Education Apocalypse Now?

The Ivy League Hits An Iceberg.

Over a decade ago, I wrote a short book titled The Higher Education Bubble, which was followed by a much longer one called The New School, and a significantly longer and updated paperback version called The Education Apocalypse.

In all of these books I explained, with increasing amounts of detail and examples, why I thought that the existing system of higher education in America was doomed.  Not that higher education itself would cease to exist, but that the standard model of college, graduate, and professional education that had obtained since the passage of the G.I. Bill, and in many ways since the late 19^th Century, would largely cease to exist.  This was due to a combination of out-of-control costs and loss of prestige.

So is the apocalypse now?  Maybe.  At the very least, we’re at some sort of a turning point.

The cost part is now pretty obvious.  When I started writing on this, a college education was almost uniformly seen as the way to get ahead.  Nowadays sitcoms often feature jokes about people with useless degrees and heavy debt, professors more interested in avoiding controversy than teaching, and corrupt administrators. 

People – especially young men – are increasingly foregoing college for the trades, and other areas where they can make good livings without running up debt.  (I have a nephew who recently graduated from welding school and who is already making well over $50/hour as a beginning welder, which translates to a six-figure annual income.  I think his debt at graduation was like $3000.  Compare that to many college grads who have $200,000 or more in debt and take jobs paying in the mid five figures.)  So falling college enrollment and an increasing gender imbalance have become the norm.

The cost issue was news when I started writing on this over a decade ago; most people hadn’t grasped how much more expensive college was than in, say, the 1990s.  Now everyone knows.

But the double whammy is the loss of prestige.  Even as college gets more expensive and, in a present-value sense, less valuable when set against student loan debt, its overall societal stature is lower.  Like Monty Python’s Camelot, it’s seen as a silly place.

But wow, the pro-Hamas protests have lit an afterburner on that one.  With the pro-terror protests and the obviously incompetent and dishonest responses from university administrators at schools like Harvard, Yale, MIT, Columbia, and Penn, these places no longer just seem silly.  They also seem kind of evil.  And maybe a bit dangerous.

And now we’re starting to see the move away from them.  Gilt-edged lefty pundit Nate Silver, himself a graduate of an elite school, recently advised people to send their kids to state schools.

“Elite higher ed is cringe.”  Ouch.  But he’s not wrong.  In a Substack post, Silver expands on this:

·       If the student’s identity were deeply tied up into being a Princeton Man or a Cornell Woman or whatever, then I’d think that was a little weird — but by all means I’d tell them to go, I’m not here to kink-shame.

·       I’d also tell them to go with the elite private college if (i) they had a high degree of confidence in what they wanted to do with their degree and (ii) it was in a field like law that regards the credential as particularly valuable. 

·       And I’d tell them to strongly consider going if they came from an economically disadvantaged background and had been offered a golden ticket to join the elite. I’m not super familiar with the literature on the selective college wage premium, but it’s among this group of disadvantaged students where the benefits seem to be concentrated. 

But if this student was just going to school to “find herself” — and she or her parents were footing most of the bill? Yeah, probably go with the top-flight state school — especially if she’s in a state with a very good in-state public school where the cost savings are much greater. Better that than to emerge with a mountain of debt and a degree from an institution that is likely to be viewed as highly polarizing. Public perceptions of higher education have declined rapidly, and I expect the problems to get worse. . . .

Even in a period when nearly all American institutions are losing public trust, the decline in confidence for higher education stands out. In 2015, 57 percent of Americans had a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in higher education, according to Gallup polling. By summer 2023, that number had declined to just 36 percent.

Remember, higher ed is a prestige good, and prestige higher ed is a mega-prestige good.  The reason why Hollywood celebrities committed felonies to place their kids in fancy private schools is prestige, and the hope that that prestige would carry over into better, or at least more secure, futures. 

But now many investment firms, hedge funds, and the like are openly declaring that they’re not interested in hiring Ivy Leaguers.  And other companies are hiring people who didn’t go to college at all:  Last year Stanley Zhong, despite graduating with a 4.41 weighted average and a 1590/1600 SAT score, as well has having launched his own startup business, was rejected by 16 colleges.  Google went ahead and hired him directly out of high school as a full-time software engineer.

Of course, Zhong will miss out on the “college experience” by going directly to Google.  But the “college experience” generally amounts to several years of partying while running up a lot of debt.  While his contemporaries are drinking cheap beer and taking out loans for expensive education, he’ll be earning  big bucks without any debt.  The cheap beer looks awfully expensive by comparison.

And not only are people abandoning college entirely, they’re also abandoning prestige colleges for less-fancy ones.  As Nate Silver pointed out, there are lots of good state schools, and they’re much cheaper.  And you generally meet, ironically enough, a much more diverse array of people in a state school than in one of those “elite” schools that prize diversity.

Top corporate recruiters are now de-emphasizing elite schools, or even skipping them entirely.  “The anti-Israel protests now at Columbia, and throughout some of the country’s once revered, top-tiered universities are tarnishing degrees from these places, these people say.  Recruiters see the bungling responses from school administrations to the protests — such as Columbia calling for remote learning as officials negotiate with anti-Israel protesters to decamp from their disruptive tent-cities on campus — as endemic of a wider problem at the schools from an academic standpoint.  At issue: Can schools that rationalize non-stop protests while allowing course curriculum that imbibes students with a leftist interpretations of world events be trusted to produce quality job candidates?”

Can they, indeed?

And parents and kids who feel unsafe, or at least uncomfortable, with the Red Guard style campus politics of Ivy League schools are increasingly looking south.  As The Free Press recently reported, there’s an exodus of applicants from the Ivy League in favor of southern state, and sometimes private, colleges and universities:

“These kids aren’t drawn to old gothic Ivy League edifices, musty libraries, hallowed dark oak halls, and ghosts of dead white men,” she added. “They want luxury. They want comfort. A lot of these Southern schools have invested in infrastructure. They have nicer dorms. They have nicer facilities. There’s air conditioning.”

They also don’t have the same incentives to pick a school for its supposed “prestige.” As many students are beginning to realize, a marquee college name doesn’t always translate to greater success. A 2023 study by a Dartmouth business professor found that just 11.8 percent of Fortune 500 CEOs have an Ivy League education, and only 9.8 percent got their MBA from an Ivy League. 

Georgia Tech’s Clark says the kind of education that propels students into a stable upper-middle-class life is no longer exclusive to elite universities. “Some of the highest paying careers right now are STEM-heavy,” says Clark. “Some Ivies offer that, but you can also get it at Virginia Tech, Clemson, NC State, and Georgia Tech, where it’s cheaper, warmer, and friendlier. It’s a better return on investment.”

And the most damning bit:

Southern colleges also offer something Northerners rarely find at elite schools: an introduction to people who don’t think or behave exactly like them, but are welcoming nonetheless. When visiting her son Scott, a student at Elon University since 2022, Francine Katz’s interactions with students and teachers has changed her entire perspective on Southerners. “I might not agree with the politics in the South, but Northerners could really learn a lot from Southerners on how to treat people,” she says.

Archie Glazer feels the same. After visiting several elite colleges in the Northeast this spring, he is trying to keep an open mind about where he’ll apply next year, but can’t get past his first impressions. 

“Everybody looked so miserable,” he says.

Well, wokeness and elitism tend to spread misery, and the elite schools have that in spades.

People are learning, and though Ivy League institutions are big, established, and rich, the past half-century has seen many big, established, and rich institutions humbled.  If it happens to them too, it will be largely of their own doing.

Meanwhile, some advice from a famous Internet philosopher: