The Closing of the American Mind

[crazy canuck]

It's not "a bit". A lot of the UKs problems really do track back to the smash and grab period.
It's well observed that the 1982 Industrial Training Act (amongst other things...) had a dire impact on the amount of tradesmen qualifying - make it so it's no longer mandatory to train apprentices and companies will decide not to do that, who'd have thought.

Our apprenticeship model changed in the same way shortly after that, with similar consequences.

[Sheilbh]

Probably doesn't help that new grads now have the same unemployment rate as non-grads.

Interesting gender split on this recently flagged in the FT:


Still a difference in the UK (about 3% for graduate and 5-6% for non-graduates). But the "graduate premium" is shrinking. In part this is because the minimum wage has significantly increased in recent years while productivity hasn't grown much which means there's basically been wage compression. It's one of the reasons I think the government's perhaps not thought through the impact of increasing payroll taxes and being keen on AI.

In Canada it is the colleges not the universities that are suffering from the drop in student visas.  And mainly in Ontario, where there were a number of degree mills.

Yeah similar issues in the UK of some fairly shady "universities" that seem to basically just be degree mills to get visas (at which point many disappear into the grey economy). It was something I didn't think was an issue when Theresa May banged on about it as Home Secretary but I've read a few reports recently from higher education people and I think it has been a serious issue.

In the UK the problem is slightly different on foreign students (for the legit universities) in particular universities fees from domestic students are capped. Those fees are unlikely to increase. Under the coalition the cap was tripled and the system became a lot more painful and regressive (this was also in part driven by statistical agencies counting the cost of those loans a bit more accurately). But it's basically a significant graduate tax (9%) which kicks in fairly low - and while wage growth is above inflation so is the cost of rent. Add in the cost of inflation (and wage growth) for universities and they've had an effective 30% cut in their income. So about a third are in deficit ad there have been course closures and redundancies - again particularly hitting the arts and humanities. The UK's most prestigious creative writing course has basically been shut down, for example. (I'd just add here - this has a huge knock on effect for local economies as setting up/expanding universities has been basically almost the only effective regional regeneration policy in the last 40-50 years).

This means universities have turned to foreign students. This is kind of fine for the prestigious research universities. So UCL, for example, only gets about 10% of its income from home students - 90% is from international students and research grants. While for a less prestigious university, such as Brighton who have had serious redundancies, over 50% of their income is from home students. This has led to those prestigious research universities focusing on expanding international recruitment - so UCL went from 9,000 international students in 2010 to about 25,000 in 2020 (pre-covid). At the same time, the number of home students have fallen. I think this is a big A-level result week story below (I suspect the Daily Telegraph looking for a pretty 18 year old girl with great A levels etc). However home students haven't reduced that much so that expansion in international students has increase the overall student body and reduced access to facilities, space and housing - plus a shift towards short-term teaching contracts with young academics.

It's unsustainable - but there's not any clear policy solution. Fee increases are unlikely to be politically possible (and, due to the statistical changes would actually count as a cost for the Treasury). Direct taxpayer funding for universities was the situation before fees and there was consistent underfunding, plus hard caps on the number of students (still the situation in Scotland which didn't adopt tuition fees) because direct funding had to compete with (and lose to) other funding priorities like the NHS, schools, pensions etc. There's similar issues with a graduate tax - part of the reason tuition fees helped fund a huge expansion in higher education is because it was hypothecated to universities. Any graduate tax would go into the giant revenue stream at HMT and, again, probably end up on pensions and the NHS. A cap would be politically difficult, economically self harming and the expansion of universities has been driven by rising demand from parents and students that doesn't feel likely to abate any time soon (on that, I'd note that apparently sharp-elbowed middle class parents are absolutely dominating the degree-apprenticeship programs where students earn while they learn).

And universities have league tables etc but are effectively unregulated (far less regulated than school exams in our national curriculum). So the competition side doesn't work effectively and one way we've seen that, rather depressingly is wage inflation - the number of firsts has gone from about 16% in 2010 to 38% in 2020. At the same time student satisfaction has fallen. They think they're not getting value for money, they're not getting good quality teaching or decent contact hours (even when I was at university in the 2000s the History students started protesting over the lack of contact hours as by third year I think they were down to two contact hours a week).

At the same time teaching and research has been subject to a lot more regulation and demands from funders in the last few decades. So amid all of that there's been a 60% increase in the number of senior managers and non-academic professionals.

As I say it all feels unsustainable and becoming more and more acute each year but without any clear obvious answer. As is often the case where I think I end up is that fees are going to stay and do have a beneficial purpose (hypothecated funding) but we should make repayment progressive again - but they're not going to increase (and we should make grants and bursaries more available). International students are broadly good but there probably needs to be regulation both on the degree mills (which are often "branches" of real universities) plus, I think, a degree of protection for home students (I'm also not sure it's great to have our higher education sector a downturn in China away from collapse). And I think there needs to be some form of cap and central planning of places aiming to both keep universities viable and maintain broad curriculums, even if that means universities can't expand as much as they'd like. I'd also look at lifting the, I think, over-regulation of teaching and research and the demands of the research funding bodies - fewer KPIs and administrators to monitor the KPIs etc.

But that's not going to be popular - and I doubt it'll happen. But I think we are probably close to some universities hitting real financial crisis. And I think some of those factors echo the situation in the US we're just a few years behind.

[Savonarola]

(Apologies for the slightly puckish title )

It's been closing for, what? 40 years now, you'd think it would be pretty near shut now at this point.

Bloom's book came out about shortly before I attended college.  Some of the criticisms, (e.g.  students confusing their taste in music with rebellion), were just.   I have no basis to compare his criticism of how the university had changed, but, as his solution (return to the foundational works of Western Civilization) was identical to the one proposed in the preface of 1952's "Great Books of the Western World", I'm skeptical.

(And obviously it didn't inspire me to go get a liberal arts degree focusing great books.)

[Savonarola]

To add to that this email, which did the rounds from a University of Chicago Classicist:

Mehercule, nihilne sanctum est?

I'm surprised to see that out of the University of Chicago, as they're well known for academic subjects (I don't believe that they even have an engineering department.)  It reminds me of something my brother's ex-mother-in-law told me.  She was a dean at UC Davis during the graduate assistant slave revolt strike.  She's a chemical engineer (and her deanship was somehow tied into the college of engineering) and their graduate students didn't strike since there's enough hard money in engineering to pay the graduate students a living wage.  There isn't in many other fields, so one has to be independently wealthy or be able to rely on your parents.  This limits the sort of student who can get an advanced degree outside something like STEM or business or something that will likely lead to a high paying career (such as law.)

[Grey Fox]

And there is also a lack of people going into trades. Like almost everything else Social media is to blame.

Makes too many young people think they can be successful being their own boss.

I wouldn't blame social media for this. In the UK Thatcher is to blame. I believe in America it tracks back some way too.
If anything social media is perhaps helping it with giving good visibility and a respectable image of trades.

They are not going into trades because of social media. They are trying to be influencers that do trades.

Reagan is to blame.

[The Minsky Moment]

(Apologies for the slightly puckish title )

I thought it well put - highlights the extraordinary cultural shift on the right, from defending traditional high scholarship and humanities against the perceived evils of intellectual shallowness and callow sophistry to championing crude careerism and anti-intellectualism.

Bloom's critique was mostly misguided and oddly idiosyncratic. He either truly didn't understand or willfully misconstrued his academic opponents, and - speaking as someone who was around college age at the time - his commentary on students was basically a fancified academic rant of "get of my lawn."  It did generate real interest at the time, and a clear left-right divide, but some of the more thoughtful reviewers and commentators pointed out that the partisan lean was not really so clear.  The zeitgeist that Bloom reacted to was not so much the echoes of the 60s era hippy protestors, but the shift on the mainstream right from the Establishment GOP of foundations and think tanks to the ultra-materialist Reaganite GOP.  From the era of Buckley and God and Man at Yale to the era of Bret Easton Ellis.  Decades later, it's not surprising that Bloom's book can be read more as an indictment of the American political right than as a supporting tract.

[Sheilbh]

Yeah - although I slightly wonder if thinking it through it's actually more on point.

Yes there was a "get off my lawn" element to the students section but I also remember it being basically that students of that generation were empty. They did not have the content morally and ethically to experience the thrill Bloom experienced when confronting a "great books" education. And I wonder if that's more on point looking at a lot of the right around Trump now. I regularly think of Ross Douthat's line during Trump's first campaign that if you didn't like the Religious Right, just wait until you meet the post-Religious Right. I'm not so sure the attack on an emptiness is so far off the mark? (And again an attack on the zeitgeist of that time - we can say many things about hippies, they were broadly believers in things.)

I also slightly wonder if part of the crisis in the US is exactly as you say on the right. But also how that interacts with what's gone on in the left. If the right aren't going to defend traditional high scholarship and (a particular vision of) the humanities, it's also not something that I think the American left's particularly invested in defending in recent years for a variety of reasons. It's perhaps why those programs are so exposed when there's political pressure on one side (including from donors), financial pressure, AI and falling enrollment. The "traditional" humanities academy is maybe lacking any defenders or people able to push back against administrators shuttering whole schools and areas of study?

[Oexmelin]

I'd obviously have a lot to say, but don't have much time now as I prepare for the semester

[The Minsky Moment]

Yes there was a "get off my lawn" element to the students section but I also remember it being basically that students of that generation were empty. They did not have the content morally and ethically to experience the thrill Bloom experienced when confronting a "great books" education.

Bloom had been a professor at Yale, which had then (and now and since WW2 I think) a 2-year special course "package" focused on great books.  There was strong demand.  The Dean of Students around the era Closing was written was a politically conservative professor of classics and the father of two very prominent neo-cons: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Kagan.

During my own college years -- early 1990s -- so around this time period, while postmodern theory was really big, there was more interest among the student body in talking about the classics and modern philosophy (modern as in Machiavelli/Bodin/Descartes --> Marx/Mill etc).  I say this as someone more academically focused in history and economics.  And of course even those interested in postmodern theory were also engaging in the "great books" as one needed to be familiar with those ideas to understand postmodern criticism.

Basically, Bloom was full of shit.  Sure he could find shallow students; there always has been and always will be plenty of those to go around in every time and place.  Indeed, they fill the pages of the Socratic dialogues. Something you'd think a prominent translator of the Republic would have noticed. 

[Sheilbh]

That's probably very fair - especially as I don't have any doubt that Bloom was deeply elitist so I think his view was probably always that only a very few would reach any heights he envisaged.

I think my read is slightly different in that I think Bloom's view and story is also the very important, interesting, mid-century American Jewish story of intellectual excitement and joy (and, generally, depth). Incidentally I think there is a UK equivalent which is explicitly/solely class-based. For Bloom it's Chicago, for many others it was City College of New York.

But I think of his description of students not having enough prejudices when they start - and I don't think he means that in a simple "they're not racist/anti-semitic/homophobic enough". I think he means that they were no longer arriving with relatively fully-formed world view that would be challenged (perhaps destroyed) and liberated through education. Which, I think, is at least in part a common theme in the stories by those American Jews who wrote about their intellectual expriences in the early/mid-20th century. So it's not so much that they're just shallow but that there was nothing internally (like religious faith or inherited tradition - or the socialist movement and Stalinist/Trot fights of the 20s and 30s) for them to grapple with and confront and emerge out of in some way (perhaps that strengthened, or utterly transformed). While the prejudice-less engage with the "great books" but they are just one more piece of a consumerist life and there's no real "openness" because its not one by vacating a space of prejudice into knowledge, it was just always empty so you can perhaps flick through things.

So on the contrast of the right then and now, I think there is something to that when you look at, say, JD Vance, or Blake Masters, or Josh Hawley (I think all Ivy grads) or, for that matter, the sort of stoicism quote/Marcus Aurelius vapidity of the online right and Silicon Valley. To be completely honest I also recognise a fair bit of myself in that critique too, I'm not comparing myself with people who've done more like Vance.

Although I have to be honest I always find the whole "great books" debate a bit weird. I think possibly just because our system is less free in terms of students picking options. So here you apply for and study a subject (and there'll be choices within that). But also I'm not aware of any equivalent to something like "Western Civ" courses in the US.

[Valmy]

The Dean of Students around the era Closing was written was a politically conservative professor of classics and the father of two very prominent neo-cons: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Kagan.

Heh. I watched a lot of his lectures as part of Yale's open courses back in the day.

[Valmy]

Yes and the social media ad system is making getting some revenue extremely easy. It totally gives all false idea of the world.

Even incredibly successful top 1% Youtubers seem to struggle to have a middle class lifestyle and that is only sustainable so long as they can keep the show rolling. And no benefits, no vacation, no retirement it is a total gig economy job. Only the truly blessed 0.001% are truly getting massive wealth.

And how many young kids actually have something interesting enough to say to sustain a youtube channel that successful for that long? You really need skills, expertise, life experiences, and that kind of thing (and/or massive charisma and good looks) to stand out in the pool of slop.

Granted I really only know about youtube, but I presume other social media is similar.

[Jacob]

It's the perfect VC dream economic model. Get massive amounts of free labour that generates constant revenues for the owning class, while only a pittance goes to even the successful content generators except the top 0.00001% (who often get the revenue from leveraging their fame in other areas, rather directly from the content).

And that's before we go into how level the playing field is to become successful.

[Grey Fox]

It's the pro athlete business model extended to another sphere of life.
It's not a great idea.

[Sheilbh]

I think fandom of teams but also the online Messi v Ronaldo GOAT stuff is actually useful in a lot of what's going on in the world or at least western societies.