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.

“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.

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:

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.

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.

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.

Try and tell me this guy has one face for Substack and another for his students.