The Outlaw Campus

[Geee]

National Review:

Two factors have so far shielded the American university from the sort of criticism that it so freely levels against almost every other institution in American life. (1) For decades a college education has been considered the key to an ascendant middle-class existence. (2) Until recently a college degree was not tantamount to lifelong debt. In other words, American society put up with a lot of arcane things from academia, given that it offered something — a BA or BS degree — that almost everyone agreed was a ticket to personal security and an educated populace.

 

Not now. Colleges have gone rogue and become virtual outlaw institutions. Graduates owe an aggregate of $1 trillion in student debt, borrowed at interest rates far above home-mortgage rates — all on the principle that universities could charge as much as they liked, given that students could borrow as much as they needed in federally guaranteed loans.

 

Few graduates have the ability to pay back the principal; they are simply paying the compounded interest. More importantly, a college degree is not any more a sure pathway to a good job, nor does it guarantee that its holder is better educated than those without it. If the best sinecure in America is a tenured full professorship, the worst fate may be that of a recent graduate in anthropology with a $100,000 loan. That the two are co-dependent is a national scandal.

[Valin]

@Geee

 

On A Related Note....

 

Yes, Academia, Winter Is Still Coming

 

Megan McArdle has an excellent essay up at Bloomberg about the sorry state of the job market for PhDs that’s very much worth your time. The crux of her argument:

 

 

The fundamental issue in the academic job market is not that administrators are cheap and greedy, or that adjuncts lack a union. It’s that there are many more people who want to be research professors than there are jobs for them. And since all those people have invested the better part of a decade in earning their job qualifications, they will hang around on the edges of academia rather than trying to start over. Such a gigantic glut of labor is bound to push down wages and working conditions.

 

 

The business model for PhDs is functionally off. Graduate schools are minting far more PhDs than the market can absorb.

 

The problem as we see it is that the post-World War 2 university system was built on the assumption of an ever expanding population of students needing more and more higher ed. Therefore there was a need for each generation to produce more professors than the last. (This is not all that dissimilar, by the way, to the way many pension systems and social programs like Medicaid were built on the assumption that a bigger generation would roll around to pay the bills for the current enrollees.)

 

For a long time, each generation did need more than the last. More professors were needed for rising enrollments, so more grad schools were needed—which also raised the demand for professors, because more professors were needed to train new professors.

 

(Snip)