- First, some context. I teach at a regional public university in the US. Our students are average on just about any dimension you care to name—aspirations, intellect, socio-economic status, physical fitness. They wear hoodies and yoga pants and like Buffalo wings. They listen to Zach Bryan and Taylor Swift. That’s in no way a put-down: I firmly believe that the average citizen deserves a shot at a good education and even more importantly a shot at a good life. All I mean is that our students are representative; they’re neither the bottom of the academic barrel nor the cream off the top.
I find that lately, any essay or commentary that starts with "I'm Gen X" is going to finish with "but here's a spooky-good Boomer impression." But fine, let's look into it. The Professor's principal complaints are that (1) there are kids that don't belong there who (2) aren't taking it seriously. Avocado toast, anyone? So for starters, fuck yeah there are kids that don't belong there. Been teaching for 30 years? That means Professor Bookbinder started out when 60% of high school graduates went to college and passed through 70%... right up to the Great Recession, where every millennial learned they'd been lied to, that a college degree didn't guarantee them a good job, that there was such a thing as bad student debt, and that they weren't making enough, really, to justify not going straight to retail. Tuition, on the other hand? I started my bachelor's in '95. Prof got his Ph.D in '95. We were in college at the same time; he's six years ahead of me. And what I can say is a year of tuition at a PAC-10 public school cost less in '95 than a quarter of public voc-tech cost in 2018 in the same zip code.. Enrollment also dropped 15%. So here's what we know: adjusted for inflation, college averages twice as expensive now as when Prof was paying for it. So why fucking do it? Because you have to. But still. if you're there anyway, why not take it seriously? Well, because you don't have to... ...and it doesn't fucking matter anyway. And I mean, look. Even back when The Professor and I were in school, the smart money was on internships. They made people ignore your grades even before computers existed. Not even my second job asked to see a transcript because I had work experience. And if that internship is unpaid? As they mostly are these days? Who even cares what your grades are? So the kids the Professor is seeing are (1) rich enough that the tuition doesn't matter and (2) aware that the grades don't matter because everyone else is fucking gone, man. Here's another li'l detail that the Professor elided: They're passing anyway. So why wouldn't you feed Dostoevsky into ChatGPT? "Kids these days! Playing everything on story mode!" They paid fuckin' $80 for the game, gramps, they'll enjoy it how they want. Maybe you tryhards should sit and think a little about the demise of CounterStrike and the rise of Bejeweled and your role in the death of the culture you're championing. ANECDATA, 30 YEARS APART 1. DENTON'S FOLLY I was in engineering at a time when Boeing was the majority of employment in the area. Boeing, of course, wanted foreign workers because they could underpay them, but they didn't like that these foreign workers had poor written English skills. So they leaned on the Dean of Engineering, Denise Denton, to shove all engineering students through an ESL course. All of us. Even those of us who had our English requirements waived due to test scores. They claimed it was "tech writing" but it was dumb shit like "5 paragraph essay format" and "how to PowerPoint." It was well below the GRE English every student was required to learn, a remedial class dressed up as a 300-level degree requirement because of cynical corporate chummery. Those of us who had done this shit in 8th grade were filled with seething resentment and the TA knew it; she retaliated in kind until she realized that we were likely to fill out our evaluation forms to her detriment. She broke down in tears on that day, literally putting her head in her hands, and we ensured she never worked in academia ever again anyway. Boeing? Well their engineers went on strike, McDonnell Douglas destroyed their corporate culture and they went on to make the 737-MAX. Ms. Denton skedaddled a year later, pissed off everyone in the UC system for kowtowing to corporate power and jumped 33 stories to her death ahead of an embezzlement investigation that nobody talks about anymore because she was also openly gay and yay representation even when it's being represented by a dishonest corporate shill and the only reason I bring it up is I still hope it fucking hurt because fuckin' 20 years later I am still salty over the waste of time and money and I got my vengeance. I feel the 18-year-old kid being dragged through The Poisonwood Bible. The Professor seems to think that not only are the kids incapable of reading, they also are incapable of reading the room - he thinks they're stupid, the school passes them anyway, the only thing that matters is their fucking money and somehow this is their fault? 2. HOW COLLEGES DIE There aren't that many schools that train midwives. It's not a well-paid profession; most of the women (and they're almost all women) who go into it do so out of mission and zeal. It's also been white as hell for 40-plus years which is a real problem for the League of Wine Moms who are a little troubled by how shitty it is to have a baby when you're black. You can't beat representation for improving diversity, equity and inclusion so the real no-snark solution is lots of black midwives. Only... they're going to be surrounded by white women. And if they want to be helpful they're better off with a nursing degree. So... the only way to increase minority enrollment is to subsidize the shit out of it. Three quarters of that program is now minority students paying zero. The other quarter is white girls paying $100k a year. And it's not like the tuition is waived for the minority girls - it's paid by a grant. To the school. Who is effectively making $100k a year for every minority student they keep enrolled. Who are all students who chose to do this, rather than something that pays better, for various inscrutable reasons. This has driven down enrollment something fierce; the program has gone from 70 students out of 200 applicants to 14 students out of 14 applicants in the space of ten years. That number drops by fifty percent after the first year. Their last graduating class was four students. And they all suck. they don't show up on time, they don't get anything done, and they don't care because they're getting passed anyway because the school makes $30k/quarter ensuring they pass. And the white girls who see this? Fuck yeah they're getting passed too because we can't have them bitching to daddy about DEI shit (because they're all being paid for by daddy). And the lady who found the grant was driven out of the university for being white and attempting to hold her free students to account; in ten years they've gone from "take notes on this" to "here's your notes on this" to "here's the questions and answers from the test next week, try to memorize them." They're understandably worried that DOGE won't renew their funding in June but let's be honest - they've been in a death spiral for fifteen years and fucking just end it already. ____________________________________________________ Professor Bookbinder is making the mistake that the students staring back at him have anything in common with him. They don't. They're grinding through their requirements because their presence in his company for a quarter or two is just another hoop. Try and tell me this guy has one face for Substack and another for his students.
“By 1992, about 17% of college students had participated in an internship, with that number increasing to about 50% by 2008. This year, in our most recent data, 75% of graduating seniors said they participated in some type of internship experience,” says Kahn.
What am I supposed to do? Keep standards high and fail them all? That’s not an option for untenured faculty who would like to keep their jobs. I’m a tenured full professor. I could probably get away with that for a while, but sooner or later the Dean’s going to bring me in for a sit-down. Plus, if we flunk out half the student body and drive the university into bankruptcy, all we’re doing is depriving the good students of an education.
Oh, they will come to my office hours (occasionally) because they are bombing the course, and tell me that they have been doing the reading, but it’s obvious they are lying. The most charitable interpretation is that they looked at some of the words, didn’t understand anything, pretended that counted as reading, and returned to looking at TikTok.
We’ve been solving the wrong problem for decades and backstopping the problem by blaming colleges. People weren’t doing this until most of the decent paying factory and related jobs went to India, China, and Bangladesh. Back in the day, kids right out of high school could get jobs that could at least net you a comfortable life in a small apartment, and depending on the industry, possibly on the path to home ownership. Today, that path is mostly gone, and as such people who would have never seen college as something they want are shunted to college where they would compete with more diligent scholars for a dwindling (thanks computer networks and soon enough add AI to this) number of desk jobs where they pretend to care about excel spreadsheets of meaningless data. The actual problem isn’t college or student loans. Those problems would solve themselves if we solved the actual problem— there aren’t enough good jobs that actually pay a living wage, and because there are so few, businesses are requiring college (and doing more above that at this point like an MA and internships) to the tune of mortgage levels of cost. If there were enough “can live on my own and possibly afford to have children” paying jobs the business could not hide them behind the paywall of college because someone else wouldn’t and the employees would choose that path instead. If we focused on creating those jobs, and therefore creating a situation where businesses compete for workers instead of one in which workers compete for jobs, then people would choose college less often and costs would go down a bit to attract more students.
No, the actual problem is college and student loans and I will show you why. ninety two percent of student loan debt is federal. you fills out your FAFSA you gets your check. This is because first the FFEL then the FDLP guarantee these loans, therefore they are the lowest rates available to anyone. Note that these debts are not serviced by the US Government, merely originated. THIS IS IMPORTANT: the servicers of these debts have zero input into who gets the loans and zero risk. If you default on your student loan, your loan company reports you in default. The federal government pays out the total that you owe to the servicer. The government then garnishes your wages etc to pick-axe what you owe. That's been the same since 1958. What changed with the 2005 Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention And Consumer Protection Act was that discharging student loan debt through bankruptcy went from "you can't do it until seven years after you graduate" to "you can't do it period ever we will claw your student loan debt back from your estate." Sure - NAFTA moved a bunch of manufacturing jobs overseas. they had already been drowned by the service sector and of the jobs that required more education, a goodly portion of them were in - wait for it - education: 'cuz here's the thing. You gotta go to college to get a good job. The government will give you whatever money you need to go to college. Loan companies will make that money available to you no matter what because it's not their fucking money and even private loans are absolutely risk-free because not even bankruptcy will spare you. What happened next was entirely predictable. Jeff Selingo has written like four books about this. I've read three of them. Ten years ago he argued that the way to pick a college is by the size of their endowment because it showed they were less predatory. Five years ago he argued that you shouldn't even bother, just find a b-tier place that will give you lots of scholarships because it ultimately doesn't matter. I was in architecture when all that sweet, sweet tuition money was flowing in back in like 2000-2004; my name is on the drawings for a couple dozen buildings that wouldn't exist without the bankruptcy protection gold rush. And I mean, here's the thing: for 30 years the only metric anyone cared about was US News and World Report (really!) and they very stringently never factored cost into their rankings. It's the fucking colleges. non-academic staff has doubled in the past 25 years. You could play chicken-and-egg: if everyone is going to college, why not make it a requirement? If every job requires a college degree, why not send everyone? But no, it's not because all the good, no-college jobs went away. It's because they became college jobs without earning anyone any more money, and they became college jobs because everyone was going to college, and everyone was going to college because we created a society where eighteen year olds signed up to take on $120k in debt to get a degree that might pay them $40k a year eventually. You know what everyone in the world admires? German engineering. You know what's a joke? German engineering. If you're an "ingeneur" in Germany you spent two years at trade school after finishing tenth grade. I have a super-skookum top-of-its-class German CNC machine that's the envy of the world and it was clearly designed and assembled by trade school kids. Anyone who has ever worked on a BMW (as opposed to merely driving one) will back me up - there's a whole bunch of amateurish bullshit in everything coming off the Continent. And yet. Most people would rather have a BMW than a Cadillac. Maybe the jobs are fine. Maybe it's the fucking colleges.The actual problem isn’t college or student loans.
If you could get a good job without college, then the price you’re willing to pay for college is elastic like anything else. You would never sign up to spend $30K a year for a BA if there were large enough pools of good jobs you could get without doing that. Hell, a lot of Gen Z are choosing trade schools over college now because 120K for a $40K salary is a terrible deal. But as long as most good jobs require college, people will not be cost conscious about college. And therefore colleges can get away with charging eye-watering tuition for an education that’s arguably worse than the one their grandparents paid $550 a semester for. Nobody wants to opt out because I mean what’s the alternative? Maybe you can do trades, but if you can’t, you either go to college or go wait tables, stock shelves, or collect garbage. Nobody’s going to say no if they want to be middle class. And until it gets fixed and people have realistic and viable options to not go to college and be able to afford rent and groceries on one paycheck, schools can morph into club med and add conserve room service, massage parlors, and a personal butler for every student to the tune of 200K or more a year. People will still sign the loan papers because the alternative is Walmart.
And if you slap a college degree requirement on every job it's not. There's like five paragraphs up there that directly refute your arguments. The trade school thing is new - and I say that having spent three quarters in trade school within the past ten years. Even then the trade school represents a weird imbalance; the rich kids were leaning harder into 4-years while the poor kids were discovering the difference between "trade school degree" and "learning as you go" was $20k you don't have to pay back. It's the fuckin' colleges and the system of colleges. The jobs did not go away. There's a whole f'n chart up there showing what a lie that is. MORE FUCKING ANECDATA BECAUSE APPARENTLY PLATITUDES ARE ALL ANYBODY THINKS ANYMORE 1. The "Harvard of the Cascades" Friend of mine has a daughter who was pulling in about $6k a month as a babysitter at the age of 17. She's a hella good babysitter. Not spectacular at academics? It actually makes me uncomfortable how much her dad rags on her. She looked at a few degree programs, all highly competitive. The one she opted into has an admittance rate of around 5%. Her dad was super-stoked when she got in. It's for dental hygienics. Little mountain community college three hours out of town. 70 students per quarter. I was talking to my dental hygienist (her name is Gina, and she's awesome) and she said "yeah, it's always been that way. Anybody out of that program writes their own ticket. I had seven job offers without having to apply for anything." Gina graduated in '89. The other programs my friend's daughter were also med-tech related; they were all also programs utterly bereft of boys. 2. What if you threw a degree program and nobody came I went to a couple regents' meetings of the machining program I was in. It was one of four degree programs that particular school ditched in the three years I had any involvement with it. The basic problem was that students would enroll, employers would offer them jobs after a quarter or two, graduation rate would drop to 17% because the only people left in the program were the ones nobody wanted to hire. That college lost their automotive repair program, their small engine repair program and their welding program while I was there and is in the process of losing their machining program (three other local colleges already have). People in that program were leaving for jobs that paid $60, $70k a year, no degree required... or they were doing Running Start. The only guys I know who finished their degrees were a buddy of mine who was going into business for himself and a retiree who mostly liked hanging out with the kids all day. In the time I've been gone they've churned faculty four times because as a state school, their operating expenses are tied to graduation rate and as a state school, their salary levels are flat across the state so an assistant professor in Microsoft's back yard gets the same salary as an assistant professor teaching dental hygiene three hours up into the mountains. __________________________________________________ You don't go to school to be an electrician. You pull wire for an electrician until you're an apprentice, then you twist nuts until you're a journeyman, then you earn enough hours to get a bond and you're done without ever cracking a book. Plumbing is similar. To no one's surprise, there are a lot of "dude jobs" that end up the same - I've got like six people I'm paying over $80 an hour to right now and not a one of them has so much as a quarter of voc. tech under their belts. I'm waiting on all of them - they're all busy AF and if I don't have work for them I get to wait in line with everyone else. You hear about the death of the construction industry and dumb shit like that but if I wanted a GC to take over my job I would be waiting until TWENTY TWENTY EIGHT. There are plenty of jobs that require actual job training. There are plenty of jobs that don't require actual job training. What happened is we ended up with so many people going to college that the ones that don't require actual job training started requiring a degree just to thin the pile, which ended up with a bunch of kids spending four years getting a bachelor's in English just so they can end up in the right pile. You can want this to be about globalization. You can pretend that this is somehow related to off-shoring. But you don't have any facts to back it up. It's about the proliferation of needless degrees and the inflation of the costs of earning them. Full stop.If you could get a good job without college, then the price you’re willing to pay for college is elastic like anything else.
we are all weeping and wailing and feeling so bad about this out here in the parking lot to civil society does anyone know what elite overproduction means? i can't read because of DEI
Having just completed an associates at community college at the age of fifty two weeks ago I'll stand as the authority on kids in school today! Seriously young people were less likely to finish the program than older students, mostly because they would miss classes and fall behind and stop showing up, just like I did at their age. 15 credit semesters are a bitch and if you aren't ready to devote yourself to them it won't end well. Text books are a scam. I've worked my way up through linear algebra in previous college experiences and if the problem sets weren't in the book than I wasn't going to open the book. You Tube has the worlds best lecturers available at anytime for free you just got to find the one that understands why you aren't getting it. I bought the text books for my first two terms of my associates and then never again. I got a 4.0 and I didn't use Chat GPT for the bulk of my classwork. I'll admit to using it for my high purity water class after I had already gotten a low purity water job and abandon all hope of making less money at Intel. I felt like I met a few young people who were very on the ball in classes and this wasn't at one of your fancy universities, these were knuckle dragging community college student.