The Department of
Education recently proposed new regulations to punish colleges that attract
students with misleading claims. But what if the whole system of higher education in America is guilty of
that?
In his latest book,
Charles Sykes, a senior fellow at the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute,
makes the case that it is. Fail U.: The False Promise of
Higher Education gives the reader a
sweeping view of our collegiate landscape and the scenery is not at all
attractive.
It includes
debt-ridden students who weren’t prepared for college in the first place,
well-paid professors who teach little but devote most of their time to research
that nobody reads, campus cry-bullies who live to air their grievances and
protest, inflated grades and puff courses, extravagant spending on athletics and
luxury amenities for students more interested in having fun than in studying,
and much more.
Fail U. is not just an
updating of Sykes’ first foray into criticizing higher education—Profscam published in
1988—but a major extension of his case that higher education was losing its
focus on teaching students and instead becoming a game of extracting the
greatest amount of money from parents and taxpayers. All of the bad trends he
observed 28 years ago have continued and worsened, but in addition, a host of
new troubles have arisen.
Such as? One is the
proliferation of college graduates who can only find jobs that don’t call for
college education. As the number of Americans holding college credentials has
skyrocketed at the same time the economy was going stagnant, many graduates now
wind up working in low-skill jobs like customer service representative, theater
usher, and taxi driver. “In 1970,” Sykes notes, “less than 1% of taxi drivers
had college degrees. Four decades later, more than 15% do.”
In the past, when
relatively few Americans went to college and had to show good academic progress
to stay in and graduate, higher education generally was a sound investment,
leading to lucrative careers. That’s no longer true. Defenders of the higher
education system keep talking about the supposed “college premium,” but it’s extremely
misleading. “Rather than benefiting from a wage premium,” Sykes writes, many
students “find themselves actually worse off than if they had not enrolled at
all.”
Another recent problem
that has metastasized like an aggressive cancer is that of intolerance. Sykes
devotes a chapter to that, calling it “Grievance U.” Back in 1988, you could
have found a few faculty members who pushed their “progressive” ideas. Students
then could easily avoid the intolerance; on most campuses, the fever swamps
where only politically correct thoughts were allowed were small and confined.
Today, on many
campuses the atmosphere of intolerance is omnipresent. Not only are there more
faculty members who brazenly use their courses for proselytizing, but students
who have been steeped in the leftist worldview now use the power that cringing
administrators have given them to threaten anyone who dares to disagree with
them.
Even liberal
professors admit to being frightened of zealous leftist students who are eager
to maul anyone for even the slightest, inadvertent transgression against their
beliefs.
There are many stories
about this sort of intellectual thuggery and Sykes recounts several. Perhaps
the most telling is the nasty treatment a 79-year-old UCLA professor, Val Rust,
received for his “micro-aggression” of correcting grammatical errors in the
papers of Ph.D. candidates.
Among other “offenses”
against these students, he “changed the capitalization of ‘indigenous’ in one
of the papers,” which allegedly signaled “disrespect for the student’s
ideological point of view.”
A few of Professor
Rust’s students defended him, one writing that the protest was merely “a cheap
way of arousing public support.” But instead of telling the students to behave
like adults, the UCLA administration overreacted by appeasing the protesters
and sending an email to all staff and students declaring that this “troubling
racial incident” required that the university community “work toward just,
equitable, and lasting solutions.”
What’s wrong with
protests over “insensitivity”? Do they really affect college learning? Sykes
argues that the constant drumbeat on campus for protecting the feelings of
students “is consistent with the deeply ingrained educational philosophy that
insists on bubble-wrapping children, protecting them from all of the bumps,
bruises, and setbacks of life, in the belief that by shielding them from
adversity and offensive ideas, they will somehow be empowered to face the
world.”
That’s a devastating
point. Higher education, no matter what the student chooses to major in, ought
to be about maturing and learning to cope with the world. Today, American
higher education often sends just the opposite message to students—that they
are doing the right thing when they try to silence and intimidate anyone who
disagrees with them. Our colleges and universities are charging huge amounts of
money in exchange for teaching some bad, illiberal ideas.
And thus we come to
Sykes’s views about the college bubble. He is convinced that we are in one,
similar to the Dutch tulip mania in the 18th century and the housing
madness that gripped America just a decade ago.
The cost of college
continues rising at the same time that the educational value delivered is
generally falling. Many schools have gone so far into debt that they’re finding
it increasingly hard to cover their debt service costs, and many families are
questioning whether they can or should afford to send the kids to college. The
higher education market is simply unsustainable.
Sykes puts it this
way: “The
education bubble bursts when puffery is confronted by reality. Increasingly,
the economic model of higher education no longer works for many students, who
realize belatedly that they have placed themselves in a financial stranglehold
for unmarketable degrees.”
He’s correct. We’ve
had a vast amount of puffery telling us what a superb “investment” a college
education is, but in reality, for a great many students getting the degree is a
waste of time and money. That understanding will have the same impact as tulip
bulb buyers realizing that the price of a bulb far exceeded its value.
He is disdainful of
the policy “fixes” that have been advanced by the Obama administration,
especially loan forgiveness.
“Easy money is being replaced by free money as
the government transforms loans into grants through a variety of programs… The
result is a rolling, massive, and very expensive federal bailout.”
One development that
will hasten the deflation of the bubble, Sykes maintains, is the rise of online
education, especially MOOCs (massive open online courses). They “challenge the
monopoly that colleges and universities have on credentialing,” he writes,
because of “their ability to restore content to higher education and some
meaning to the credentials that have become increasingly hollow.” And he scoffs
at the defense often raised by the higher ed establishment that free online
courses are “dehumanizing.”
“Universities can
hardly complain that MOOCs dehumanize and depersonalize education,” Sykes counters,
“since the modern university has already done all it can to minimize the
interactions between elite faculty and undergraduates.”
Undoubtedly, Fail U. will be blasted by defenders
of the academic status quo, just as Profscam
was. They will say that Sykes exaggerates and sensationalizes the
problems of higher education. I don’t think he does, but what would they
prefer? Silence, or criticism so couched in appropriately fuzzy academic
language that no one would pay any attention? Probably so.
The best thing about
this book is that it will convince large numbers of average Americans that they
should think long and hard before committing loads of money to college.
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