, guidance to districts, and outright mandates to accomplish universal adoption.
The disappearance from our culture of a true liberal arts education -- which is ultimately the real issue here – is an urgent, incredibly important issue, as you know. It's also an old one. And the arguments around it are old, too.
Twenty-five years ago I started the first blog tracking the attack on free speech on campus – an enterprise that lasted more than a decade and that allowed me to walk through all the iterations of the problems with higher education countless times. I eventually stopped writing the blog because there just wasn't any movement or meaningful change, despite the amazing work of FIRE, which set the standard for reasoned critique of higher ed's failure to defend free inquiry and the fearless pursuit of truth. I was tired of making the same arguments over and over again, arguments I see raised once more, many years later, in this beautifully written and very smart post.
The problems morph with the times – Ben Shapiro was a student activist when I was writing my daily critiques of higher ed, and now look at where he is. But ultimately, the core issues remain the same: ideological capture of the humanities by the left and a subsequent corruption of what could once be described as a liberal arts education; countless attempts on the part of the center and the right to remedy the situation using persuasion, critique, activism, and the law; repeated failure of those attempts.
Over time, it's led to the kind of blunt force argument described here, in which well-educated, highly successful conservatives with a platform announce to large audiences of vulnerable young people that they should not go to college. I agree that this is deeply irresponsible, even as I understand where they are coming from, and even as I believe, too, that college really isn't for everybody – not everybody wants to study literature, philosophy, and the history of ideas, and not everybody makes good use of that opportunity.
I left the academy in 2008, after nearly a decade of fighting the good fight. I have since watched the academy double down on itself in ways that appear to be, ultimately, institutionally suicidal. I am encouraged by the founding of the University of Austin at Texas, which sets a standard for how we might rebuild higher education in this country, and offers a tremendous proof of concept – there are faculty who urgently want to be there, there are students who urgently want to attend, and just this fall, a megadonor made a grant so big that the university will never again have to charge tuition -- meaning that there are no financial barriers to anyone wishing to attend, and that the students will not graduate drowning in debt. I thought there might be movement in the fall of 2007, when so much about the toxic workings of our top universities – among them the one where I used to teach and where I earned tenure – was exposed. No meaningful long-term dice.
If there's one thing that can move the needle, I think it's AI. It's the way AI is showing us the difference between a "job" that ultimately is not a lot more than replicable task work – even if it's at a high level – and work that only humans can do. This work involves creative problem-solving, rigorous critical thinking, the ability to synthesize and invent and articulate new ideas, new problems, new solutions – things that have not been thought before. I know of several professors at the Wharton school, the finest business school in the world, doing scholarship in this very area.
We now have, ironically, completed the circle – in order to get a meaningful job in the future, we're going to need that liberal arts education. We're going to need to be able to think. The people who get the memo are going to be the ones who succeed and that's going to be true on an institutional level as well as an individual one.
I've had the misfortune of growing up in a family that has the mainstream conservative visionn of education.
I lean right by temperament and interests but being surrounded by left-leaning and far-left people with the exception of one community College professor has been socially isolating as someone who loves the humanities.
Disillusionment is difficult to avoid because social isolation except on niche internet communities is almost unavoidable for right-leaning individuals who love history, literature, philosophy and the Humanities in general.
Both conservatives and liberal parents have considered a college degree as a necessary requirement to be hired. It is a needed in order to apply. Yes, there are techies who didn't need the degree but for the average young man or woman it is simply a step you have to show that you made. The broad education you speak about I still remember fondly as do many conservatives and liberals. I was introduced to subjects I never would have found on my own. And certainly all of the honors, the feathers in my cap didn't hurt my self esteem. Did it create good thinking habits, a critical mind and so forth? I really doubt that. All of that was nice, even very nice but when I went to school (1960-64) tuition was $1200 dollars, room and board another $600. Would I be willing to spend $80-90 thousand a year for that broad education–no way Jose. Unless it was necessary to get a job or go to law or med school, or graduate school but at those prices I would have serious misgivings. I very much doubt most students develop the intellectual hunger or refinement that becomes a life long habit. It does happen but when it does, it probably would have happened anyway. It is a nice way to round off one's school years but that is it. What has happened on campuses politically, the shouting down of conservatives is the main reason conservatives are not eager to fund them. It's the same for Public TV, a great idea,and enriching culturally but its political bias has made conservatives against funding them. One other thought. I am not happy the way academicians, the "experts" journalists have turned to as the smartest, best idea people around, are as capable at being leaders, or good decision makers as non academicians who may not have the same book smarts but have a better feel for the ways of the world. Trump often comes across as not very smart, which he isn't, but he is a man of action, someone who is mostly concerned with getting things done. He understands that power is and has always been the main currency, not brilliance, something academicians tend to underestimate. Intelligence is certainly helpful but the world (unfortunately) usually goes to those with the most power. That is obvious to most participants but professors tend to think what really counts is demonstrating you are the smartest one on the room. I'll take Jared Kushner and Steven Witkoff over professors any day to problem solve. For both better and worse Trump has been a necessary correction and cutting some of the ridiculous amounts of money "education" has been receiving is not a bad idea. It is not specifically anti-intellectual it is reminding university types that they had gotten too big for their britches.
I fully agree, what surprises me is that they truly think the future of the country lies with plumbers and not with lawyers who make laws, for example. The fewer conservatives go to universities, the more professionals will be left leaning and overrepresented. There will come a time when there won’t be a judge, politician, or even a manager in a multinational company who isn’t left-wing. Because they were the ones who studied, they were the ones who dominated the market.
And it’s a terrible message to define your whole life based on a market trend. If right now they tell you that being a plumber pays more, in 10 years when there’s an oversupply of plumbers and wages drop back to the minimum, that’s when the Ben Shapiros of the world will say, ‘You should have gone to college"
I agree with you, but I also worry about sending my daughter to a college where she will be faced with extreme, faculty-approved antisemitism; antizionism; gender ideology; a quasi-Marxist view of society; and contempt for her parents. She is currently only a few months old and I just hope that the situation on campus improves over the next eighteen years. My wife and I (both graduates of humanities degrees at elite universities) find ourselves asking whether we even want her to go to university in this environment, a conversation neither of us would have predicted having when we were undergraduates. We don't disagree with the idea of a university humanities education, but we worry that the current model of the university imparts extreme brain rot instead of "the best which has been thought and said."
Who will debate and refute the ideas of marxists, gender studies students, etc. if conservatives stop enrolling in humanities programs at universities? There will be no ideological shift in universities if conservatives stop going there.
True, but it seems a lot to put on her. Maybe it just seems that way because she's so young right now.
This has to be one of your best articles yet. I agree with it completely. The best way to increase your chances at success is by continuously learning and improving. I’m left wing but would like to see more conservatives in college, because I actually want to try understanding why they believe what they believe in. And even though there’s a lot of stuff that they would consider “woke” now lol, it still remains the best place to be educated in the humanistic tradition. And even if you’re not in college or you’re not a humanities student, your quality of life can still be greatly improved by reading literature or philosophy or studying other languages in your spare time. Some techbros understand this that’s why you’ll catch them reading Marcus Aurelius or Machiavelli in their spare time for their personal edification lol. Perhaps you could write a post on how people should self-educate even if they can’t study the humanities at a university.
Thanks so much for your kind words and reflection! Writing about self-education is a great idea! I'll put that on my list :)
I have a degree in Political Science, as well as an MBA. I agree there are still valuable things the humanities can offer.
But there are a number of “woke” ideas that strike me as very unwise. The notion that we should abolish or defund the police would create large numbers of crime victims. DEI for pilots or air traffic controllers will increase the number of plane crashes. Ideas that masculinity is toxic, or that “whiteness” is evil, or that immigration laws should be ignored, or that the government should control the economy, as it does in China - these strike me as just absurd.
They have nothing to do with reading Gibbon, or Machiavelli, or Herodotus, nor with studying statistics, or calculus, or physics.
Why would universities promulgate them? Worse, why would so many students believe them?
This was such a great piece, Liza that reminds us of why the higher education system whatever its flaws, is still worth it and still matters. Does the university system need reform? Yes. Does a good chunk of academia have a problem with left-wing bias? Yes. But that doesn't mean we should just defund it and do away with it altogether as conservatives would like us to do. A college education can STILL open doors for you and the skills you learn from it can certainly be valuable. Are some degrees worthless? Yes. But many are not! College degrees are admittedly, not as valuable as they once were but that doesn't mean they aren't helpful at all. Far from it, the highest earning individuals in our society have college degrees and got a good liberal arts education for the important skills that they gain from it like critical thinking for example. Ben Shapiro, Matt Walsh, the late Charlie Kirk, and the Tuttle Twins tv show all tell conservatives college is a scam and waste of time. But this just isn't so! Ivy League graduates gain much from what they learn in the liberal arts in school. Many of those you went to school with at Columbia University studied English so they could use what they learned in the field to the lucrative careers in fields like the law and consulting.
You yourself gained a lot of useful skills for your business Invictus Prep from your vigorous English education warts and all. The Humanities can teach you things like again, critical thinking, how to write, proper spelling and punctuation, how to understand the world around you, seeing complexity, analyzing things, and being able to emphasize with others and broadening your mind to be open to other world views, adaptability, interdisciplinary knowledge in other words seeing how two different fields connect to each other, creativity, innovation, moral and ethical reasoning, and understanding yourself and your own thoughts. Plus, as you rightly point out, colleges can connect you with resources, networks and invaluable professional connections one wouldn't be able to find as readily otherwise.
The left is to be condemned for turning Matthew Arnold and the Ancient Greek's wonderful idea of a humanistic, classical education that makes us into well-rounded human beings, and turning it into an ideological battleground. But the right is also to be condemned for throwing the baby out with the bathwater and just telling young people to give up on it altogether. Conservatives are supposed to you know...conserve our institutions, so shouldn't they be leading the charge to protect the general, liberal arts education and the university? If college was just all about job training and what was "practical" that would just drive higher education down even more and make it boring. By the way, I agree closing the Department of Education while not as catastrophic as some make it out to be, would still be a horrible idea. It wouldn't solve the problem and would create a whole new set of them.
Liza's article has inspired me to leave you all with some titles I think it would be good for all of us to read about why college is still important and needed:
* Literature and the American College: Essays in Defense of the Humanities by Irving Babbitt and Russell Kirk
* In Defense of a Liberal Education by Fareed Zakaria
* The University We Need: Reforming Higher Education by Warren Treadgold
* Reforming Our Universities: The Campaign for an Academic Bill of Rights by David Horowitz
* College: What It Was, Is, and Should Be by Andrew Delbanco
* The Liberating Arts: Why We Need Liberal Arts Education by Jeffery Bilbro
I have some sympathy with this argument, but I can't help pointing out that it presents a picture of a long period of academic peace in which most people went to college as a matter of course. But that is not the case. College was traditionally the preserve of the rich, many of whom were there for the connections, not the education. True scholars were few, whether rich or poor. Most people did not go to college. That changed after WWII, and there was a vast college build-out program through the sixties designed to extend college education to the masses, or at least to the middle classes.
There were not, of course, enough good scholars, let alone gifted teachers, to keep up with this vast build-out of universities and vast influx of students, and so the character of university education was bound to change, as much in the character of the teachers as in the character of the students.
Aspiring professors mobbed PhD programs in much the same way people have been mobbing computer science departments for the past few decades, resulting, inevitably, in oversupply and the infamous taxi-driving PhDs. There were not nearly enough reasonable research projects for all these doctoral candidates, resulting in the glut of rightly-mocked weird disciplines and thesis topics.
There were not enough true scholars among those recruits to permit the development of any rigor or discipline in most institutions. Such rigor was a threat to jobs and so had to be eliminated, with the results we can see now. That it was the ideas of the left that subsequently came to predominate can be explained simply by the fact that people of a more rightward inclination were off building companies rather than research chairs.
There may indeed be a value in a scholarly education of at least the brightest middle-class children, but to suggest that there has ever been a stable and mature system in place to deliver it is misleading. The university system grew like a weed, which led inevitably to its current corruption, and to the disdain that people who see no value in its strange and corrupt curriculum now have for the institution as a whole.
Is it possible to develop a robust scholarly institution for the education of middle-class youth, and to do so on a scale that can include most of the middle class as well as the brightest and most motivated of the working class? Perhaps, if it is in fact possible to develop genuine scholarly interest in so wide a swath of the population, which I doubt. But the universities at the moment are arguably further from being able to do that than they were in 1945.
In those days, the proper place for producing educated citizens was elementary school. High school was for more advanced learning, and college for more advanced learning yet. Obviously there was filtering because these were not needed or suitable for all children.
We should return to that. Down to the idea that not everyone should be graduated from eighth grade.
Good post because I feel that conservatism is no longer an ideology with principles but is just a political movement based on resistance to social change and even just government itself . It no longer has leaders like Reagan or Bush who at least tried to have some notion of standing up for average people or of compassion. Now it’s based on resentment of any hint of civil rights and a liberal attitude or policies. Sure liberals have gone too far with some of the DEI policies but it was to correct mistakes of the past. And like that the Ivy League and other liberal arts colleges do not have a vocational track like some of the state colleges. People there can do just as well as the vocational schools . But might the success of the Ivy League schools be just a result of their insanely high standards and connections with elite alumni that give many graduates an edge in the job market?
Interesting article. That's all I will say
Were college still as you describe it, I could not agree more.
The right is correct to attack college education but does so in the wrong way. The problem is not college education per se but is instead the ugly effects of the flow of government money into education which tends to be controlled by the left at all levels. Until the government is out of the schools, our tax dollars will continue to pay for teaching communism, trans worship, and all manner of left wing nastiness at every grade level. Trump and the right are correct that something is very wrong with education including the colleges and universities but they are not fixing the problem correctly.
Would really like to see thoughtful people on the right being better students of our problems in higher education. I teach at a pretty woke school. But nobody is teaching communism. Very few have ever read Marx. But please do go after anti-intellectualism on the left. You'll want to know your opponent better.
I’m glad I had conservative friends at college in 2015-19. They likely prevented me from going full commie. You could say I was woke-curious back then. I still lean left but am committed to knowing & being able to dialogue with people of all stripes; never being in an echo chamber in those formative years, I think, has kept me intellectually honest.
I started to read it and had to punch out.
A lot of us DO value it in theory. And if they were places that valued knowledge, which she dismisses the ideological capture part despite Harvard/etc. famously deciding “nah, keep your money, we’ll keep DIE”, we’d value them in practice.
I think what she’s conflating with “not valuing college in theory” is the fact that many of us don’t believe college/university is for everyone, and that it should not be.
"The point of college is and always has been to educate the general populace to produce better citizens of the world"
The idea of college as for the general populace is new and people didn't put them themselves into debt to become better citizens of the world, they took loans believing they would make enough to easily pay them back.
Going to college to make yourself a better citizen of the world is for people who have money to spare. I don't think those in debt and underemployed find much comfort in thinking themselves a better citizen of the world.
Even without that issue, I think grading may deter those less academically inclined. For the general populace, we should look elsewhere. Maybe community theatre and libraries?
(So many excellent comments!) I share the essay's concerns about College. I also agree with the thrust of the essay--that ideally students who attend college should develop skills in abstract reasoning and critical thought. I also agree that there are voices on the right who encourage students (particularly young men) to look at alternatives to University degrees, and there are others (whom you've named) who tend to discourage college altogether. Fortunately, there are also those on the right who want to improve University educational standards (such as Christopher Russo) as well as others who are concerned with schooling at the K through 12 levels (e. g., Moms for Liberty). (Of course, those who concerned with academic standards are not typically "influencers" of young adults who are making these kinds of academic decisions.)
One tangential point--I think a distinction should be made between cutting educational funding and dismantling the Dept. of Education bureaucracy. Having a Dept. of Education does not necessarily translate into a better education. The DOE was founded in 1980, and from personal observation, I would say that educational standards have not improved since then (although I realize that correlation is not causation).
A look at the texts and primers from the late 1800's gives an idea as to how far reading standards have declined over time.
Below is a link to a poetry text from 1892. The first 42 pages are for beginning readers. If you read the preface, it says that these poems are to be committed to memory--in other words, children were not supposed to simply read these poems, but learn them well enough for recitation. See the Longfellow poem on page 42-43:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/rx531kszrujpdem/Memory%20Gems%2C%20Graded%20Selections%20in%20Prose%20and%20Verse%20%281883%29.pdf?dl=0
As stated in the Preface below, the following is a link to a FIRST grade reader from 1896 (for example, see page 72):
https://www.dropbox.com/s/lqwkt32d0jisd2c/A%20Primary%20Reader%20Old-time%20Stories%2C%20Fairy%20Tales%20and%20Myths%2C%20Retold%20by%20Children%20%281896%29.pdf?dl=0
I realize that there are some first graders who are capable of reading much more complex texts than shown in these examples, but I would guess that they are relatively few. From personal experience, the reading material that I had in first grade (decades ago) was much more basic than these examples, and unfortunately, the establishment of the DOE has not stemmed the general decline in standards.
I mention the decline in early educational standards because they form the basis for college. (And frankly, a high school education in the early part of the 20th century is equivalent to a bachelor's or even a master's degree at some universities today.)
The good news is that reading standards can improve (with or without assistance from DOE) as discussed in the following article.
https://www.educationnext.org/time-to-pay-attention-to-louisiana-and-the-southern-surge/
The following are excerpts from another article on the same subject:
Southern States of Mississippi and Louisiana Go Back to Teaching the Basics in School – Now Lead Liberal States Like California in Literacy
...In California, for instance, only 30% of public school fourth graders can read proficiently. Fully 41% cannot even read at a basic level — which is to say, they cannot really understand and interpret written text at all. Eighth graders, as you might expect, look almost as bad…
But scores are not slipping everywhere. In Mississippi, they have been rising year over year. The state recovered from a brief decline during COVID and has now surpassed its pre-COVID highs. Its fourth grade students outperform California’s on average, even though our state [California] is richer, more educated, and spends about 50% more per pupil.
The difference is most pronounced if you look at the most disadvantaged students. In California, only 28% of Black fourth graders read at or above basic level, for instance, compared to 52% in Mississippi. But it’s not just that Mississippi has raised the floor. It has also raised the ceiling: The state is also one of the nation’s best performers when you look at students who are not “economically disadvantaged.”
First, it’s not just Mississippi — Louisiana, Alabama, and Tennessee have adopted the same strategies, stemmed the bleeding affecting states elsewhere, and seen significant improvements…
This is the part of the story that has gotten the most attention — teach phonics! And you should, indeed, teach phonics. But making schools adopt the approach took more than a mere nudge. The Southern Surge states have tried earmarked funding, guidance to districts, and outright mandates to accomplish universal adoption.
The disappearance from our culture of a true liberal arts education -- which is ultimately the real issue here – is an urgent, incredibly important issue, as you know. It's also an old one. And the arguments around it are old, too.
Twenty-five years ago I started the first blog tracking the attack on free speech on campus – an enterprise that lasted more than a decade and that allowed me to walk through all the iterations of the problems with higher education countless times. I eventually stopped writing the blog because there just wasn't any movement or meaningful change, despite the amazing work of FIRE, which set the standard for reasoned critique of higher ed's failure to defend free inquiry and the fearless pursuit of truth. I was tired of making the same arguments over and over again, arguments I see raised once more, many years later, in this beautifully written and very smart post.
The problems morph with the times – Ben Shapiro was a student activist when I was writing my daily critiques of higher ed, and now look at where he is. But ultimately, the core issues remain the same: ideological capture of the humanities by the left and a subsequent corruption of what could once be described as a liberal arts education; countless attempts on the part of the center and the right to remedy the situation using persuasion, critique, activism, and the law; repeated failure of those attempts.
Over time, it's led to the kind of blunt force argument described here, in which well-educated, highly successful conservatives with a platform announce to large audiences of vulnerable young people that they should not go to college. I agree that this is deeply irresponsible, even as I understand where they are coming from, and even as I believe, too, that college really isn't for everybody – not everybody wants to study literature, philosophy, and the history of ideas, and not everybody makes good use of that opportunity.
I left the academy in 2008, after nearly a decade of fighting the good fight. I have since watched the academy double down on itself in ways that appear to be, ultimately, institutionally suicidal. I am encouraged by the founding of the University of Austin at Texas, which sets a standard for how we might rebuild higher education in this country, and offers a tremendous proof of concept – there are faculty who urgently want to be there, there are students who urgently want to attend, and just this fall, a megadonor made a grant so big that the university will never again have to charge tuition -- meaning that there are no financial barriers to anyone wishing to attend, and that the students will not graduate drowning in debt. I thought there might be movement in the fall of 2007, when so much about the toxic workings of our top universities – among them the one where I used to teach and where I earned tenure – was exposed. No meaningful long-term dice.
If there's one thing that can move the needle, I think it's AI. It's the way AI is showing us the difference between a "job" that ultimately is not a lot more than replicable task work – even if it's at a high level – and work that only humans can do. This work involves creative problem-solving, rigorous critical thinking, the ability to synthesize and invent and articulate new ideas, new problems, new solutions – things that have not been thought before. I know of several professors at the Wharton school, the finest business school in the world, doing scholarship in this very area.
We now have, ironically, completed the circle – in order to get a meaningful job in the future, we're going to need that liberal arts education. We're going to need to be able to think. The people who get the memo are going to be the ones who succeed and that's going to be true on an institutional level as well as an individual one.
Thanks for this thought-provoking post.
I've had the misfortune of growing up in a family that has the mainstream conservative visionn of education.
I lean right by temperament and interests but being surrounded by left-leaning and far-left people with the exception of one community College professor has been socially isolating as someone who loves the humanities.
Disillusionment is difficult to avoid because social isolation except on niche internet communities is almost unavoidable for right-leaning individuals who love history, literature, philosophy and the Humanities in general.
Both conservatives and liberal parents have considered a college degree as a necessary requirement to be hired. It is a needed in order to apply. Yes, there are techies who didn't need the degree but for the average young man or woman it is simply a step you have to show that you made. The broad education you speak about I still remember fondly as do many conservatives and liberals. I was introduced to subjects I never would have found on my own. And certainly all of the honors, the feathers in my cap didn't hurt my self esteem. Did it create good thinking habits, a critical mind and so forth? I really doubt that. All of that was nice, even very nice but when I went to school (1960-64) tuition was $1200 dollars, room and board another $600. Would I be willing to spend $80-90 thousand a year for that broad education–no way Jose. Unless it was necessary to get a job or go to law or med school, or graduate school but at those prices I would have serious misgivings. I very much doubt most students develop the intellectual hunger or refinement that becomes a life long habit. It does happen but when it does, it probably would have happened anyway. It is a nice way to round off one's school years but that is it. What has happened on campuses politically, the shouting down of conservatives is the main reason conservatives are not eager to fund them. It's the same for Public TV, a great idea,and enriching culturally but its political bias has made conservatives against funding them. One other thought. I am not happy the way academicians, the "experts" journalists have turned to as the smartest, best idea people around, are as capable at being leaders, or good decision makers as non academicians who may not have the same book smarts but have a better feel for the ways of the world. Trump often comes across as not very smart, which he isn't, but he is a man of action, someone who is mostly concerned with getting things done. He understands that power is and has always been the main currency, not brilliance, something academicians tend to underestimate. Intelligence is certainly helpful but the world (unfortunately) usually goes to those with the most power. That is obvious to most participants but professors tend to think what really counts is demonstrating you are the smartest one on the room. I'll take Jared Kushner and Steven Witkoff over professors any day to problem solve. For both better and worse Trump has been a necessary correction and cutting some of the ridiculous amounts of money "education" has been receiving is not a bad idea. It is not specifically anti-intellectual it is reminding university types that they had gotten too big for their britches.
I fully agree, what surprises me is that they truly think the future of the country lies with plumbers and not with lawyers who make laws, for example. The fewer conservatives go to universities, the more professionals will be left leaning and overrepresented. There will come a time when there won’t be a judge, politician, or even a manager in a multinational company who isn’t left-wing. Because they were the ones who studied, they were the ones who dominated the market.
And it’s a terrible message to define your whole life based on a market trend. If right now they tell you that being a plumber pays more, in 10 years when there’s an oversupply of plumbers and wages drop back to the minimum, that’s when the Ben Shapiros of the world will say, ‘You should have gone to college"