I do like the concept of refusing grants and loans to students whose chosen field will not pay them more than someone with no degree or a lesser degree would receive. These people who shackle themselves with incredible debts that can never be repaid with the salaries common in their chosen field need to be protected from thier own perfidy.
I don't really care about protecting these students from their own perfidy, but I care a lot about protecting taxpayers from the students' perfidy. If the schools were stuck with the students' debts, it's certain that granting loans for useless degrees would end and it wouldn't take long.
In writing what I did I was thinking in the same tone. I find the entire government loan thing absurd. Government does very few things efficiently. Granting loans is something that banks do well when not pushed by idiotic government pressure. Anticipated return on capital does a good job of weeding out unproductive loans.
the problems we're seeing in higher ed were exacerbated exponentially when the government took over the granting of school loans. All risk/reward equations went out the window, taking responsibility and accountability with it.
The banks were issuing the student loans back in the day, knowing they'd be backstopped by the govt if students default. I had zero income and got student loans (1986-1992 timeframe) for undergrad, what bank would do that with no income, no collateral? A bank that knew the govt parachute was always there.
The implosion can't accelerate fast enough for me.
As with so many of our failing institutions, the problems lie not in the institutions themselves but in the ideology of the people who have taken charge of those places.
Progressivism treats every problem as though it occurs in a void.
It is in our schools, from prek to phd that the culture of death is actively nurtured.
After the school shooting in my neighborhood, a lot of people lobbied for stronger gun laws.
No one lobbied for helping the mentally disturbed, no one acknowledged gender confusion as being a mental health issue and no one questioned why our society is currently producing so many homicidal maniacs.
Of what possible use is academia in a society in which reality is not valued?
Our state teachers' union is running ads about trusted spaces and help against bullying. Such unions are the prime untrustworthy bullies, along with officials they own.
have you noticed that in the third decade of "zero tolerance" for bullying in school we've turned out generations of the most ruthless bullies the world has ever seen?
Could not possibly agree more! And now you are right in my wheelhouse.
In the Gated Geezer Enclosure in which we have lived for the last 16 years, there are roughly 2,000 homes, some of which are used as wintering homes by Canadians who are scared to death of guns. BUT, in the other several hundred, I am guessing there are a minimum of 3 or 4 weapons apiece, and in some collectors' homes, many times that number. Not once in those 16 years have we had a shooting. The guns just sit there, well-behaved, compliant, hoping to be taken on an outing to the desert canyon or the Tactical Range, and not looking forward to killing anyone at a school Prom or baby shower or sports parade. What ARE the odds that all these guns have committed no homicides? Not even the Weapons of War Assault Weapons? AG
A friend of mine said something about 'all the guns' and I asked her how many guns would it take for her to pick one up and shoot someone. She looked at me like I'd grown another head. My point was completely beyond her.
Very few people know that the same day as the school shooting, another maniac knifed two random people downtown and another killed five when he exited the highway onto a city street at 70mph. It's not the weapons. It's never been the weapons.
Is gen-Ed general education or gender studies. I couldn’t understand that part.
I posted this on the clown college essay on WSJ expressions. It’s relevant here.
——————
Why is the taxpayer involved at all with “higher education”? We front a ton of money so people can graduate high school not knowing much of anything.
Oh wait, the interest was supposed to pay for obamadoesntcare. That’s right. Well two failed programs from The Obama. Who says he’s not the grift that keeps on giving.
I don’t think I knew that the interest on student loans was designated for obamadoesntcare (wonderful — going to steal that, thank you). Another sign that both programs were designed to fail.
It is going to be difficult. When I first started paying attention to how left vs right influenced academia, about 10 years ago, the sciences had been taken over by left politics, but engineering (my field is chemical engineering) was still pretty neutral. Engineering has since been taken over as well through a variety of mechanisms (funding source, what journals will publish, who gets to give keynote lectures, tenure). My opinion is that the badly supported and badly defended so-called climate science was the Trojan Horse that brought poorly designed experiments and thus pointless analyses and models into the formerly rigorous hard sciences.
No comment other than thank goodness and faster please.
We were unfortunately deprived of another conservative voice in sociology with the tragic death of Mike Adams. I was reminded of the anniversary of his passing this weekend and he is most certainly missed.
Yes, I would have mentioned Mike if he was still with us. Partly to note that he was hounded out of his department, and treated abominably. Again--many academic sociologists tend to be horrible people; should be known as the Sociopathy department instead.
Thanks, Steve. Brilliant as always. There's a brilliant young sociologist at the University of Chicago--Cassie Sever. She's extraordinary, and utterly Catholic and conservative.
Adopting the outward trappings of science wouldn't make voodoo a science. Both hard and soft sciences have sub-disciplines akin to voodoo. The priests of these cults cite each other to create dungheaps of footnotes and references plus comfy tenured jobs.
Eliminating Intro Sociology means one less easy 'A' for incoming Freshmen.
Bad joke aside, there needs to be more accountability for colleges and universities. Others have suggested that these schools be responsible for providing and servicing all student loans. Legislation could force them into extending school loans for no more than five years after leaving. If the student is unable to meet the financial obligation, the loan goes unpaid. That alone would eliminate the administrative bloat and worthless degrees.
The government has no more business financing college than they did financing mortgages. Both practices led to bubbles in which people who couldn't or wouldn't hop on that train got priced out of the market. And where people on those trains defaulted and left us taxpayers with the bill.
Our fine republicans ( small r ) just joined the dims in passing a bipartisan* "housing" bill.
H.R.6644 - This bill revises federal housing programs, including by expanding available financing for affordable housing and providing grants for planning and community development activities.
1) expanding available financing for affordable housing ( to people who shouldn't get loans )
2) grants ( another way to say grift and fraud )
3) community development activities ( who is the most famous community organizer)
When I was in college in the 70s, sociology courses were considered the least challenging, coming in last, with psych courses ranked barely better. An easy A. All BS all the time. My majors (double), English and History, probably now fall into Trump's no-loan category. But back in the day they were intellectually challenging. I considered them a benefit to my eventual career in business. And my consciousness as a human being.
I only knew one sociology major at UCSC. After graduating, he immediately took a job in hospital management and worked his way up. He retired the CEO of a midsized hospital in California. I can't see that he used his knowledge of sociology in any manner in his career.
His degree probably played a part in getting him the hospital management job. The fact that it was a sociology degree didn't matter. The job probably just required a college degree, sort of a substitute for an IQ test, which can't be given these days — or maybe they can be given now, in the days of Trump.
They haven't over turned Grigg vs Duke Power yet, so NO IQ tests can be given.... and the college degree being the "substitute" has been terribly degraded over the past 15-20 years.
Back around 1970 UCSC for a few brief years was the most selective UC campus. [Victor Davis Hanson and I both graduated there in 1975.] I got two 800s on the SAT math tests: two other guys on my dorm floor did too. So much for me being "hot stuff". The soc. major had to be smart just to get in there, and he graduated with "high honors in sociology".
Journalism is not a course, of course. It is an occupation, usually occupied by illiterate and ignorant folks with degrees in "journalism". Its key requirement is that one look good on tv and at press conferences, if not physically, at least at playing an intelligent person.
My liberal arts college didn't have a journalism major. But if I were hypothesizing, I'd put journalism above both because it probably has more rigorous output requirements and evaluation. (As long as you stick to the party line. . .)
Really? I took a journalism course senior year (needed credits) and went to Disneyworld for a week, came back, found out there was a test, didn't study and got a B. Journalism gives us nothing but "Journalists" who can't even report a story objectively. pfffft.
I wouldn't encourage anyone to major in journalism. I think my college had a "social science" distribution requirement and I chose Psych 1. I remember sitting in the class (about 40 students, full prof) and thinking "what a bunch of crap." I mean, some of it has basic validity, but that part is obvious. I think the class was graded on the basis of multiple-choice exams. Snore. I went back to my room and read Middlemarch.
As with many college majors these days, English and History surely ain't what they used to be. My wife was a history major back in the 60s and 70s: the reading and writing of papers never stopped. I think she spent more time doing homework than I did as an electrical engineering major, and I did a LOT of homework into the wee hours of every weeknight.
Another aspect of the harm caused by student loans is the inflation of college costs.
When I went to UCSC in the early 1970s, there was no in-state tuition, only about $700 a year in "registration fees". (A rose by any other name.) Room and board brought the total up to close to $3,000 per year. My dad just paid that out of his salary as a middle manager at the phone company.
Current in-state tuition at UC is $15,588, plus misc. "fees". That certainly far outstrips the rate of inflation since I was an undergrad.
The cost of higher education has outstripped the inflation in every other category expect medical costs (subsidized by the federal government) and the salaries of CEOs of international corporations-subsidized by the Fed keeping interest rates so low that most investors gamble their savings by investing in stock markets, hoping the rising share prices will beat inflation-and they do. Meanwhile the CEOs get enormous profits by exercising options set low in lieu of cash compensation (taxed at a higher rate than capital gains, of course). We can thank Bill Clinton for that.
To make any kind of meaningful reform would require admitting that current curriculum in some areas, admission policies, etc. are wrong and serve no real purpose. For leftists admitting mistakes is not possible because they are the smartest people in the room therefore their ideas are right and data is wrong. A lot of caterwauling may be coming.
Along with the dimunition of financial resources are declining birthrates and young men choosing to not participate because colleges are unwelcoming and the effort and money spent are not worth the squeeze. As Steve is fond of saying: time to get out the popcorn.
I do like the concept of refusing grants and loans to students whose chosen field will not pay them more than someone with no degree or a lesser degree would receive. These people who shackle themselves with incredible debts that can never be repaid with the salaries common in their chosen field need to be protected from thier own perfidy.
I don't really care about protecting these students from their own perfidy, but I care a lot about protecting taxpayers from the students' perfidy. If the schools were stuck with the students' debts, it's certain that granting loans for useless degrees would end and it wouldn't take long.
In writing what I did I was thinking in the same tone. I find the entire government loan thing absurd. Government does very few things efficiently. Granting loans is something that banks do well when not pushed by idiotic government pressure. Anticipated return on capital does a good job of weeding out unproductive loans.
the problems we're seeing in higher ed were exacerbated exponentially when the government took over the granting of school loans. All risk/reward equations went out the window, taking responsibility and accountability with it.
The banks were issuing the student loans back in the day, knowing they'd be backstopped by the govt if students default. I had zero income and got student loans (1986-1992 timeframe) for undergrad, what bank would do that with no income, no collateral? A bank that knew the govt parachute was always there.
Those subjects should be reserved for trust fund kids who don't have to look forward to having to earn a living anyway.
Any chance that banks will expend more effort in recouping their loans than the federal government?
The implosion can't accelerate fast enough for me.
As with so many of our failing institutions, the problems lie not in the institutions themselves but in the ideology of the people who have taken charge of those places.
Progressivism treats every problem as though it occurs in a void.
It is in our schools, from prek to phd that the culture of death is actively nurtured.
After the school shooting in my neighborhood, a lot of people lobbied for stronger gun laws.
No one lobbied for helping the mentally disturbed, no one acknowledged gender confusion as being a mental health issue and no one questioned why our society is currently producing so many homicidal maniacs.
Of what possible use is academia in a society in which reality is not valued?
Our state teachers' union is running ads about trusted spaces and help against bullying. Such unions are the prime untrustworthy bullies, along with officials they own.
have you noticed that in the third decade of "zero tolerance" for bullying in school we've turned out generations of the most ruthless bullies the world has ever seen?
Many schools actively promote moral confusion and also let kids run amok.
By 'many' do you mean 'most'?
I don't know
Could not possibly agree more! And now you are right in my wheelhouse.
In the Gated Geezer Enclosure in which we have lived for the last 16 years, there are roughly 2,000 homes, some of which are used as wintering homes by Canadians who are scared to death of guns. BUT, in the other several hundred, I am guessing there are a minimum of 3 or 4 weapons apiece, and in some collectors' homes, many times that number. Not once in those 16 years have we had a shooting. The guns just sit there, well-behaved, compliant, hoping to be taken on an outing to the desert canyon or the Tactical Range, and not looking forward to killing anyone at a school Prom or baby shower or sports parade. What ARE the odds that all these guns have committed no homicides? Not even the Weapons of War Assault Weapons? AG
A friend of mine said something about 'all the guns' and I asked her how many guns would it take for her to pick one up and shoot someone. She looked at me like I'd grown another head. My point was completely beyond her.
Very few people know that the same day as the school shooting, another maniac knifed two random people downtown and another killed five when he exited the highway onto a city street at 70mph. It's not the weapons. It's never been the weapons.
"The guns just sit there, well-behaved, compliant..."
... waiting patiently for their daily walk in the wheelbarrow.
Is gen-Ed general education or gender studies. I couldn’t understand that part.
I posted this on the clown college essay on WSJ expressions. It’s relevant here.
——————
Why is the taxpayer involved at all with “higher education”? We front a ton of money so people can graduate high school not knowing much of anything.
Oh wait, the interest was supposed to pay for obamadoesntcare. That’s right. Well two failed programs from The Obama. Who says he’s not the grift that keeps on giving.
I don’t think I knew that the interest on student loans was designated for obamadoesntcare (wonderful — going to steal that, thank you). Another sign that both programs were designed to fail.
Bravo!
Cleaning out the Augean stables of Academia is a truly Herculean task, but the survival of Western culture demands it.
If the schools' access to government money and loans is eliminated, I believe the stables of academia will self-clean in short order.
It is going to be difficult. When I first started paying attention to how left vs right influenced academia, about 10 years ago, the sciences had been taken over by left politics, but engineering (my field is chemical engineering) was still pretty neutral. Engineering has since been taken over as well through a variety of mechanisms (funding source, what journals will publish, who gets to give keynote lectures, tenure). My opinion is that the badly supported and badly defended so-called climate science was the Trojan Horse that brought poorly designed experiments and thus pointless analyses and models into the formerly rigorous hard sciences.
easier, faster and cheaper to just blow up the stables and build new.
Labs and their equipment are very expensive.
Glenn Reynold's 2012 book on the subject is The Higher Education Bubble.
Glenn hosts the Instapundit site. To which I contribute, or infest, depending upon your viewpoint.
No comment other than thank goodness and faster please.
We were unfortunately deprived of another conservative voice in sociology with the tragic death of Mike Adams. I was reminded of the anniversary of his passing this weekend and he is most certainly missed.
Yes, I would have mentioned Mike if he was still with us. Partly to note that he was hounded out of his department, and treated abominably. Again--many academic sociologists tend to be horrible people; should be known as the Sociopathy department instead.
Thanks, Steve. Brilliant as always. There's a brilliant young sociologist at the University of Chicago--Cassie Sever. She's extraordinary, and utterly Catholic and conservative.
Adopting the outward trappings of science wouldn't make voodoo a science. Both hard and soft sciences have sub-disciplines akin to voodoo. The priests of these cults cite each other to create dungheaps of footnotes and references plus comfy tenured jobs.
Eliminating Intro Sociology means one less easy 'A' for incoming Freshmen.
Bad joke aside, there needs to be more accountability for colleges and universities. Others have suggested that these schools be responsible for providing and servicing all student loans. Legislation could force them into extending school loans for no more than five years after leaving. If the student is unable to meet the financial obligation, the loan goes unpaid. That alone would eliminate the administrative bloat and worthless degrees.
A sane idea, therefore it will never be enacted.
Perhaps DJT will push for it in his 3rd term
The government has no more business financing college than they did financing mortgages. Both practices led to bubbles in which people who couldn't or wouldn't hop on that train got priced out of the market. And where people on those trains defaulted and left us taxpayers with the bill.
Our fine republicans ( small r ) just joined the dims in passing a bipartisan* "housing" bill.
H.R.6644 - This bill revises federal housing programs, including by expanding available financing for affordable housing and providing grants for planning and community development activities.
1) expanding available financing for affordable housing ( to people who shouldn't get loans )
2) grants ( another way to say grift and fraud )
3) community development activities ( who is the most famous community organizer)
They did it again.
And I'm disgusted.
When I was in college in the 70s, sociology courses were considered the least challenging, coming in last, with psych courses ranked barely better. An easy A. All BS all the time. My majors (double), English and History, probably now fall into Trump's no-loan category. But back in the day they were intellectually challenging. I considered them a benefit to my eventual career in business. And my consciousness as a human being.
I only knew one sociology major at UCSC. After graduating, he immediately took a job in hospital management and worked his way up. He retired the CEO of a midsized hospital in California. I can't see that he used his knowledge of sociology in any manner in his career.
His degree probably played a part in getting him the hospital management job. The fact that it was a sociology degree didn't matter. The job probably just required a college degree, sort of a substitute for an IQ test, which can't be given these days — or maybe they can be given now, in the days of Trump.
They haven't over turned Grigg vs Duke Power yet, so NO IQ tests can be given.... and the college degree being the "substitute" has been terribly degraded over the past 15-20 years.
Back around 1970 UCSC for a few brief years was the most selective UC campus. [Victor Davis Hanson and I both graduated there in 1975.] I got two 800s on the SAT math tests: two other guys on my dorm floor did too. So much for me being "hot stuff". The soc. major had to be smart just to get in there, and he graduated with "high honors in sociology".
Where would you place journalism: above or below psych?
Journalism is not a course, of course. It is an occupation, usually occupied by illiterate and ignorant folks with degrees in "journalism". Its key requirement is that one look good on tv and at press conferences, if not physically, at least at playing an intelligent person.
Most people with degrees in journalism work in public relations.
My liberal arts college didn't have a journalism major. But if I were hypothesizing, I'd put journalism above both because it probably has more rigorous output requirements and evaluation. (As long as you stick to the party line. . .)
Really? I took a journalism course senior year (needed credits) and went to Disneyworld for a week, came back, found out there was a test, didn't study and got a B. Journalism gives us nothing but "Journalists" who can't even report a story objectively. pfffft.
I wouldn't encourage anyone to major in journalism. I think my college had a "social science" distribution requirement and I chose Psych 1. I remember sitting in the class (about 40 students, full prof) and thinking "what a bunch of crap." I mean, some of it has basic validity, but that part is obvious. I think the class was graded on the basis of multiple-choice exams. Snore. I went back to my room and read Middlemarch.
As with many college majors these days, English and History surely ain't what they used to be. My wife was a history major back in the 60s and 70s: the reading and writing of papers never stopped. I think she spent more time doing homework than I did as an electrical engineering major, and I did a LOT of homework into the wee hours of every weeknight.
Another aspect of the harm caused by student loans is the inflation of college costs.
When I went to UCSC in the early 1970s, there was no in-state tuition, only about $700 a year in "registration fees". (A rose by any other name.) Room and board brought the total up to close to $3,000 per year. My dad just paid that out of his salary as a middle manager at the phone company.
Current in-state tuition at UC is $15,588, plus misc. "fees". That certainly far outstrips the rate of inflation since I was an undergrad.
Government involvement creates inflation and chaos wherever it goes. Education and healthcare are just two examples.
The cost of higher education has outstripped the inflation in every other category expect medical costs (subsidized by the federal government) and the salaries of CEOs of international corporations-subsidized by the Fed keeping interest rates so low that most investors gamble their savings by investing in stock markets, hoping the rising share prices will beat inflation-and they do. Meanwhile the CEOs get enormous profits by exercising options set low in lieu of cash compensation (taxed at a higher rate than capital gains, of course). We can thank Bill Clinton for that.
Another overdue cleanup on Aisle 6.
To make any kind of meaningful reform would require admitting that current curriculum in some areas, admission policies, etc. are wrong and serve no real purpose. For leftists admitting mistakes is not possible because they are the smartest people in the room therefore their ideas are right and data is wrong. A lot of caterwauling may be coming.
People who have stopped paying any attention to the WaPo will probably have missed this excellent article by Megan McArdle earlier this month about the sharp decline of quality in Anthropology - https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2026/07/19/higher-education-is-losing-publics-trust/ (archive - https://archive.md/kslaW )
The CHE interview it discusses is also good as an example of modern academia being utterly detached from reality ( https://www.chronicle.com/article/is-anthropology-hopelessly-politicized archive - https://archive.md/PvWdq )
Along with the dimunition of financial resources are declining birthrates and young men choosing to not participate because colleges are unwelcoming and the effort and money spent are not worth the squeeze. As Steve is fond of saying: time to get out the popcorn.