When, why and how colleges went wrong

Let's face it. College is not for all.

According to new data from American Compass’s “Failing on Purpose” survey of 2,000 young adults and parents, only one in eight young Americans aged 19 to 22 are enrolled in college more than one hour from home. By comparison, half are still living at home. Look further down the road, and only one in eight young Americans in their mid-to-late 20s have earned a degree, moved out of their parents’ house, and found work that they consider a “career” rather than “just a job.” One in four never went to college at all; one in four dropped out.

And it is serious time that colleges re-examine the meaning and role of "merit" in admissions (see Dershowitz, below), as it pertains to the likelihood of success in completing a meaningful four-year degree with a reasonable level of proficiency and within a reasonable period of time. And despite the problem of legacies, purchased admissions, "student athletes" and other flies in the admissions and merit ointment, significant, large-scale changes to the selection and education process are needed if American higher education is going to sustain itself as a leading global power, as it also sustains the United States as a leading global power -- for good.

Harvard Needs Merit-Based Admissions - WSJ.pdf

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Fifty years of direct engagement with higher education, from a reddish-blonde, fresh-faced first-year undergraduate having his campus close after the Kent State shootings, to a white-haired, not-so-fresh emeritus professor, means that I have seen a lot, learned a lot, written a lot, taught a lot (of material to thousands of students), and ave earned the right to comment on the trends of those fifty years. So this is going to be a politically incorrect rant on the primary problem of colleges today, and that is the abandonment of an academic meritocracy and educational mission in exchange for a misguided social engineering and social justice mission.

Four rites of passage, or passages of rights

One. I'll start with how I believe colleges were once right on target, fifty years ago. What were they doing right. Why it was right. When did it start to wobble?

The first stage of the when and why start with the closings after Kent State, when politics crashed college campuses and, as the pandemic has done in a much more dramatic fashion, curtailed the meaningful end to a semester and, for some, a four-year degree, with no real positive by-products of the protest. If anything, faculty and students should have increased their attention to their education, not agreed to let it slide. The Kent State and pandemic closings serve as de facto bookends to this process, but the ground work can be traced back to some of the structures, policies and traditions that grew out of the surge of males into higher ed on the GI bill after World War II. These war veterans moved into the ranks of the faculty and administration of American colleges in the 1960s, and their kids -- the Baby Boomers -- coming to campus had a very different view of the world.

Prior to Kent State, higher ed was experiencing a growth spurt in public colleges, headlined by expansion in California and New York. Still, a relatively small number of high school grads went on to college; there were plenty of well-paid blue-collar jobs in union factories to tempt grads straight into the labor force. Why postpone four years of earnings in exchange for four years of college expenses, even if those expenses were a fraction of today's costs, and one "could work their way through college," with part-time and summer employment to pay tuition, room and board.

Colleges grew to realize that they played a role in economic development yet they continued to reinforce the ideal "liberal arts" education over more STEM, vocational or professional (e.g., business, agriculture) undergraduate education. Corporations were happy to take well-educated, bright, ambitious liberal arts majors and train them to be business people, leveraging solid foundations in English, history, writing, languages, and the social sciences and humanities.

Colleges stuck primarily to the "basics," those faculty, department, curricula and majors that had been part of the institution for decades, if not centuries. Yet the Soviet launch of Sputnick underscored the need for for scientists and the endemic cold war fueled defense department budgets that funded massive research projects, most of which were based at "research" universities, rather than smaller, undergraduate-focused, liberal arts colleges.

To attend college did not require a clear sense of career or purpose. It was simply what "smart" people did, and it was a requirement for those who did have a longer term focus on fields such as medicine, law, dentistry, and accounting. The brightest of the bright would often forego a business career for a "career of the mind," going on to earn doctorates in their undergraduate academic fields, first as graduate students and later as the newly minted faculty needed to staff expanding colleges.

While there were some changes smoldering by 1960, colleges weren't really ready -- or willing to accept -- the changes that would be unleashed by profound social changes in the Sixties.

Two. Next, I'll show some of the things that caused at first slow change and, later, a very rapid change, in the direction and purpose of a college education. What started to take colleges off their true course?

Among those angry and often spoiled Boomers who came of age in very large numbers during the Sixties, many chose to pursue social activism, protests and even bombings as an extension of their college experiences. A lot of them went to graduate school in the soft social sciences or law. Politics were as much about protest as progress. These college graduates of the late Sixties and early Seventies were wholly unlike their fathers, who graduated -- if they went to college at all -- after serving in World War II. The Boomers enjoyed the economic boom of the Fifties and the rapid expansion of college opportunity that accelerated after the "greatest generation" had moved on to careers in industry.

In brief, once quiet, ivy-covered campuses became a cauldron of social change, both reflecting societal change and creating change form within those ivy-covered walls. An unavoidable fact of the college experience in the Sixties -- and generally true today -- is that college students had plenty of free time even amidst rigorous academic studies, and the proximity of thousands of fellow students, often in intensely close physical, social and sexual contact created an environment conducive to massive change.

What underscored this change were three driving forces: the "sex, drugs and rock and roll" youth culture, the proliferation of television as a medium of communication (often at the expense of print media), and radical civil rights, feminist and "lifestyle" (e.g., gay rights) movements.

The widespread availability of birth control pills, cheap and low intensity drugs and stimulants (e.g., alcohol, marijuana) and the influence of rock and roll with a "message" produced a sexual and social revolution that continues somewhat unabated to this day. [NOTE: The "speed bumps" on this change were laws restricting cigarette advertising and harsher penalties for driving while intoxicated.] Lee Iacocca's Ford Mustang produced a metaphor and a literal vehicle for this accelerating youth movement.

Students came to see themselves as the active owners of the university and the curriculum, rather than as raw material of the educational process. Students cut ties from their parents with privacy laws, sought out those parts of the university they deemed inappropriate to the university's mission and spoke out loudly against them, e.g., ROTC programs, defense research contracts, and paternalistic policies in their residence halls. The Vietnam war provided the primary focus of protests while also making it more important than ever to attend college, if only to earn a draft deferment.

In time, many of the faculty came to agree with their students. Even more supportive -- even if indirectly -- were college administrators who seemed too often eager to succumb to student demands.

And academic life on campus really started to erode. Most colleges wanted to grow, usually expressed as improving their capacity to serve their public mission when the reality was that it was as much for power and incomes for faculty and, especially, administrators. To grow enrollments meant enrolling more students who were less prepared if not unprepared for college. Remedial education and "dumbed down" majors, e.g., general studies, provided low-effort, low-performance paths for students unwilling or unable to take on the traditional demands of college academics. Colleges would recruit "all-star" faculty from other campuses to build their reputation (while also fueling significant salary increases for faculty).

By the end of the twentieth century, higher education had become one of the major components of the American economy. Along with healthcare and the "retirement" industry (serving tens of millions of aging Americans), this trio of sectors displaced the import of manufacturing and agriculture in terms of national employment and percent of GDP.

By 2000, it was widely accepted that a college degree was essential to a good life and a good income, making college less of a privilege based on merit and much more of a right and a necessity, regardless of academic proficiency or potential. Studies showing lifetime earnings gaps of a million dollars for college grads as compared to high school graduates (based on those who graduated forty years ago), provided status and power to universities, while disguising the rapidly evolving reduction in the earnings gap, especially when compared to the costs of the college credential and the significantly lesser value of humanities and social sciences degrees as compared to STEM and business majors.

By 2020, the dream of a better future for college graduates had become a nightmare for many, with outrageous college costs (including not just tuition, but also books, room board, and personal computers), high dropout rates, majors leading to poor earnings prospects or even unemployment, and to over $1.6 trillion in burdensome college debt. The college graduates of the twenty-first century were eager to listen to the wrongs that had been perpetrated upon them by a society less willing or able to fund the increasing array of entitlements demanded by entitled, demanding graduates. They had been led down a path to nowhere and while those graduates who had pursued marketable degrees with little or no debt prospered, the resultant burgeoning inequality across Millenenials only fueled the fire of social justice claims. Graduates did not like these unequal outcomes, so they demanded a new claim, replacing the "equal opportunity" of the civil rights movements with "equity."

Three. Here I'll describe the sorry state of "the college experience," including education and "equity," today. The shame of the Black Lives Matter and DIE movements, and the foolish virtue signaling of colleges to try to re-establish their meaningfulness in life...and why this has failed.

Where this has taken us today is to a place that the "greatest generation" would never recognize and that even the Boomers would have a hard time understanding just how fall the mighty American higher education industry had fallen, in the eyes of the world, of parents, of the public in general and of those from the professoriate who maintained an adherence to many of the traditions of academic merit, freedom of inquiry, freedom of speech, and the economic -- not just the personal maturation -- value of a college education.

Four. Finally, I will try to bring back a meaningful and productive focus, vision and mission for higher education today. What do colleges need to do get on track? Where do they need to be going? What do they need to revive? to discard? to add?

Macrotrends

The death of culture by a thousand cuts. No one person or party led this race to the bottom. Rather, it was matter of a thousand little trickles moving into small streams, then to rivers and then on to an ocean of storm politics. Let's just review a few of those streams.

The Clinton legacy of moral erosion in public office. At least Kennedy covered it up well. Bill was a bit more brazen, and he coarsened the nature of public office from the highest office in the country for the most powerful man in the world. He exemplified sexual harassment while representing quite the opposite public face.

The wealthy elite versus the uber wealthy. The top five percent versus the top 0.5%. After the inevitable geometric expansion of wealth and income inequality that accompanies any period of sustained economic growth, those who benefitted the most seemed the most upset while preening with self-righteous virtue signaling. These include university presidents, Hollywood, tv and professional athletics stars, mainstream media moguls, and self-appointed intelligentsia found bloviating on an ever expanding number of television channels. And it produces results such as Oberlin's $31 million dollar defamation penalty from their misguided, over the top, false claim of freedom of speech and the right to protest against a bakery.

Social media, internet porn, video games replace the all-night dorm "bull session." Social distancing during the pandemic was an easy transition for the Gen Z student, digitally yet unemotionally connected to peers and professors, far and wide. So what if education went out the window? Recorded Zoom lessons gave parents a chance to see the insanity in the mind of woke faculty, and the parents revolted, causing the US AG to term them "terrorists," only to be shamed into walking that back. Mental health went into the crapper along with mathematics and other meaningful measures of actually learning something of value and substance during the politically motivated pandemic policies. "Science" became weaponized as a political claim of authority. "Expert" became a meaningless term. Fauci claimed that, "I am science." Science, hypotheses and evidence went away, driven out by sophistry and political narratives.

Obama's divisive strategy. Foregoing a chance to unite the nation with his historic election, Obama chose to hammer home our diversity, differences and divisions rather than our common values. Freddy Gray and, later, George Floyd, came to crystallize the anger and resentment that Obama disguised as "social justice" or "equity."

The 80/20 rule looks more like a new 90/10 rule, or half of all gains are made by the square root of the number of parties in the industry, e.g. if there are 10,000 professional athletes, 100 of them will garner 50% of the industry income.

From campus recreational drugs to deadly street drugs, from hippie dealers to drug cartels. From marijuana, has his and Qualudes to meth, heroin and fentanyl. Drugs went from being a sideline to being an occupation, a profession, worsened with the increasing legalization of marijuana and various forms of gambling. Drugs became one of the top sectors of the Mexican economy.

Meanwhile, on campus, the liberal arts faculty, now staffed by many of those "Sixties radicals," found their fields falling out of favor in the public's and students' eyes, and rather than re-examine their own role in its demise, they doubled down with chest-thumping defenses of a worn-out model of education. The 'liberal' arts had become more 'liberal' and an art form than a liberating experience or a science.And administration became a major growth industry, especoallyn for 'education' majors and failed academics unable or unwilling to do the traditional work of the professoriate.

The social sciences became a disreputable collection of absurd "peer reviewed" journals, eager to publish the most outlandish rubbish and rhetoric, with no attention to data, evidence, inferential statistics or facts. Few could separate correlation from causation. Few of the articles were ever replicated. The peer system proved to be a social network of back scratchers, marginal thinkers, and cranks. When people like Paul Krugman, Howard Zinn and Noah Chomsky get media attention and real experts and insightful people like Thomas Sowell, Jordan Peterson, and Matt Ridley get ghosted, one has to wonder just how rotten hings have become in the state of Academia. "Publish AND perish" seems to be a more apt mantra. Despite efforts to defend their value and role, the humanities became harder to defend as a meaningful educational experience, at least not as practiced by defensive, "woke" and activist humanities faculty today.

By contrast, many humanities departments today indoctrinate students in identity politics, which points fingers at races and genders that are said to “oppress” and focuses on calling out, canceling, and tearing down. As Joshua Mitchell points out in American Awakening: Identity Politics and Other Afflictions of Our Time, identity politics is a modern form of the ancient practice of scapegoating. It separates humanity into the pure and the stained based on race and gender and promises that, somehow, purging the stained can make things right. Many college students come ready to dig down to the depths of the human soul to see what’s there, but instead, they’re told that what matters is on the surface: race and gender. "Is this what we're paying for?" they're asking.

Notre Dame political philosopher Patrick Deneen argues that a true education in the liberal arts is first and foremost not about pointing fingers but learning how to overcome one’s own weaknesses, malice, and addictions, which is hard work. The humanities provide countless models of thought, feeling, and behavior to compare and contrast and use as points of reference. Said Newman, “If then a practical end must be assigned to a university course, I say it is that of training good members of society.” If Newman was right, the humanities are less like parsley and more like the main course.

Somehow all of this can be traced back to the educational system, from Clinton's wasted Oxford scholarship after his Georgetown education apparently taught him noting about Jesuit values or Ignition traditions, to the invention of the internet on the UCLA campus, to the campus drug culture, to the arrogance of the uncritical thinking, brain dean liberal arts majors, and campuses now wife with massive financial aid discounts for 'diversity' and 'affordability.' And here too, financial aid in the form of loans became a focal point for Gen Z protests after they left campus, with major debt, a dead major, and a dead end job.

So what are we to do?

So what are we to do? Can this tide of social change be reversed or even stabilized, or are we condemned to a dystopian future, one like the world depicted in Albert Brooks' Twenty Thirty? Here is the Amazon preview:

June 12, 2030 started out like any other day in memory—and by then, memories were long. Since cancer had been cured fifteen years before, America’s population was aging rapidly. That sounds like good news, but consider this: millions of baby boomers, with a big natural predator picked off, were sucking dry benefits and resources that were never meant to hold them into their eighties and beyond. Young people around the country simmered with resentment toward “the olds” and anger at the treadmill they could never get off of just to maintain their parents’ entitlement programs.

Rational reality needs to be restored, with an understanding and appreciation of the true nature and history of America and the role of higher education in furthering the progress we have enjoyed for over two hundred years, a period of progress that almost coincided with the history of the United States and American higher education that produced the wealthiest, most productive, most diverse society in the history of the world. Prosperity, progress and, yes, social justice, rely upon both the rule of law and the level of education that permeates the society.

Restore mission, get back to basics, pursue science and enlightenment

The purpose of higher education is to....create and transfer knowledge and wisdom through the open pursuit of ideas, full stop. This requires students to come to college with a substantial body of knowledge and some rudimentary critical thinking skills to make the possibility of the benefits of a college education a reality.

The process starts with correcting serious deficiencies in the level and type of preparation for college that is endemic to our national system of primary and secondary education, both public and private.

Re-examine the need for a college degree as a measure of status and a requirement for "success" in careers and life, while providing additional, constructive outlets for high school graduates not well suited for in in need of a "college education."

Fix elementary and secondary educational curriculum, assessments, and standards. At a very minimum, prohibit remedial education from being any part of of college program of studies.

Expand and revise "standardized testing," namely the ACT, SAT and AP testing programs, with an eye to validity in predicting college success rather than dolor blindness in test results distributions. Make admissions meaningful.

Make colleges responsible for loan defaults of their graduates as well as their drop outs. Replace need-based loans and other forms of financial aid with fewer but more substantial academic merit-based scholarships, grants and awards.

Colleges need to put structures and policies in place that support academics and merit, while also demonstrating the value of the college education, in terms of the intellectual, career and life development of graduates of the college. This means accountability for colleges.

Establish clear learning objectives for any program and link those objectives to post-graduate markers of success in life. Enhancing one's "love of" or "respect for" higher learning is a necessary but insufficient outcome. Develop and use a more comprehensive assessment of one's college education than a transcribing listing letter grades for forty courses completed for a degree.

Assess rather than assume the development of significant critical thinking skills resulting from the college experience. Encourage free speech, the diversity of ideas, and data-based decision making over rhetoric.

Apply a harsh lens to the curriculum, majors and minors offered by the school, ensuring that they produce meaningful learning outcomes. Revise and/or discard as needed.

Do more long-term assessment of the the impact of teaching on a student's education, in place of the simplistic student satisfaction measures collected at the end of each course. Ask graduates three, ten or twenty years post graduation as to the sustainable impact of their teachers and their educational experience.

Develop practices to ensure that "research" faculty have the skills to teach -- if they are required to teach, while also ensuring that "teaching" faculty have the learning skills required to keep them abreast of their fields.

Ruthlessly price administrative systems, perhaps starting with a clean sheet and adding in only those administrative functions and levels needed to support the primary academic mission of the school. Outsource non mission critical activities to parties with expertise in delivering food, housing, and other ancillary activities for the college.

Restore sanity to college sports, perhaps by re-examining the "student athlete" model as well as the mechanisms for funding athletic scholarships and compensation for athletes and the athletic department. Put he "student" back in "student athlete" without a disingenuous nod and a wink to college athlete's education.

Put some teeth into trustees and legislatures rather than a simple demand fro more resources -- blank checks, so to speak -- from profligate administrations. Make college presidents prove that their educational exepericene adds value, to the students AND to the society that needs them to make a contribution to economic and civic life.

These ideas and this understanding stem from years of living and studying the nature of college in America today, well beyond -- but greatly informed by -- my own experience serving public and private universities, large and small, local and global, research and teaching, faith-based and secular. About fifteen years ago, Hank Hilton -- at the time a Jesuit and now a parish pastor -- wrote on "faith and reason" as the basis of Loyola Sellinger trying to reconcile its pursuit of knowledge while embedded in faith. This started my formal study of the history and evolution of higher ed in America, with a focus on business schools, especially but not limited to, Jesuit business schools.

Some of my final research produced the following studies as to the critical role and the need for the broad -- not just environmental -- sustainability of Jesuit business schools. Below find three such studies.

Liberating art of Jesuit business education 2016.doc

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IAJBS Sustainable Jesuit education 17 April 2018 copy.docx

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IAJBS Sustainable model 2018R.pptx

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