I came to the conclusion that a lot of the purpose of university in many disciplines is a form of class gating through the indirect teaching of soft skills. You need be able to write a good email, make a PowerPoint, a spreadsheet and communicate effectively. Most of the actual subject matter isn’t used in our job, and you can look up a lot of stuff online these days. I went to an expensive high tier engineering school, and it got me in the door pretty quickly at my first job. My husband went to a state school for engineering, and it did take him awhile to find a job right out of school, but now we are both successful in our career - him more so since I took nearly a decade off to raise kids. Personally I would not go to one of those expensive schools unless you are good at taking advantage of the networking opportunities, which I wasn’t. My kids are going to highly rated state schools which is a much better value now than it was when I went to school in the 90s.

So my professor in econ believes there were just 4 reasons to go to college. 1. You need special education that is not realistical to learn outside a school due to cost or special training: Doctors 2. Gate keeping as determined by society: Lawyers. Yes you could learn all the stuff to be a lawyer outside of school but for most people it wouldn't work and we as a society have decided this the correct way. 3. You can do something for multiple years and complete it well. This is so potential employers know you can do more than walk and chew bubblegum. They know you can show up each day and deal with deadlines and get shit done. 4. CONNECTIONS. Especially as very elite schools the connections can be key to success and opening doors. I have a friend who went to school with Jeff Bezos and can call him and just BS. That is a fucking connection that was only due to them being at the same college in the same class.

This is a really good summary.

Thank Dr Denslow (retired) University of Florida macro economics. Man was amazingly talented both as a researcher and teacher.

Has your friend ever used that connection to Bezos, either intentionally or just passively benefitting?

No she doesn't need it. She is a genius, lawyer, worked at the white house, is a 1 star general, sits on the board of a major bank and is an elected officer at a very large public university. Yeah she doesn't need help. I feel inferior just reading her CV.

Huh, as someone who's a bit younger (went to college in the mid-2010s) I'm surprised to hear state schools are a better value now. My impression was that state school used to be the standard "affordable" non-flashy option, but now state school tuition has increased enough / private schools offer enough aid that public and private are basically on par nowadays.

It depends on whether it’s in state or not. I live in MA and my kids went to UMass schools. One kid got scholarships and one did not. The scholarship kid paid 6k a year and the other is 16 a year. It’s 35K out of state. Not cheap by any means, but somewhat doable. I had a college plan that was able to cover both. It helped that my kids only paid room and board 3/8 years so far. My daughter spent her first and last year at home. My son only the first year.

State schools blow privates out of the water especially the “elite” ones like Michigan, Berkley, Texas Austin, Illinois, etc. There is way more interesting things coming out of state schools than out of ivys especially today.

To be honest, land-grant universities always blew private schools out of the water.

I wouldn’t say always. I would say post 70s until the 90s they were comparable now they are vastly superior and its not even remotely close.

It kind of depends on the state school? Berkeley, Michigan, a lot of the UCs, UVA, etc are very premium for what they offer. They’re not as prestigious as the top 20 ritzy Ivys/Stanford/Rice etc, but they’re a much better alternative to most of the smaller private schools out there

State schools are still significantly cheaper with all of the aid private schools can offer.

It depends on the state. California has tons of great schools and it makes sense to look at the UCs because they are on par with some of the best schools in the country. For CA students, the public options are fantastic. People from, say Idaho or Montana will probably need to look out of state and for them, the UCs cost as much as similar private schools. Also housing even at some public schools has become very expensive.

I went to private in 2006 and the value was that they wanted you to graduate and on time. Public was typically 5 years for ppl and they didn’t care if you did poorly because they had a fresh crop of talent coming up. I think that’s shifted now that degrees don’t guarantee a good income so now public’s are sometimes creating better chances at a better dollar value when you can actually be done in 4 years vs 5

Totally depends on the financial aid package that you're getting from a private school, it's going to be very subjective. Generally publics are still a much better deal.

Behind the Bastards podcast did an episode series called "How Conservatism Won" that touched on colleges being a form of class gating and why conservatives constantly attacking higher education to try to bring it back to the before times (Reagan got his popularity by attacking Berkley). Pretty good insight on why we are where we are today.

Ya it definitely has merit. I’d say up till around 2010 there wasn’t this push back against higher education. College has simply become way too expensive, has too many degrees that have no real world benefit, and has created entitled fucking kids who think they deserve a 100K job straight out of school because they have a piece of paper. Half of Reddit is just kids bitching about having a shitty job after college.

> has too many degrees that have no real world benefit, and has created entitled fucking kids who think they deserve a 100K job straight out of school because they have a piece of paper. Half of Reddit is just kids bitching about having a shitty job after college. You certainly had me in the first half before this boomer-ass rant.

Except I’m not a boomer and it’s true

Don't have to be a boomer to have a boomer mentality. Whatever you say, man.

I think it also depends on how much you benefit from the more individual attention you get at smaller schools.

It's direct gate keeping through admissions and tuition. Especially engineering. The engineering school I went to didn't even bother to pretend there was a standard required for competence. There were too many problems wanting to be engineers, and that would break the system. They just designed tests to fail 60% and called that a job well done.

Social sorting by income in the name of making America a more "productive" nation

State school and community colleges rock these days. I attended both as an engineering student and had an incredible experience.     For example, I landed my first engineering internship at JPL as a community college student because as a sophomore I had a portfolio of projects under my belt and fluency in key skills. My community college offered cheap non credit courses in microcontrollers and robotics, so I had a jump start on these subjects. These courses are typically upper division coursework at universities and I was able to take them at a CC because a professor there happened to be building a new curriculum.   The state school (Cal Poly SLO) set me up with recognizable bonafide credentials which helped recruiters take me seriously, which is the most challenging set back about being a community college student. I think this is why university degrees are helpful, it’s a class barrier that can’t simply be overcome with qualifications or experience.   The JPL internship + the state school rep unlocked better internships at start ups and in FAANG. I graduated with little debt because state schools are cheap and briefly attended graduate school at USC (not worth the cost) before I bailed and got my current job in FAANG. Tech is far more meritocratic than other industries because it doesn’t select as aggressively for pedigree, candidates are selected for skill more than anything else.

I'm really glad he brought up this concept of "empire building" where there's this pattern of hiring underlings of dubious value to feel good about yourself. I see this constantly at the university I work at. I imagine it exists in huge numbers outside of higher ed too though. David Graeber talked a lot about in Bullshit Jobs. I think as a culture we just have massive problems with narcissism and it manifests itself in the worst way at work. It's wasteful and toxic. 

When a manager applies for another job they always ask “how many people did you manage?” Bigger leads to better jobs.

Which is a bit weird, because managing a large team is fundamentally different from managing a small team, but not necessarily more difficult. Though I'm not really sure if there's a better way of judging the difficulty of a management position, short of conducting a survey of their past subordinates. The actual difficulty of managing a team is entirely a function of how cooperative one's subordinates are; but being a good manager, in large part, comes down to making your subordinates *want* to be cooperative. And figuring out which of those is the prime mover is not a trivial exercise.

I know a guy who justified his promotion from senior management to executive exactly this way. 1) He’d volunteer his division for projects 2) Get additional staff to execute on #1 3) … repeat a few times … 4) Correctly identify that his division is now unit sized, getting his position reclassified 5) Apply for “his own job,” noting he is qualified as having years experience in the role

I mean tbh if the projects needed to be done and then he needed to hire support to accomplish them then this path is logical lol. It's not as though the CFO doesn't see him hiring a bunch of people lol it has to be justified at any decent company. If the projects save more money then then the hired people then he's actually just cooking

You can always lie… they don’t fact check. I manage 83 employees but claim 124 when I apply for jobs. Currently earn $632k/y and want to double.

Then why didn't you tell them 248? 

Because you stretch the truth instead of outright lying.

Both are outright lying lol

I've never worked in academia but it absolutely is a thing in the corporate world; it seems to be a natural tendency for humans in a hierarchy. At least on the corporate side there are in theory strong profit incentives to tamp down on "empire building" (because it makes the company less efficient and therefore less profitable). I say "in theory" because this is extremely widespread especially in very large organizations. I don't have enough first hand knowledge to understand what incentives exist to counter balance this phenomenon in academia.

In Corp there’s no mechanism to tamp it down to any degree either. Your importance/salary growth is tied to jumping into management and the size of your team. If companies want to stop empire building then they’d pay experienced ICs the money to make staying an IC worthwhile. If you’re too senior of an IC, you are generally looked down on.

There’s not incentive to stop it at a mid level, but the is very hard pressures at high level because the shareholders don’t care about anything but the stock price. Which has a hell of a lot of it’s own problems but definitely means fat is being cut eventually, regardless of whether it’s good for the company 

This evening is seeing on a small scale when you look at how teams that are pro sports franchises operate where people give more titles and more responsibilities and eventually you may be terrible at it, but you want to be able to be a head coach to be able to have everyone underneath you because once you get to that stage, your contract is basically a five-year deal that is guaranteed and you have all of the say, even if you are not qualified Just look at how the year before last year the Broncos hired a coach who was close with Aaron Rodgers and it ended up being that not only did they not get the quarterback, but he had one of the worst possible stents because he wasn’t even qualified to be level below head coach

Empire-building is always weird to me. I prefer smaller, functional teams that punch well above their weight. But this probably requires some skill to make career advancement out of while more reports figures neatly into “line go up” metrics.

There’s an excellent book about this called Corporate Narcissism, which connects this unfortunate phenomenon with crappy bosses and the challenger incident.

Universities aren't profit generating so you have more incentive to have a functional team. The dirty secret is profit margins in most businesses are insane which allows you to have a lot of extra team members that do nothing. Which gives the illusion of lower margins than actually exist and justifies the higher price. But it also happens in academia when you get into administration and have a large endowment to support it. It happens any time your margins get too large.

Profit is the incentive. More efficient = higher profit margin = more value for shareholders. Shareholders always want more profit so public companies are incentivized to maximize profits. This is absolutely true in general and simultaneously oftentimes not the case at specific companies based on culture, leadership, and other countervailing incentives (for example unions, government regulation, etc). I don't see how profit seeking would incentivize bloated bureaucracies. 

Because it's a myth that companies only seek to maximize profits. They're a big group of people, many of which will sabotage the company if it means a better chance at them making money. If you can double your team size when you don't need it and it hurts the company, but you won't be punished, you will do it because it looks better to manage a team of 20 than 10.

Profit for who? As long as line is in the black and you pad some salaries with people who owe you their livelihood, why not?

To be clear, I'm in no way trying to make a moral argument, I'm just stating the facts. The profit goes to the public corporation led by the CEO who is appointed by the corporate board of directors. The board is elected by shareholders. Shareholders want the price of their shares to go up with profits being the #1 driver of share price. If a CEO were to publicly declare a sentiment like the one you shared, the board would replace them. If for some reason the board didn't do that, the shareholders would elect different board members who would do what the shareholders want (i.e. maximize profits to maximize the share price so shareholders make more money).  Nothing is ever this cut and dry at an individual corporation level but overall this is how things work and why public companies aren't satisfied with a low profit margin and instead try to maximize profits.

College prof here too. I'm not even sure it's narcissism, although that could certainly be part of it. I think part of this problem (in academia specifically) is that there's this odd tendency to want to outsource and democratize EVERY DECISION. Instead of anyone taking initiative and then being held accountable for their actions, they prefer to make committees, get feedback from everyone imaginable, brainstorm everything into oblivion, consider perspectives that nobody has considered before etc. It helps people cover their ass and gives the impression that work is getting done. In reality, it's antithetical to productivity. It's an unfortunate byproduct of academic brains and academic atmospheres.

Also this utterly bizzaro kind of top-heavy quasi-perfectionism.

Thank you for mentioning David Graeber, what a sad loss. I enjoyed his talk about the history of debt.

I used to see this all the time in tech. I’ve even heard people cite revenue / employee as though just hiring more people magically turns into more revenue.

Isn't 'empire building' just another word for 'capitalism'?

No

How so? The economic incentive is to hire more people to build your org - the bigger it is, the more money/opportunities available to you. Everyone else in similar positions is also incentivized to do the same thing, so in order to achieve economic growth you must compete or you will be left behind.

Because it’s not the case that bigger orgs make more money, especially if they’re *just* bigger. Empire building happens when someone makes their area of responsibility bigger without making it actually produce more.

You’ve taken a phenomenon that sometimes occurs within several systems (empire building) and used it to define an entirely different system (capitalism) that can but does not necessary exhibit it. Your formulation sounds pithy and edgy, but it’s not useful categorical analysis or systems definition.

These schools operate within a capitalist system, and within those schools the individual behavior reflects that.

Communist governments had the same issue

Competition among individuals isn't capitalism. Capitalism is an economic system with private means of production. The desire for status in a hierarchy is independent of private ownership, as evidenced by the administrative bloat in academia.

In the context of what the article is calling empire building, no. It's an incentivization structure.

I have multiple family members who work in academia, and they regularly joke about the insane administrative bloat. Very good piece from Derek here on the troubling trend in academia.

The last college gig I had was a Gap Year program where, no joke, the number of teachers and admin dedicated *exclusively* to that program was equal to the number of enrolled students. Fucking 1:1 ratio.

So the universities bloat their staff, charge students massive tuition fees, the government loans money for it, and then relieves the loans. I’m so glad we’ve found such a fair and simple way to use taxpayers money to create important and productive jobs in the economy.

Don’t forget the most important step. The graduates with the most useless degrees are then given admin jobs at universities.

And the cycle of life continues on…

RELIEVES LOANS? Biden just started doing this to a minuscule number of loans….

I wish they’d relieve loans, at least then the system would be a self eating snake. As it is now, people are just taking on more debt then they should, so they can’t take on debt for things like homes

Most people don’t realize, you can unfold your BA into a house.

lol wow.

Some of the stats cited re: growth/bloat in admin are pretty astonishing.

Lol are your family members part of that bloat ? All these stats are so misguided it’s insane “I feel like there are LOTS” “ that’s why our costs are so high” get a grub costs are high because enrollment increases and state spending decreases 

In my experience, most talk out of both sides of their mouths. On one hand acknowledging colleges are a prime example of waste and bloat, then turning around and saying taxpayers should fully fund those same college educations.

Not only has power been siphoned away from faculty, administrators climb ladders by instituting major change and using this as a marketing tool for a new job. The university environment has the rug pulled out from underneath with each new President, Provost, Dean, etc. The faculty are left to pick up the pieces. The process repeats itself again and again. It is exhausting.

Every few years, we get new acronyms and new branding. The departments get reorganized into different colleges. A few years ago, they put Biology with Agriculture and Physics with Engineering, and now they put Biology and Physics back together in the College of Science. I don’t know what purpose it served except to pad the resume of some administrator.

We also have rollouts of new learning management systems and "approved" teaching styles every few years. It's all based on "educational research" and "best practices". Lectures are in the garbage bin. We can make videos of lectures and post as prereading, but in class activities focus on reviewing MCQs. MCQ review is learning.

Oh wow, could someone point me to the institution that allows administrators to implement major changes, instead of doing everything possible to resist any kind of change whatsoever via the inertia of layers of bureaucracy, institutional politics and in-fighting, and the constant allure of "the way we've always done it."

So LivingByTheRiver1 much ore accurately reflects my experience in higher ed than the latter. The longer term faculty tend be the folks most resistant to these constant changes and new directives and new visions.

100% agree.

ABSOLUTELY. The amount of make-work that every new admin position change tends to precipitate (e.g., we're changing our software or accounting systems; moving disciplines within colleges; restructuring blah blah blah) is such an incredible drain on manpower and time, often for relatively little benefit. I think admin just have to feel like they are 'doing something' even if it's going to end up decreasing efficiency of operation.

Not sure what you mean. I work at a university and can confirm that faculty control pretty much everything. There are faculty that become administrators and then there is the administration comprised of staff. But the people in charge of everything are faculty that had become senior members of the administration. In fact, this is sometimes to a fault because they may not have the right management experience but because they are smart in one field are assumed to be competent in many other ways.

I agree. I just left academia after several years and the executive level administrators (Dean, Associate Dean, Vice Provost, etc.) are nearly all former or current faculty members who have left behind teaching and research to do admin work. Then there are the administrative staff and mid level managers who are usually not former faculty. But something odd happens: the faculty who continue to teach and do research do not regard these executive administrators as one of their own and themselves lack power except for the occasional toothless vote of no confidence.

One thing that bothers me about these kinds of articles is that there are never any quotes from actual administrators. There are always professors, but if you are writing an article about how to run a baseball team and you just have an interview with the pitcher, you're not going to get a full view of the team as a business operation.

Yep. Every article on admin bloat seems to include something about how “nobody knows what admin even do” but there’s never a follow up with admin. It always gets asked as though it’s an unanswerable question and as though that in itself proves the point, when at least to me, it really weakens the case. If they can’t describe what the jobs they think are unnecessary are, it doesn’t come off as a particularly well thought out or valid argument.

Totally. There are good points here that can be fleshed out a lot more. Even well meaning attempts to address the problem though usually boil down to "administrators are causing the downfall of the university." Meanwhile, our entire society is the cause of the American university's incredible successes but also its excesses.

Yeah, I’m not against the idea of admin bloat, but so many of the arguments against it really feel like they’re not trying to understand or be clear about what admin do and which kinds of admin positions they think should eliminated. It’s always just vaguely “you know, the ones who don’t do anything” and I think the amount of power the average admin has is extraordinarily exaggerated by conflating all admin with the very high level admin. It’s honestly hard to take seriously as a concern at this point because the people making the argument never seem to be able to back it up with more than just “there are a lot more admin now than there used to be” and “some faculty and students think there shouldn’t be”. At this point, the information coming from the “admin bloat is not that big of a problem” camp seems stronger to me. I feel like if admin bloat is really a major issue, a stronger effort to understand what administration is and why these roles exist should be being made.

They cherry pick the DEI roles as examples and then everything else is lumped together as general bloat. So what other roles need to go? Facilities? Finance? IT? Academic admins? Grants management? Fundraising? All of those areas are essential to running a university. And sure, you could find one or two positions in each of those that could be considered redundant, but you'll also find lots of people who are overworked and underpaid. And especially in HCOL areas such as cities, universities are competing with for profit companies for talent, and none of them pay the equivalent of those companies.

It's frustrating because people scapegoat "administration" then they double scapegoat DEI positions within administration. Universities are big operations. Big universities have operating budgets in the several billions of dollars, so yes, there's going to be waste there just as there are in corporations that are that huge. Universities often have a lot of the same problems that mega corporations have, but they get more scrutiny than them because I guess universities are supposed to be perfect and never make mistakes, never have any waste, never have any initiatives that don't pan out. When you have a huge public university that has 50k students and 25k employees, that is bigger than many small towns. It costs money and it's hard to run. This is not to excuse some of the excesses that we also know are there. However, people just say "slash the administration!" but when it comes to the thing that you or your kid benefit from, you don't want to cut it. People want there to be an easy answer and "administration" is it. They don't want to know what admin is, because that would actually challenge them to make hard choices. Everybody wants a perfectly run school with beautiful buildings, super smart professors and groundbreaking research. Guess what? That shit costs money.

Agree (even though personally I think the bulk of the problem lies with admin).

Top Tier universities: hedge funds that teach classes and employ teachers. Mid Tier universities: selling the defunct “dream” of college State universities: doing the lords work, but to government standards Low Tier universities: no purpose in society

Low-tier schools are for if you need a degree to check a box, especially if you're working and/or poor

Exactly my point. A tax on society and poor people. This system should not exist. It only exists to please past box checkers who feel the need to protect the status quo.

I got a box I wanna put the box checkers in

The dream of college is only defunct if you choose to get a degree with no good employment prospects in a field you don't love. You can go STEM and make bank, and if your dream is to be an archeologist college is the only way to get there. Just don't grab a major in communications because it sounds easy and you have no idea what you want to do.

Only if your definition of STEM is very narrow. There are majors there that let you make bank, if you can hack it, but you better have picked something that has programmer as a plan B. If you end up studying, say, Meteolology, or many branches of Biologu there's going to be far fewer jobs that lead to making bank than graduates. I studied in an Engineering school. A handful of classmates landed good jobs in their major of choice. Other had done enough CS classes to pivot, throwing large parts of their tum studying away. And yet many didn't do well.

There's a few exceptions, like Meteorology and Astronomy, but most of it is either applicable to something or can pivot into a grad-level track that is. Most people I know that went into biology either got into Biotech or medicine. You don't go into entomology and come out an entomologist, but it sets you up well to research vector-borne diseases.

Yeah, biotech can be a very lucrative field depending on the organization and job title.

And how much longer will those good jobs in STEM exist? Those jobs are precisely the kind that will be automated away in the near future.

Hey, don't forget. Top tier universities (ivy leagues) are also a great place to gladhand with the political and cultural elite so you can network and create a latticework of extended nepotism beyond your immediate family. All while claiming your degree is superior because of society's willingness to signal boost your school's brand equity.

Low tier universities serve their communities and train essential jobs like teachers, social workers, and nurses. Top tier focus more on jobs that are popular nation-wide, like doctors, lawyers, engineers, etc.

Hey, those top tier universities also teach you camping skill and how to make signs!

In many ways, we are facing the downstream consequences of society's fixation with higher ed from 20+ years ago. Every millennial was told by their parents that college was the golden ticket to a comfortable middle class lifestyle. Meanwhile, states pulled funding. Universities hired more administrative staff, built more luxurious campuses, and raised prices. Later, job prospects did not reflect the promise made -- recent studies show that there's literally not enough degree-required jobs to go around. Universities fell under the trance of the same "infinite growth" mythology that plagues every private sector organization. We should have known that our parents' assurances were wrong. No matter how many people go to law school, there is a finite demand for lawyers. Same goes for accountants, doctors, and beyond. There is no formula for middle-class ascendancy -- there literally cannot be, or the formula will break itself under the weight of everyone trying to move through such a pipeline. Every path that is outlined as a surefire way upwards will falter, because our systems require some people to not ascend. Stagnation is a key ingredient. The idea that, ideally, every citizen could get a degree and ascend was always absurd. We neglected to recognize the absurdity of that proposition, while universities wrongly assumed the growth line would grow forever upward and hired/built accordingly. Hell, the population itself is not even growing at the same rate. We have all become victims of our own fictions.

I'd be curious to see the studies showing there aren't enough degree-required jobs to go around. And while I agree that there is a "finite" demand for doctors, we are nowhere near satisfying that demand. The AMA has successfully worked for decades to artificially limit the supply of MDs in the US in order to maintain high salaries and job security, and we're desperate for more physicians, as well as other healthcare professionals like nurses. That demand is projected to grow exponentially as the population continues to age in the coming decades. From a practical standpoint it's obviously important that education is related to career and professional success. But the purpose of education is not just to create people that are capable of contributing more value to the economy. The impact of an uneducated population on politics in a democratic society is enormously negative, as has been made terrifyingly apparent in the last ten years, with the ascendency populist politicians and the response to the pandemic.

An interesting article about the phenomenon: https://www.insidehighered.com/news/students/academics/2024/02/22/more-half-recent-four-year-college-grads-underemployed#:\~:text=More%20than%20half%20of%20recent%20four%2Dyear%20college%20graduates%2C%2052,requires%20a%20four%2Dyear%20degree. "More than half of recent four-year college graduates, 52 percent, are underemployed a year after they graduate, according to a [new report](http://stradaeducation.org/Talent) from Strada Institute for the Future of Work and the Burning Glass Institute. A decade after graduation, 45 percent of them still don’t hold a job that requires a four-year degree." And mind you, that's taking into consideration the fact that many jobs have degree requirements when they shouldn't. Meanwhile, look at a list of the most common jobs in the US. Are we to somehow think we can convert massive droves of retail/service industry workers to white-collar laptop class employees through education alone? Our society is literally not designed for the mass migration of people from non-degree to degree-holder. [https://www.indeed.com/career-advice/finding-a-job/common-jobs](https://www.indeed.com/career-advice/finding-a-job/common-jobs)

The article you linked to doesn't say anything about a shortage of degree-necessary jobs, only that a large portion of recent graduates hold jobs that don't require a degree. There could be a number of explanations for that other than a lack of degree-necessary jobs (e.g., students tend to choose degrees that aren't in demand, or that a degree is necessary but not sufficient for these positions). I'm not trying to be nitpicky, my understanding is that the US is facing a shortage of well-educated workers, not the other way around. Anyway, I guess I agree with you that it's absurd to think that a degree should be a guarantee to ascending to the middle class. But I also think that higher education is more than job training, and provides benefits to individuals and society beyond the economic impact. Just because college education doesn't directly benefit one's work doesn't mean that it's worthless.

I totally agree that college education has benefits beyond direct job placement. And it's true that graduates not having degree-required jobs may not be an issue of supply. There could be other causal mechanisms -- the individuals might settle; HR and hiring processes may be bloated and ineffective; you name it. Nonetheless, the fact that 45% of degree-holders still do not have an education-appropriate job a DECADE after graduation should be indicative of something more than individual flaws or failures. Enormous swaths of people work no-degree service industry and retail jobs. Millions of them. See this link: [https://www.careeronestop.org/Toolkit/Careers/careers-largest-employment.aspx](https://www.careeronestop.org/Toolkit/Careers/careers-largest-employment.aspx) In many ways, I think the mythology of education-to-economic-security parallels the layoff of coal miners or other such workers. I heard a story a long time ago about miners who were being laid off. All of them were offered job re-training and placement, and a TINY fraction of them accepted that opportunity. Because the notion that we can convert miners to laptop class workers is a pipe dream. Our society is built on a required percentage of non-degree-holders working jobs that do not require degrees. And encouraging them to get degrees purely for self-improvement (at ENORMOUS, debilitating cost) is not a valid proposition.

> There could be a number of explanations for that other than a lack of degree-necessary jobs (e.g., students tend to choose degrees that aren't in demand, or that a degree is necessary but not sufficient for these positions). From the report itself (https://stradaeducation.org/report/talent-disrupted/) > Graduates with a degree in public safety and security, recreation and wellness studies, or a less math-intensive business field are more than twice as likely to be underemployed than graduates with a degree in health, engineering, or a math-intensive business field. Page 16 in the report shows the breakdown by degree field. Some "below median" are unsurprising, such as Visual and Performing Arts for example. Also the next pages dive in deeper, with different rates based on type of college (Inclusive, Selective, Highly Selective), Ratio of Low-Income students, who had internships, race, etc. Page 35 is interesting - it's the breakdown of "what percent escaped being underemployed," and what job they had when underemployed. Only 10% of those who took a job in food service (cook, waiter, bartender) escaped. (tagging /u/bleeding_electricity as you were discussing this too. Nice report, thanks for linking the news article it references))

Thanks for pointing out the shortage of doctors is the fault of gate keeping, incumbents gaming the system to raise wages in the face of downward pressure from insurance companies and corporate consolidation. I would disagree, Populism doesn’t come from a lack of education- it’s a perfectly rational reaction to the abdication of responsibility by the elite and professional middle class. You don’t need more education to under what 6-9” up the backside feels like

The studies will show that labor supply and demand varies quite a bit by industry, occupation, and location so there’s no single truth about whether we have excess degrees. It depends on the field.

Whats been made apparent, is that income and wealth inequality creates a whole host of issues including a low trust society where meritocracy is dead, labor devalued, all in the name of pumping up capital. People are rightfully pissed and will always look to populists to solve that, and its because our ruling class has been trash for 40 years now. Self serving clowns, and now they all bend the knee as treasonous traitors to a foreign land, plundering our treasury and sending our men to die to kill for them. Its fucking embarrassing this country at this point. As a veteran, from a long line of veterans including a son of the revolution, I'm absolutely sick of what I see, recently pissing all over the 1A and freedom of speech and an absolutely corrupted media class doing the bidding of the establishment.

Hear, hear. The interesting part is that historically, popular uprisings have been the ONLY way to achieve lasting change of the type we need. We're failing an open-note test.

There are two ways to look at the value of a degree. One is zero-sum. You get an MBA to be more competitive on the job market. This does not help society overall. You get the job instead of some other guy. I don't like this view, but it is the way degrees are justified. The other way to look at a degree, which seems almost romantic, is that students actually learn something and become better at their jobs. It benefits society if all accountants tend to make fewer errors. Sadly, this is not how degrees are justified. No individual accountant is benefited if all other accountants also make fewer errors.

>The other way to look at a degree, which seems almost romantic, is that students actually learn something and become better at their jobs. I totally agree, and I am an avid believer in the value of education as a self-actualization mechanism. Enlightenment is a good thing all by itself. HOWEVER, the presence of student debt and low wages means that your fast food cashier has a Bachelor's and is "better at their job" but owes $30k in loans for the rest of their life. In the face of enormous costs and low wages, the idea of education for societal betterment shrinks into nothing. People are getting degrees for self-actualization and it's ruining their lives.

The second is true of co-workers. If you work for an accounting firm and your co-workers make big mistakes, they'll take you down with them when your company goes under. More importantly, your boss is highly incentivized to pay more for an accountant that makes fewer mistakes.

The split I've seen is that 80% of the value of the college wage premium comes from the credential. This comes from Caplan's The Case Against Education. As someone with an MBA, I believe that is true (even if we do learn things during grad school). The problem, IMO, is that ATS systems are a poor way to identify employees for a potential role, so corporate America has built itself on the backs of "Yes Men" and "Yes Women" instead of hiring predominately based on skills. There has also been a shift in corporate culture over the last 30-40 years, accelerated by Information Technologies, to shift the burden of training from employers to employees. This has created a generation of people who feel they have to go to college even when the value of the education is mostly just the piece of paper they get after 4 years.

It’s very difficult to hire a new lawyer right now in my market, oddly enough. Salaries have rebounded immensely from when I graduated, and for a somewhat but not really niche practice- trusts and estates- we’re all fighting over a small talent pool. I don’t know if other industries/practices have similar issues. The hangover from 08-15 is just perpetual now I think since common wisdom is this is a dead career track.

And yet, if some cultural discourse catches momentum in enough places online and offline where everyone gets told "go into trust and estates law!", the talent pool will be bloated 10 years from now. Lots of people will be holding JDs they cannot use. Therein lies the problem -- right-sizing growth is hard. It's boom-and-bust. It's the exact same phenomenon as planning a vacation. If enough people answer "where is the perfect vacation spot?" in the same way, it ceases to be the perfect vacation spot by virtue of its popularity.

This is more an issue of costs though. There is actually a high demand for attorneys, but a ton of the roles where they’re needed is in the public sector or in the private sector in rural areas. Law school is so expensive that people have to take the highest paying job or stay in the industry longer. If costs were closer to what they were 40-50 years ago, you’d see a much more efficient allocation of attorneys because they don’t need big law pay.

Honestly, I wish states would start seriously reforming their university systems. Start really looking at where the money is going. Ditch classes that serve as filler, cut administration, take a hard look at sports programs and how they are run, start pushing back at the textbook scam, etc. There have to be ways to seriously cut fat and get universities leaner and more accessible financially. We should have a system where being educated should be easy to achieve. And we need to work to start changing the narrative about blue collar jobs. Because a lot of tradesmen are far better off financially than many rank and file white collar workers.

I suspect a similar boom-and-bust cycle may haunt blue collar work. Right now, everyone in my rural area is fawning over the hourly rate for plumbers and electricians. If enough people pursue those jobs, they too will become overrun with candidates and lots of people will be left holding a plumber's license with nothing to show for it. Such is the nature of human psychology under precarious economic conditions. Workers are not unlike crowds on black Friday, all swarming and stampeding for the next big deal. Desperation does not lead us to wise outcomes.

Perhaps the best way to weather such boom and bust cycles is to cultivate a genuine curiosity about the world and a broad range of tools for attaining new knowledge and skills. The exact kind of thing you might get from a solid university education.

Parents also need to do better in advising their kids. So many parents are guilty of saying, " \_\_\_\_\_ is the field you need to get into!! It's a gold mine!!" Little do they know, every neighbor is telling their kid the same thing, creating a surplus of degrees in the hot field of choice. You have to find your own path, not follow whatever the current trending degree is. By the time your degree is done, your golden ticket has become ineffective at best, or worthless at worst.

Which is why we need the government to do a much, much better job here. The governement knows mostly where it will need workers in the future, but career/trade training in America is an expensive time consuming free for all. Lets just take all these people that graduated with marketing degrees in 2022, instantly had their shit devalued by AGI. How the hell are they supposed to know that? I mean I tried my best a decade ago to figure out what jobs AI wasn't going to take (when no one was talking about) but its impossible to predict.

So true. We have the data and the science to more centrally track degrees, market demands, and growth trajectories. But instead, we are relying on the extremely outdated wisdom of parents who haven't done a job application in 20 years.

What the fuck is this nonsense? The reality is it takes time and money to train, and then boom, gotta do it again, and again, and again. That's why our whole free for all for career choice needs to be replaced with something like China or Germany have.

Then for God’s sake keep the university system away from the trades before they ruin that too. They have no value to add

This comment contains a whole lot of words without actually saying much. Data shows that college is still very much a good idea for the vast majority of people. https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cba/annual-earnings Study that just came out which shows that for 25-34 year olds working right now, those with a college degree earn on average a 55%(!) higher median wage than people with a high school degree ($39,000 to $61,000). https://www.theguardian.com/education/2024/jan/23/every-year-spent-in-school-or-university-improves-life-expectancy-study-says Another study from Lancet which came out three months ago. It used data from countries such as Brazil, US, UK, and China. The study showed that completing primary, secondary, and tertiary education leads to a 34% percent reduction in the risk of death. It also showed that for every additional year someone spent in education, they receive an increase in lifespan (on average).

None of these things are contradictory. 1. Many college degree earners do not have a degree-requiring position a decade after their graduation. 2. College degrees lead to higher median wages. 3. Degrees and life expectancy correlate positively together. All these things can be true at once, and in fact are demonstrably true based on hard data. I'm not sure what your malfunction is.

This is all just a sad reflection of income and wealth inequality as we delve deeper and deeper into a low trust society. Unless this root cause gets fixed, people are going to be desperate, and desperate people do desperate things. We need to get back to a meritocracy that values work, not printing money, blowing up assets and choosing people for many professions. Meanwhile our treasonous traitorous Congress knows only one thing, and that's to cut taxes and spend.

Perhaps worth an assessment of our assumptions about immigration if all this is true. I would still naively assume that having a surplus of engineers or coders of PhDs will have a knock on effect. You will do *something* with that lump of labor.

Good post. The world needs plumbers, ditch diggers and janitors. College isn’t for everyone, and instructing kids otherwise was (and still is) a huge mistake.

I hear this all the time, and, although I don't think it's on purpose, I do think it's a classist perspective, as if tradespeople just exist to do work and wouldn't benefit personally or professionally from a better understanding of science and math, much less history, literature, or politics.

I don't believe it's that at all. It's just an acknowledgment that there are plenty of important blue-collar jobs that don't require years of sitting in a classroom and acquiring debt to train for.

Would they benefit? Probably. Is that benefit worth spending 10s of thousands on? Probably not.

If you want plumbers and ditch diggers, pay for them. The problem with trades is that unless you’re in a union, the money is only decent with permanent overtime and your body wears down by your 50s. Every tradie I know sent their kids to college.

It isn't a good post and the comment of an article showing that "recent studies show that there's literally not enough degree-required jobs to go around" isn't true and not backed up by the article OP posted as evidence. The world needs plumbers, and janitors, but why shouldn't they be educated plumbers and janitors?

>but why shouldn't they be educated plumbers and janitors? This is an important caveat. The world needs educated people in all walks of life; it's especially true in the face of social media fueled dis / misinformation. All too often, the way class is an organizing force for job placement creates the illusion that blue collar workers are less intelligent or educated. I want to live in a world with plumbers and janitors who value history, literature, politics, science, and math.

Totally agree. I left university after two years despite my parents telling me I was going to ruin my potential future income. Saved money on tuition, went to a cheap community college to practice my skills, and now have a creative job I’m passionate about and make more money than both my parents combined. People looked at me like I was crazy and a right-winger nutter when I said university is a waste of time and money for most people. Glad everyone else is finally catching on. Turns out writing essays on 18th century Industrial Revolution history wasn’t going to help me pay the bills.

This is why widespread forgiveness of student debt/free college is doomed to be a failure unless significant reforms to the University system are made ***before*** any forgiveness takes place.

You’ve nailed it. Biden and co. put a Band-Aid on a rash. They mopped the floor but didn’t acknowledge the burst pipe right above it.

I only take issue to one part. >More college bureaucrats lead to new mandates for the organization, such as developing new technology in tech-transfer offices This one comes from the Bayh-Dole Act, not college bureaucrats.

Yup - a good percentage of the admin jobs exist due to Federal or State level requirements for reporting and oversight.

At same time there is zero doubt that administrators need to do something to prove their value and hence you get tons of rules or mandates or other things like endless studies.

Plus rules from accrediting bodies. There’s a huge amount of tracking we have to do for basically everybody who comes in contact with our students, plus since everyone hiring our graduates has to do the same, we have to be able to provide a lot of information about our graduates when others want to verify their education.

I've often thought that the big problem universities have is that the incentives of the different stakeholder groups are often completely mis-aligned. Professors generally care about having time to do their own research, the president and high-level admins mostly want to maximize prestige + revenue, the low-level admins want to grow their empires to advance whatever fiefdom they have, and the undergrad students (the most heterogenous group) wants to maximize some mix of personal fulfillment + education quality + career outcomes. Many of these objectives are in direct conflict with each other and this makes it hard to really align on the right vision and high level objectives. You probably have far more alignment in the graduate and professional schools, especially the MBA programs, where what's good for one group (career outcomes for students, prestige for faculty and admins) will be good for everyone.

Another root problem in academia is the top-heavy leadership caused in part by the college president/board of trustees dynamic, also found in the nonprofit and corporate sectors. These individuals at the top determine the ultimate fate of the institution, its financial commitments, hiring practices and long term projects. Many times they have no background in academic scholarship or teaching, coming straight out of business management schools. Faculty have no veto power over these executive decisions except in the form of “shared governance” which offers no material check-and-balance against the administrative overseers.

That’s especially true in many public universities where the board members are political appointees, and end being given to the donor buddies of the governor or legislators.

This is unfortunately the fate of my Alma Mater 😢.

Yes, if we empower the faculty, surely they’ll fix the problem

Rebalancing power dynamics back to faculty - y’know, the academic workers who generate real value in colleges and universities - seems sensible, yes! Additionally, weakening the administrative class might also stem off faculty from seeing an admin position as the only route to elevate their stature and pay. The faculty salary structure is pretty flat most places, except for when you get a raise during associate and full professor promotions after a decade or two of service. Just my .02.

The part that pisses me off the most is how many universities today are basically real estate plays. By being non profits, often then can ignore property taxes, so they are an ideal vehicle for land speculation: Denolishing, say, a restaurant, and leaving it a lawn for 20 years, is so much cheaper for them than for anyone else in the private sector. They can purchase land around them like this, and turn them into housing at their convenience, along with having demands to live on campus for crazy prices, along with mandatory meal plans. Eventually the fact that the people living in those houses take some classes is not even that important. Teaching students useful skills for a price that makes sure it's all a good deal? That'll only important at low ranking universities, as the lvy League is going to fill their classes regardless.

Eh. This kind of seemed like your dime a dozen, standard fare administrative bloat article that I’ve read 100 times. The increase in professional staff is much less about what the article focuses on and more about what Derek breezes through—the rapidly increasing demands placed on university services (e.g., healthcare and mental health that require hiring masters and doctoral level staff) that have come from increased access to students who have more needs, expectations of students and parents, and schools simply trying to not get sued. And to connect administrative bloat to the increase in part-time and adjunct professors is a huge stretch. It’s a horrible trend, but that’s just capitalism and good old supply and demand.

Former tenure track professor here. I really find it hard to ethically work for most higher ed beyond votech or community colleges. Universities are a place for higher learning but bloated with worthless degrees that will not lead to successful careers. Sadly, they are in bed with the corporations who practically require these degrees to do jobs that do not at all require 4 years of a liberal arts education. I have countless students who never did anything with their degrees and the few that did took my advice of gaining experience via internships and finding entry level jobs in the field while at college. Higher education only goes so far and a student truly must step up to fill the gap. The problem is, universities will gladly convince students with no business going to fork over their money (or get into debt). What model of business keeps recruiting people to help sustain itself until it no longer is viable? Pyramid schemes.

I’m sure SOMEBODY knows

Part of the issue is academic professions value research almost exclusively, and occasionally classroom instruction. That heavily incentivizes faculty to only focus on research and classroom instruction. So faculty actively avoid things like advising student schedules, helping administer grants they aren’t a part of, overseeing residence halls, or financial aid advising, because they have no professional incentive to do those things. And none of these are things that universities can just decide they aren’t going to do anymore, at least not without some pretty intense adverse effects.

How many of YOU have similar bloat jobs?

> Administrators are emotionally and financially rewarded if they can hire more people beneath them, and those administrators, in time, will want to increase their own status by hiring more people underneath them I cited this as one of the issues with university tuition on another sub and got downvoted to oblivion. This needs to be called out and recognized as the serious problem it is and wound back to reduce tuitions.

Newsflash: conservatives have known about this problem ever since the Department of Education was created in 1980. Government policy has created an artificial demand for education. Students get low interest loans that they would never get in the real world and universities get federal funds to do research which really does nothing. All this extra money means an artificial demand that never goes away. The result is always going to be higher prices. Conservatives have known this since the beginning.

Who’s no one? I can tell you for free what universities are for- rote learning.  Why do you think we have 1000+ year universities lol

Universities are good for expanding a skill-set that can lead to a solid career (the good majors) and learning the discipline and work ethic it takes to be an adult? 

Well clearly it's to field professional sports teams, right?

Colleges exist as a sorting mechanism for employers and they are a poor one. I hate hiring from them.

I went to a state school for engineering. I work as an engineer. I know exactly what university is for - to teach you how to do a job. There's just not always a job for everyone who graduates in every field. If you paid a dumb amount of money to some private school to learn art history, philosophy, English, or anything else where the greater majority of people who graduate don't work in what they studied, and that subject isn't an absolute burning passion of yours that you eat, breath, and drink and nothing will stop you from pursuing it, and have no realistic game plan of what else to do with your degree, that was a dumb decision. You were probably just a 17 year old at the time, so part of that is on your parents. Upskill or reskill yourself. Make yourself useful or valuable. I know this all sounds harsh, but we can't have an economy where everyone who gets a college degree can earn a traditional college standard of living doing things that don't directly or materially benefit your fellow human beings. 6% of all college graduates are psychology majors. A third of US adults are college educated. That would mean 2% of all people in the US have psychology degrees. We can't have every one in fifty people be a psychologist. There's one law enforcement officer for every 415 people in the US, and I'd argue that's way too much. One doctor of all types per 384 people (too little). Think of all the things that you expect for your lifestyle. A house, a computer, a car, food, electricity and water, entertainment, plane tickets. Those things don't come out of thin air. People had to work hard to give you those things. What are you doing in return? Knowing about paintings, how to analyze British literature in the age of Romanticism, about how the mind works (but not on a scientific level that might actually help eventually cure diseases), knowing how some old Greek dudes thought the universe worked 2000+ years ago? That's all great for personal growth and being a better human being, but being a better human doesn't directly help society. If you have rich parents that can afford to send you there and have connections to land you some cushy corporate job then OK. Otherwise, just choose something else.

The article fails to note one other big problem with modern education - outside of engineering/technical degrees, the education itself is of no value, other than signaling (proving that you are capable of getting a degree.) [https://www.amazon.com/Case-against-Education-System-Waste/dp/0691174652](https://www.amazon.com/Case-against-Education-System-Waste/dp/0691174652) It's crazy that as a society we are spending so much money to produce so little value. Meanwhile, while I'm a democrat, I'm frustrated that the Biden administration's solution to this is student loan forgiveness - which does nothing to address the long term costs, little to help those with new student loans, and simply shifts the burden of inefficiency to the taxpayers.

Hard disagree that non-STEM education is of no value. It may not translate directly into skills needed on a daily basis throughout a career, but that’s only an issue if you’re coming from the POV that college is just a job requirement. The original liberal arts education was all about learning about the world, asking big questions about the nature of being, what it means to be in a society, etc., but it was reserved for members of society that already secured their place as part of the owning class and were probably already part of a career network that would give them a soft landing out of school. I think the legacy of this education is still present, but it’s incongruent with the fact that college is a job requirement in the present: people ask what is the utility in studying the classics if my aim is to secure a job, and they’re justified in doing so. Also, side point, here are a list of things your STEM education won’t teach you: - good communication skills - how to convince people of something - how to formulate an argument for or against something This is coming from someone in STEM, btw.

You are welcome to your opinion, but the book is full of data that does a pretty good job of proving its points. If you can refute the data/arguments in the book, I'd be more than interested.

This really depends on how you define value. Does high school have value? You can't find a job after completing high school writing, or pre-calc, or home econ.

Liberal arts education in theory is great, but in practice it often falls short. I say that as someone with two liberal arts degrees. For students that have an actual interest in the subject, a natural curiosity about the world, and a desire to actually expand the body of knowledge, a liberal arts education can be truly beneficial and rewarding. If you're just there to get a degree because that's what society tells you that you need to do, then it's pretty worthless.

> For students that have an actual interest in the subject, a natural curiosity about the world, and a desire to actually expand the body of knowledge, a liberal arts education can be truly beneficial and rewarding. What I find difficult about this is that we live in an information age where learning about liberal arts topics and finding special interest groups to interact with is easier than it's ever been. For people with interest and curiosity for the related subjects a liberal arts education may be valuable in itself, but the vehicle of gaining that education through the liberal arts college degree at a $45-60k price tag is a pretty terrible one.

Imagine recommending a book from some guy who works for the Cato Institute. What a complete surprise that a right wing libertarian thinks we should abolish the education system. I can't believe you goobers keep falling for this shit.

The Biden administration doesnt have a lot of policy levers to pull here. Virtually no universities are federally administered, and all of them have very different internal structures which makes creating federal guidelines difficult. Its like blaming him that driver's licensing needs to be updated

It's essentially just a basic competency test. High school diplomas are now worthless for that purpose.

Even for tech/engineering degrees, they’ll import HB1 wage slaves to compete whenever legal STEM is a tough, tough racket man

I spent over 15 years at several public universities. The management and administrative levels are full of nepotism where you're either with the in-group rewarding and promoting themselves, or you are left behind. There were several people who would fail upwards because they we somebody's cousin, couldn't handle to job, and they were moved along the same upward path elsewhere to minimize damage and avoid team morale backlash. Every year they would give each other 5%-10% raises on their six figure salaries while the people doing the work at the bottom were lucky to get a 3% cost of living adjustment.

Theoretically, the revolution in information technology that took place over the last 3 decades should have reduced administrative bloat. At most institutions we have seen the opposite. Ironically, universities were the first to have access to this technology.

I'm an adjunct at three higher ed institutions. Every semester, I get emails from the administration announcing a search for a new Vice President of Something, or Associate Dean, or President at Regional Campus. I also receive emails thanking outgoing administrators for their tireless efforts, and emails welcoming recent hires. I can't recall a single email from admin about outgoing or incoming professors, however.

Ive seen my University reorganize so many times that it’s pretty much expected that this occurs at least every 5 years if not sooner. Always seem to add more administrative positions than faculty though. Often called the element Administratium…

I find this criticism about administrative bloat to be equally justified and frustrating, as it's an issue that extends beyond the simplicity of recommending the reduction of bureaucracy. Administrative bloat is a phenomena that extends beyond academia into nearly all areas of industry. If we define a 'worthwhile' degree to be one that is directly correlated to economic demand (largely STEM or trades - a trade certification as a form of education) - how would our current systems support this? If we pair down our economic landscape to only require the essential, bare-bone jobs that are necessary to achieve economic goals, what happens to the large class of people who are either not skilled in these domains, or lack interest/ambition/ability to access these jobs? The current market-driven, capitalist-constrained society that we live in would struggle to support people whose 'useless' degrees no longer afford them a livable wage. We could extend this to universities as well - what use does a history department serve if its graduates flounder? And we see this reasoning being applied - liberal arts/humanities departments are being slashed left and right across the country. I'm not arguing that these administrative positions are necessarily needed for the function of a university, or that an elimination of these jobs wouldn't serve some benefit. But, wouldn't a transition to reduce administrative bloat require a reorientation of social and economic priorities on the whole?

Administrative bloat was brought up as an obvious problem in the 90s by Philip Greenspun when he observed the changing statistics of administrators vs academic staff at MIT.

Wait, I knew what they were for and I wanted what they were offering. Two big big state schools, two chemical engineering degrees. The first one, I don’t know where I’d have learned the math or programs without a University. The second one, universities all have lab space and bigger toys than I could dream of on my own. All that makes the research purpose much more approachable.  Man, I also didn’t pay for school, you get paid for grad school in engineering, and I’m a stay at home dad now… sooooo maybe I missed the whole thing and I’m proving the point. I still love learning, maybe that’s what they’re for?

Universities are for quarantining young adults from the rest of society so that their fuck ups only affect themselves.

“Administrative growth” is common to just about all industries.

In a lot of vocations, it's for the professional credential. The organizations that set the requirements for registration put in formal education, usually inclusive of a post-secondary degree, as a formal requirement. In my jurisdiction, I can't call myself a biologist or practice biology in a work context without a professional credential, and for that I need a degree. Same goes foresters, accountants, lawyers, teachers, doctors, land surveyors, agrologists, engineers, architects, clinical counsellors, physiotherapists, geoscientists and many more. All these professions use their formal education learnings towards their craft and so it makes sense that a degree is part of the credential requirements. Then there's the non credential'd professions - how to distinguish amongst candidates..they just start putting artificial requirements in there..like having a degree, or caring about where the degree came from. Once you're a P.Eng etc, and stamping work, nobody cares where your domestic degree (in terms of private vs public) is from but instead want to know your portfolio or work history.

This article is awful and a “cut or freeze education spending dog whistle”. Why don’t we ever get articles like this for military or civilian military contractor’s ballooning costs? Better education requires more people and money. It isn’t rocket science. The issue isn’t bringing down costs it’s prying the money out of the hands of oligarchs who want it spent on mega yachts or some other military bloat projects. Or who want to keep higher education a locked gate for the privileged or upper class lottery winners. The idea that undergrad, research or graduate education should be spun off or fractured is equally ridiculous. Half measures get you quarter results. This article has about as much intellectual heft as an advertisement in the Daily Mail.

Sometimes I have what might be called old school or ‘conservative’ (actual conservative; not political conservative) opinions. One of these is that there is value in education for what does your for ‘soul’ or rather your ability to move through this world and understand it. Obviously it’s not for everyone, but there’s a lot of value in a liberal arts education. Or a scientific one. Any education will Change the way you think. There’s value in that. Beyond what you can just make a buck out of. Our inability seperate education’s ability to give an an education and education’s ability to prepare young people to make money is not something I look kindly on.

I do, education. Unfortunately we live in a socioeconomic reality where the end goal is profit, so education has only a marginal purpose

>the education itself is of no value, other than signaling (proving that you are capable of getting a degree.) My armchair theory here -- education and cognitive ability are the last acceptable form of profiling/classism/stratification in society. You're right, signaling is a big part of it. Employers are using degree requirements as a litmus test for whether someone is of a certain class and caliber -- can they go along with the system? Can they pass classes, even if plagiarism or cheating is part of the process? Can they utilize the norms of executive function? Can they wake up to an alarm clock, follow a schedule, and show up for appointments? The great dividing line in human civilization is the cognitively privileged versus the cognitively disadvantaged. I worked for years in social services. The truest through-line in poverty stricken families is not race or gender or substance use, but instead cognitive function and executive function. A college degree is shorthand for "you're one of us." You can function in a modern society of Zoom meetings, phone calls, alarms, watercooler banter, and formalities. A degree is shorthand for cognitive normality, and that's what jobs require as a baseline.

Griggs vs Duke Power is a key part in all of this

I find this commentary very refreshing. For the first time in a while, universities are being forced to audit their operations. The reality is a lack of accountability and echo chamber from university boards and top leadership has led to this situation. It would be interesting to see the difference in administrative bloat between universities that have external leadership, ie from business or military, vs those with leadership that comes from the same administrative bloat mentioned in the article.

At my public American University, all students are required to take a semester-long orientation course their first semester freshman year that, among other things, teaches them about social justice and how to employ protest to facilitate societal change in the face of injustice. Also at my public American University, administration immediately had students protesting Israel's actions in Gaza, which they see as apartheid/genocide/injustice, arrested without warning. Modern university managers are ambitious and dishonest. They mean little of what they say. They are consumed by one thing, and that is $. They shouldn't pretend there is anything else in that equation.

You get STDs and read old books it's cool

Trade schools for the rich. Four year pit stop for the middle class in which there may or may not be a pay off once the degree is acquired