Over the past few years, I have been telling my friends in academia that the Republicans are going to turn on the whole institution. Because my friends don’t know any Republicans personally (well, except for me) it has all seemed abstract and kind of vague. Pew now is reporting that over the past few years Republican are getting “woke” to higher education. My own personal impression is that the bleeding edge of academic activists have become much more abrasively Left-wing, even if there is a silent moderate majority.
This is not going to end well for an institution which relies in large part upon public monies (even private universities focused on research rely on public grants to fund laboratories and fellowships). I see the 2020s as being a decade when the USA will actually start to tighten its belt due to excessive fiscal obligations (entitlements and our military empire).
Freddie de Boer wrote a good piece about this a few years ago. I agree that it is coming and insular academic elites are mostly to blame.
https://fredrikdeboer.com/2017/07/11/the-mass-defunding-of-higher-education-thats-yet-to-come/
“I am increasingly convinced that a mass defunding of public higher education is coming to an unprecedented degree and at an unprecedented scale. People enjoy telling me that this has already occurred, as if I am not sufficiently informed about higher education to know that state support of our public universities has declined precipitously. But things can always get worse, much worse. And given the endless controversies on college campuses of conservative speakers getting shut out and conservative students feeling silenced, and given how little the average academic seems to care about appealing to the conservative half of this country, the PR work is being done for the enemies of public education by those within the institutions themselves.”
This is getting noticed, but I’m not sure the system can reform itself.
The People v. Their Universities: How Popular Discontent Is Reshaping Higher Education Law
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3417967
The Democrats have tabled student loan debt as an issue. Their impulse is, as always, to create a giveaway that impoverishes people who received no benefit and does nothing to stop the bleeding.
I think the Republican response should be twofold. They should acknowledge that the current system has placed a terrible burden on young people, but that it is unfair to discharge debts without an honest effort to repay them.
To that end they should propose that a student loan debtor should be able to file a petition in bankruptcy court and to receive a discharge if they pay 10% of their after tax income for a period of 5 years. The payments should be applied to principal and any amount of interest and fees should be discharged. They should also allow discharge of parents and grandparents who have guaranteed student loan debt in all ordinary bankruptcy proceedings.
The second branch is to prevent the colleges from exploiting another generation of students. Wage and price controls should be imposed on any college that takes Federal money, including by way of tax exemptions.
Tuition should include books and fees, and be limited to $10,000 per year. The total number courses per year and for a BA should also be limited. Eventually we should eliminate non-germane courses (distribution requirements etc.) and cut BAs to 3 years.
The wages should be pinned to an objective standard like the federal GS scale. A tenured professor should be paid no more than a GS-15. College presidents should not be paid more than the President of the United states. Deans should not make more than Cabinet Secretaries. The number of salaried non instructional personnel should be limited to less than half the number of teachers.
Another issue is the Admissions scandal where parents were bribing college sports coaches for admissions favors.
The real scandal is the current admissions system. It is designed to allow the colleges to use it to favor the upper class children of the coastal elite. The bribery was an inevitable side effect.
The only possible way out of this bind is to remove control of the process from the colleges. Many educated people believe that admissions should be controlled by a third party testing authority as it is in many other countries. Their intuition is that such a system would be acceptable to everyone.
There are objective systems in Europe and East Asia, the kids take examinations such as the French Baccalauréat or the German Abitur. The tests are written essay type exams, and some of them are even oral. They are far harder to cheat on than the multiple choice parodies of examinations used in the US such as the SAT.
Testing wont work
A testing system would make many large and powerful political groups very unhappy. It is clear to me that a sufficient portion of the public, no doubt concentrated in certain groups, has rejected the very idea that testing can be fair or efficient.
American parents are not prepared to find out that their precious snowflakes have skated through their inferior high schools without learning anything. And certain classes have not inculcated a love of learning among their children, nor have they called out the politicians and teachers unions who conspire against them.
None of these people will accept the verdict of a test or system of tests. They will fall for the siren song of demagogues who claim that the system is based on sexism, intolerance, xenophobia, homophobia, islamophobia, racism, and bigotry.
The only admission system I can think of that is objective, transparent, and fair is a random draw.
A lottery would be fair to everyone. No one could claim that they were handicapped by their race or the fact that they were limited by circumstance to poorly run and financed public schools. No one would be advantaged by being able to afford exam tutors, admissions consultants, social justice expeditions to third world countries, alumni donations, or participation in private school only sports like rowing.