The Coming College Crackup

Ponder this datum, recently shared by Victor Davis Hanson:

Stanford recently enrolled 16,937 undergraduate and graduate students, but lists 15,750 administrative staff.

Administrative staff.

Not professors. Bureaucrats, bean-counters, middle-managers, make-work types... and oodles of DEI apparatchiks, of course.

Meanwhile, companies are increasingly realizing that prospective employees need not have college degrees. That a demonstration of skills relevant to the job can, in more and more cases, suffice.

When only about a quarter of people end up using their degrees in their jobs, the question of whether a degree is worth the time, money, and effort is a fair one to ask. It’s not a triviality to forego four years of job or career and spend as much as a couple hundred thousand dollars.

People are asking. College enrollment has been trending downward for over a decade, a trend I expect to accelerate as universities continue their collectivist suicide.

Tuition growth has been significantly outpacing inflation for the past couple decades (at least), and the government's easy-money recklessness will continue to fuel that growth. Until, that is, students simply stop going. Without the students, the universities would lose their pipeline to student loan dollars. Some will cry for bailouts, and they may get them, but barring fundamental change, that aid will be bandaids on an arterial laceration.

Many consider a college degree mostly as proof of maturity, as a demonstration that a person can honor a commitment to a job. But, with grade inflation, social promotion, and garbage degrees proliferating, does the degree still convey that same message?

In 1960, only about 8% of Americans had college degrees. Today, over 37%. We might be tempted to correlate the growth in per-capita wealth with this increase, but again, I go back to both the minority of grads who actually use their degrees, the proliferation of degrees that seem little more than navel-gazing, and the sense that a very big chunk of America's college students are there to have fun and delay adulthood rather than enhance their life prospects. As to that last bit, the government has been fond of telling us, for a long time, that the average college grad earns more than non-grads. Problem is, this stat is massively skewed by the professional segments. When you remove doctors, lawyers, engineers, and others in academically rigorous fields/professions from the mix, that advantage withers, and the cost and time devoted to a "studies" degree can the young college grad well behind those who, for example, went down the trades path.

Is there a "correct" college grad fraction? That's not for you or me to decide... or at least it shouldn't be. Absent distortions, that'd be sorted out by market forces.

Problem is, the distortions abound. Government has been working for decades to increase college participation levels. Academia, drawn by the siren song of free money, has increasingly produced the outcome we see today: junk degrees, inflated GPAs, "scholarship" that fails the repeatability test, dumbing down of curricula, admissions based on identity markers rather than merit, and so forth.

I'm reminded of the government's disastrous effort to increase home ownership rates. Through its Community Reinvestment Act and its GSEs (Fannie Mae, et al) offloading lenders' risk onto taxpayers, the government managed to get home ownership up from 64% to 69%. Then, of course, as we all know, the bubble burst. Today, it's down to 65%, which suggests that natural outcomes aren’t as easily bent as big government types wish.

Of related interest is the observation, by emeritus history professor Russell Jacoby, that universities' rapid expansion which ended in the 90s spilled a great big pile of PhDs in useless subjects onto Main Street. In doing so, the cultural lunacy that used to remain inside those ivy-covered walls infected the broader culture, and came to dominate modern politics.

Stock markets are deemed to be in "correction" when they decline more than 10% but less than 20%. By that metric undergraduate enrollment, down 12% from its 2010 peak, is in correction territory. I expect it to drop into a full-blown bear market in the next few years, and we may very well never see that peak level of college enrollment again, at least in my lifetime.

Economic recessions serve a useful "housecleaning" purpose. When pressure to contract happens, employers have an easier time culling the dead wood (and those who don't will suffer most, and may even fail). An educational recession may, we can hope, serve a similar purpose. The administrative bloat, the useless departments and degree programs, and the slacker professors may be pruned back or lopped off entirely under the financial pressure of decreased enrollment and diminished interest. Ditto for the DEI and other woke mandates that detract from real education.

That dead wood won't go quietly, unfortunately. Much of the political power in academia rests in its hands.

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An afterthought (been having a lot of these lately). When I first entered the world of defense contracting, I was informed during part of my security clearance process that fully 50% of Soviet military technology was stolen from the US. Such a stat is not easily found re the Chinese today, but one report bounds the cost of Chinese IP theft at $225-600B per year. PER YEAR!

There's an old joke that goes, "there are nations that use the Metric system, and there are nations that put men on the moon." The Soviet Union had a larger population than America. China has 4x America's population. Both claim(ed) that their centralized economies and top-down planning produce better outcomes than America's filthy capitalism, individual liberty, and haphazard everything, yet they need(ed) to steal American ideas, inventions, innovation, and prowess to keep up. If they're so great, why do they need to cheat off us? Why don’t(didn’t) their systems produce the innovations ours does(did)?

The regression in academic excellence in recent years, in the name of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, and the infusion of cultural relativism into mathematics and the hard sciences will, I fear, dull our edge and erode the competitive advantage we hold over our geopolitical foes. While I welcome a washing out of universities, there is a big risk that the baby gets thrown out with that woke-muddy bathwater.

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Peter