A good number of schools already do this via institutional financial aid packages. Depends on the school. I dont think that's the unbundling that's necessary here.
What needs to be unbundled is the teaching and research. Most professors at research schools dont care about teaching, the tenure committees dont care about it and the schools absolutely do not care about it (hence 300+ student classes)
What American university has separate education-only tuition?
I think you are underestimating the cost of amenities that are bundled together into tuition. Only about 30% of university spending is on instruction.
Large amounts of spending on research is largely restricted to elite universities, so your proposal would have very little impact on the vast majority of universities.
Exactly this. I don't think many undergrads realize that at many of the prestige schools the actual teaching is way at the bottom of the priority list for many faculty.
In my opinion, bundling of research and pedagogy is very valuable.
I graduated from an extremely selective free college. The students were very bright, but the school was always strapped for cash. There were no PhD programs and faculty did little research. Pedagogy was excellent and my peers were smart and motivated. I learned a lot, but there wasn’t much research happening. I supplemented with a summer research internship at a different school, and a corporate internship.
I graduated with the second highest gpa in my class and had an almost perfect GRE. I expected to get in to every grad program I applied to. I also came from a stifling religious background and modest material conditions (my dad was a teacher).
I was rejected by a lot of schools, which really surprised me. I got into a very good, but not super elite PhD program. I eventually learned that the reason I was rejected by the top schools was that I didn’t have a lot of academic research experience.
Research universities provide opportunities for students to engage in research. Teaching schools don’t. If you want to get into research, the former is vastly preferable.
At the same time, giving faculty access to the large supply of cheap student labor is good for advancing human knowledge.
Finally, participating in research is itself pedagogical for the student, as they become familiar with how knowledge is actually produced and vetted.
I mean, that's an argument for why research and teaching bundling works for *students who want to go to grad school*. Thats a fairly small % of students.
There's a simpler solution, at least for motivated kids. After high-school, attend a community college (almost free for residents) for the first two years of (pretty much) standardized courses (101s through 202s). Then transfer in to a four-year college/university as a junior for the upperclassmen lectures/labs/seminars and your degree. There may be a need for a few "bridging" courses, but that can be handled during summer school and/or January/winter terms as well as independent study. The "fun-and-games" and social life requirements (dorms/meal plans/etc.) are typically demanded only of first- and/or second-year students in four-year colleges and universities.
The point of higher education institutions is to equip students with knowledge, education and skills to became employable. The burden is on universities, tenure professors who teach and do the research and administrators who provide the support services like careers services. Furthermore, Americans are also footing the bill for the university athletics. I have so many questions about that, and it just seems so wrong - somebody needs to press reset!
My understanding is higher ed is intended to produce knowledge about the world…and then employable skills based on that knowledge relative to its relevance to the market. Most humanities research has been forced to bend to support/prove social justice causes, thereby producing irrelevant knowledge at best, divisive blindness and identity-based bigotry at worst…aka unemployable skills. Remove that and more students will become more useful upon graduation.
There’s so much wrong with the university system in the US that it drowns out what’s so right in terms of research, high quality education in important fields, etc. There’s also a lot wrong in terms of the choices that students make. It’s all a mess.
To have a shot at those employers, you'd need to essentially arrive on campus ready to do recruitment for the one summer internship that you'd get. That seems unlikely for most transfer students.
The real key is the early club-joining and campus recruitment processes as well as summer internships that students at prestigious schools would have more exposure to early on. I think the CC-to-transfer approach would work out better for those looking to apply to med school/law school, but increasingly those admissions (especially med school) want to see more activities, research, etc. that transfers would already be behind on as well.
It's a well intentioned idea but misses the problem of basic arithmetic: there are far more people than there are available slots for prestigious jobs. Even if everyone had a BA there would have to be some new criterion to winnow people out
Sure, there's always new things being added in terms of expectations to winnow people out for those jobs. And it gets much harder for transfer students who don't have two years of networking and learning social mores to meet those expectations (much less transfer from a CC to a target school for those in the first place).
The degree is issued by the four-year college/university. Many states require colleges/universities and community colleges to agree on what courses are "core" and are fully (or partially) creditable from one type institution to the other.
Prospective employers rarely delve into applicants' educational background at this level of detail. The degree (and, rarely, GPA) are all that is generally required.
Employers are under considerable jeopardy when examining or interviewing prospective hires. They ask the minimum necessary to qualify the candidate pool in order to keep HR and the government happy.
I think elite employers are more worried about screening out undesirable candidates, of which attending a college that admits anyone would rank pretty highly.
Sorry, I missed your "elite" employers qualification. Those who compete for offers of employment from such employers are generally not sensitive to cost or bloat of unnecessary courses and activities. They also find significant benefit from the social and academic relationships they establish at elite colleges and university, so would largely be expected to pay whatever the cost is for the "full" elite higher education experience.
Well, not everyone is hoping to work for an “elite” employer. If you’re able to get a bachelors degree from an affordable school, even if you graduate a year or two “late”, you’re under less pressure to earn a high salary to pay off loans.
Correct. People without ambition for wealth and joining the ruling class can lead perfectly happy lives … but they can presumably also do that without any higher education.
Depends. Engineers like myself aren’t “ruling class”, nor do we hold the prestige of doctors, lawyers, politicians, or others… but a college degree is necessary to get hired as an engineer.
The funny thing about the ruling class in America, is that you can change ruling classes. Don’t like California? Move to Idaho. Don’t like Florida? Move to Washington. The federal executive is largely can’t be changed on demand, but has far less influence in your life that your state and local governments do.
I am not referring to politicians per se as the ruling class but rather the elites who largely select them. As I said you can live a perfectly happy life without an elite education or employer, and it will make those aspiring to join their ranks happy to have less competition.
Many schools are restricting the ability to live off campus and require students to stay at least one, sometimes two or more years in dorms. Mealplans of some sort are also often required.
On the one hand, I'm sympathetic to this idea for all the reasons Yascha explains.
On the other hand, literally the most important and memorable part of my college experience was sharing meals and conversation with fellow classmates (at my school, almost everyone lives in dorms all four years), and I think having a big part of the class miss that experience would have been unfortunate for both them and for me.
I have been a philosophy professor for 40 years and I just retired emeritus. I have served on and chaired every committee imaginable from rank and tenure to curriculum. The most stubborn self-convinced people I have ever known are tenured faculty. They believe what they believe and that is what they believe and the only way to convince them of anything is to convince them that what you propose is merely an addendum to what they already believe.
These ideas are worth considering, but at the top of any list of reforms should be recognition of this problem: way too many young people attend both four year and community colleges. Millions of so-called students merely accumulate seat time, take on massive debt, and accomplish little of intellectual or vocational value. Stated bluntly, they don't much care about genuine learning; they are in college because their parents coerced them to go, they didn't know what else to do, it's non-stop party time, etc.
Yes, there are serious students achieving at a high level who will be major contributors to society. Some students will continue their intellectual pursuits for a lifetime no matter where their paying careers take them. But the hard reality is that much less than half of students fit these descriptions. The rest are wasting time and money. Every rational person more less recognizes this fact, and classroom professors recognize it more than anyone else.
Coordination problem, everyone knows that employers are going to use degrees as a way to filter applicants. So such students just need to spend the minimum effort to get the degree and then move forward in the workplace. Unless employers as a whole come up with a better way of filtering applicants than checking for a piece of paper, the majority of 20 year olds are going to try to get that piece of paper regardless of their interest in learning.
1. My 40-year experience at a state flagship History Department is that there is indeed a left wing faculty monoculture that feels increasingly that it has a moral duty to impose its views on the unwashed, including the students.
2. Off-campus private housing in Berkeley is absolutely exorbitant in price. Those who can’t afford the “luxury cruise” college option (less expensive at a state school, to be sure) often have to drive as much as two hours each way from where the affordable housing is. Berkeley may be an unusual situation; but in a place such as Berkeley (and what about NYC?), YM’s “choice” proposal is pretty unworkable in terms of lowering costs.
Not sure it'll matter. Students aren't turning against the system after they go to college; they are arriving already disgruntled, having spent the last decade of their lives forced without choice or voice to undergo a daily regimen of curriculum and testing and classroom structure designed and implemented almost exclusively by the authorities at the university level.
The effect is as subtle, insidious, and far-reaching as one would expect when a group of humans is infantilized by arrogant power. Which, in no small irony, is what our secondary school system does to anyone not academically inclined or motivated, willingly or not. Once released, it's only natural to either turn against your captors or join them.
I'm exaggerating and simplifying a bit here, but the underlying thesis is sound. We have created a relentlessly college-centered educational system whose primary response to any alternatives, when not simply ignoring them, is disparagement and contempt. Then we've gone and made life rather difficult for anyone holding 'only' a high school diploma, then forced all of those who enroll, but especially the less academic, into debt enslavement for a degree nearly half don't finish and far more question. That's a circumstance that starts long before Freshman Comp or Sociology 101.
Yes, the university system is largely responsible for their present state of affairs, but from my experience (30 years in primary, secondary and college classrooms) it's largely because its their world every student must endure before arrival, particularly from about 6th grade on.
It may well be that in this modern world, our citizens now need at least 16 years of education (rather than the 12 of a few decades ago, or the 8 of a century ago, or the...). Just not sure it's accurate or helpful and not self-defeating to presume the only path for every adult is the one which works for the academic university. College used to be a choice; now we only pretend it is, a lie many students know and resent.
Here is a proposal for another kind of unbundling to avoid ideological corruption: separate hard science research from teaching institutions. In other words, expand the national labs and move most of research there.
As our income distribution has stretched out since the 1980s, as the number of generations since the birth of the post-WWII middle class has increased, so has the expectation that kids who go off to school will not live any worse than they did at home. In car-dominated America, that means having control over your environment at all times.
And these are the kids schools want. They foot the bill.
Stimulating piece. But here, comparative realities matter. Academics familiar with both U.S. and European systems generally recognize the core feature of the American model in labor terms: sustained public and private investment has created far more full-time faculty positions across a wider range of disciplines than exist elsewhere, and those positions are often better paid. The latter does not apply to adjuncts, of course—yet even here, U.S. adjunct utilization rates are lower than the proportion of precarious teaching faculty in, for instance, Germany.
Much is made of “bloat,” but therapy dogs during exam week—while ubiquitous, silly, and to outsiders exotic—are not a meaningful category of excess spending. Prestige buildings and ever-growing administrative bureaucracies are. But the real question is whether leaner systems abroad actually generate as many stable faculty jobs or as much research output. If not, then the “unbundling” you propose seems bound to mean faculty losses and contraction of research--independent of the machinations of the present administration: in other words, austerity.
On another point: “Graduates from top universities abroad are much less constrained in their career choices, making it possible for them to go into public service or to take entrepreneurial risks like founding a start-up.” This is certainly a social good. Would lower tuition be a good thing for working class students? Undoubtedly yes. Would it be better for researchers? Probably not. And would it address the issue most often cited for declining confidence in U.S. universities: perceptions of ideological capture, especially on the Right? Probably not.
The "confidence in U.S. higher education" data is telling. It should be compared with the results of the same basic question asking respondents for their confidence level at the time they completed their own higher education experience. Many, like me, who attended higher education some four decades ago will rate that experience much higher. The trends would be very evident. I myself had an excellent experience in both a public polytechnic undergraduate program and six years later an ivy league graduate school. Based on this comparative data set a consortium of selected public and private universities could conduct serious research on why higher education in the U.S. is today so troubled. Then, with some level of federal funding held as a carrot, lead the implementation of the remedies. Give the effort three years max.
Today I live in Amherst, MA with a consortium of five top institutions in the immediate area (Amherst College, Mt. Holyoke, Smith, Hampshire and UMass/Amherst). It is fascinating to observe the behavior of different groups of students and their interactions with local communities in a de facto natural experiment. Truth is, despite their differences all are top schools which seem to defy the worst of the problems Yascha so well covers.
I went back to school as an adult in my late 30s. Although I lean to the left slightly, I consider myself an independent. I was shocked at how ideologically bound my undergraduate school was. There was not room for right leaning voices to be heard. That was in the late 1990s. It was pre-cancel culture, but I can certainly see how that came to flourish in that environment. I hope that changes. I hope Democrats get it that many Americans like me are in the center and we want all voices to be heard.
It sounds like this is an earnest proposal and not a "modest proposal" as the subtitle states, which would be an absurd satirical proposition as per the extremely famous essay by Swift which this phrase is an allusion to.
This is an excellent suggestion. I had a smart philosopher colleague many years ago who (motivated in part by his distaste for college athletics) worked up a plan along these lines. His idea was to offer only the humanities (the cheapest part of a curriculum) and some business coursework. Be located in a city, so that students could find their own housing and be responsible for their own meals, and where they could get access to a good library. All he needed was a half-dozen or so faculty and some office and classroom space. The result was a much cheaper college education on the "only here to learn" model.
He never did anything with the proposal except share it with some broadly sympathetic colleagues. And obviously his particular version wouldn't be for everyone. But of course there's no reason the "unbundled" experience would need to look the same at every institution.
I do think his suggestion offers a complement to Yascha's piece, though, by clarifying that the goal would not need to be reached through "unbundling" existing institutions. A group of ambitious donors could launch a new college along these lines. (And then if they could also sidestep the accreditation mafia....)
I’m with the professor on the athletics thing. The smell of the school changing rooms and the communal shower always made me feel uneasy. Never went near anything athletic at university!
1. You mention a bipartisan drop in support for universities, and then cite just the right-wing talking points about why universities are bad. Curious.
2. I agree that monoculture and ideological conformity is a problem – but the fix for this in the US is tricky, because much of what passes for conservative discourse these days is explicitly anti-intellectual and illiberal, if not outright abusive. That's what right-wingers complain is being shut out of universities. But I don't think that sort of thinking or speech need be made welcome in fundamentally intellectual, liberal enterprises.
3. Commuter campuses exist already, all across the United States. Look at my home state. UC Berkeley has students trying to get by in the city. So does UCLA. Most Cal State universities are, I think, commuter campuses. If you want that sort of experience, it's not hard to find.
4. I don't agree that gyms should be unbundled. Athletic education is a decent and legitimate part of a university's mission, even if I recoil at the utter mess we've made of it in our zeal for competition and entertainment. (Ironically, though, college football and basketball are some of the main ways the modern US university interacts with the community, if that's what you care about.)
5. I sincerely doubt a D&D club is costing the university much. Do they even get a room on campus? Similarly with many other hobby clubs you might find around universities.
A good number of schools already do this via institutional financial aid packages. Depends on the school. I dont think that's the unbundling that's necessary here.
What needs to be unbundled is the teaching and research. Most professors at research schools dont care about teaching, the tenure committees dont care about it and the schools absolutely do not care about it (hence 300+ student classes)
What American university has separate education-only tuition?
I think you are underestimating the cost of amenities that are bundled together into tuition. Only about 30% of university spending is on instruction.
Large amounts of spending on research is largely restricted to elite universities, so your proposal would have very little impact on the vast majority of universities.
Exactly this. I don't think many undergrads realize that at many of the prestige schools the actual teaching is way at the bottom of the priority list for many faculty.
Respectfully disagree.
In my opinion, bundling of research and pedagogy is very valuable.
I graduated from an extremely selective free college. The students were very bright, but the school was always strapped for cash. There were no PhD programs and faculty did little research. Pedagogy was excellent and my peers were smart and motivated. I learned a lot, but there wasn’t much research happening. I supplemented with a summer research internship at a different school, and a corporate internship.
I graduated with the second highest gpa in my class and had an almost perfect GRE. I expected to get in to every grad program I applied to. I also came from a stifling religious background and modest material conditions (my dad was a teacher).
I was rejected by a lot of schools, which really surprised me. I got into a very good, but not super elite PhD program. I eventually learned that the reason I was rejected by the top schools was that I didn’t have a lot of academic research experience.
Research universities provide opportunities for students to engage in research. Teaching schools don’t. If you want to get into research, the former is vastly preferable.
At the same time, giving faculty access to the large supply of cheap student labor is good for advancing human knowledge.
Finally, participating in research is itself pedagogical for the student, as they become familiar with how knowledge is actually produced and vetted.
I mean, that's an argument for why research and teaching bundling works for *students who want to go to grad school*. Thats a fairly small % of students.
There's a simpler solution, at least for motivated kids. After high-school, attend a community college (almost free for residents) for the first two years of (pretty much) standardized courses (101s through 202s). Then transfer in to a four-year college/university as a junior for the upperclassmen lectures/labs/seminars and your degree. There may be a need for a few "bridging" courses, but that can be handled during summer school and/or January/winter terms as well as independent study. The "fun-and-games" and social life requirements (dorms/meal plans/etc.) are typically demanded only of first- and/or second-year students in four-year colleges and universities.
The point of higher education institutions is to equip students with knowledge, education and skills to became employable. The burden is on universities, tenure professors who teach and do the research and administrators who provide the support services like careers services. Furthermore, Americans are also footing the bill for the university athletics. I have so many questions about that, and it just seems so wrong - somebody needs to press reset!
My understanding is higher ed is intended to produce knowledge about the world…and then employable skills based on that knowledge relative to its relevance to the market. Most humanities research has been forced to bend to support/prove social justice causes, thereby producing irrelevant knowledge at best, divisive blindness and identity-based bigotry at worst…aka unemployable skills. Remove that and more students will become more useful upon graduation.
There’s so much wrong with the university system in the US that it drowns out what’s so right in terms of research, high quality education in important fields, etc. There’s also a lot wrong in terms of the choices that students make. It’s all a mess.
Wouldn't the most prestigious employers like Goldman or McKinsey just screen out anyone who did this?
To have a shot at those employers, you'd need to essentially arrive on campus ready to do recruitment for the one summer internship that you'd get. That seems unlikely for most transfer students.
The real key is the early club-joining and campus recruitment processes as well as summer internships that students at prestigious schools would have more exposure to early on. I think the CC-to-transfer approach would work out better for those looking to apply to med school/law school, but increasingly those admissions (especially med school) want to see more activities, research, etc. that transfers would already be behind on as well.
It's a well intentioned idea but misses the problem of basic arithmetic: there are far more people than there are available slots for prestigious jobs. Even if everyone had a BA there would have to be some new criterion to winnow people out
Sure, there's always new things being added in terms of expectations to winnow people out for those jobs. And it gets much harder for transfer students who don't have two years of networking and learning social mores to meet those expectations (much less transfer from a CC to a target school for those in the first place).
To be fair it's probably better than going into debt for a non selective college, but it will close a lot of doors to being in the ruling class.
The degree is issued by the four-year college/university. Many states require colleges/universities and community colleges to agree on what courses are "core" and are fully (or partially) creditable from one type institution to the other.
Prospective employers rarely delve into applicants' educational background at this level of detail. The degree (and, rarely, GPA) are all that is generally required.
They could just ask on the application for the dates the person attended, or request a transcript which would show transfer credits.
Employers are under considerable jeopardy when examining or interviewing prospective hires. They ask the minimum necessary to qualify the candidate pool in order to keep HR and the government happy.
I think elite employers are more worried about screening out undesirable candidates, of which attending a college that admits anyone would rank pretty highly.
Sorry, I missed your "elite" employers qualification. Those who compete for offers of employment from such employers are generally not sensitive to cost or bloat of unnecessary courses and activities. They also find significant benefit from the social and academic relationships they establish at elite colleges and university, so would largely be expected to pay whatever the cost is for the "full" elite higher education experience.
Well, not everyone is hoping to work for an “elite” employer. If you’re able to get a bachelors degree from an affordable school, even if you graduate a year or two “late”, you’re under less pressure to earn a high salary to pay off loans.
Correct. People without ambition for wealth and joining the ruling class can lead perfectly happy lives … but they can presumably also do that without any higher education.
Depends. Engineers like myself aren’t “ruling class”, nor do we hold the prestige of doctors, lawyers, politicians, or others… but a college degree is necessary to get hired as an engineer.
The funny thing about the ruling class in America, is that you can change ruling classes. Don’t like California? Move to Idaho. Don’t like Florida? Move to Washington. The federal executive is largely can’t be changed on demand, but has far less influence in your life that your state and local governments do.
I am not referring to politicians per se as the ruling class but rather the elites who largely select them. As I said you can live a perfectly happy life without an elite education or employer, and it will make those aspiring to join their ranks happy to have less competition.
It’s worth pointing out that you can already choose to live off campus and room and board is not usually included in tuition.
Many schools are restricting the ability to live off campus and require students to stay at least one, sometimes two or more years in dorms. Mealplans of some sort are also often required.
Commuting from home is also an option in many areas of the country although students who do so miss out on part of the traditional college experience.
That is not his proposal.
On the one hand, I'm sympathetic to this idea for all the reasons Yascha explains.
On the other hand, literally the most important and memorable part of my college experience was sharing meals and conversation with fellow classmates (at my school, almost everyone lives in dorms all four years), and I think having a big part of the class miss that experience would have been unfortunate for both them and for me.
I have been a philosophy professor for 40 years and I just retired emeritus. I have served on and chaired every committee imaginable from rank and tenure to curriculum. The most stubborn self-convinced people I have ever known are tenured faculty. They believe what they believe and that is what they believe and the only way to convince them of anything is to convince them that what you propose is merely an addendum to what they already believe.
These ideas are worth considering, but at the top of any list of reforms should be recognition of this problem: way too many young people attend both four year and community colleges. Millions of so-called students merely accumulate seat time, take on massive debt, and accomplish little of intellectual or vocational value. Stated bluntly, they don't much care about genuine learning; they are in college because their parents coerced them to go, they didn't know what else to do, it's non-stop party time, etc.
Yes, there are serious students achieving at a high level who will be major contributors to society. Some students will continue their intellectual pursuits for a lifetime no matter where their paying careers take them. But the hard reality is that much less than half of students fit these descriptions. The rest are wasting time and money. Every rational person more less recognizes this fact, and classroom professors recognize it more than anyone else.
Coordination problem, everyone knows that employers are going to use degrees as a way to filter applicants. So such students just need to spend the minimum effort to get the degree and then move forward in the workplace. Unless employers as a whole come up with a better way of filtering applicants than checking for a piece of paper, the majority of 20 year olds are going to try to get that piece of paper regardless of their interest in learning.
Two comments:
1. My 40-year experience at a state flagship History Department is that there is indeed a left wing faculty monoculture that feels increasingly that it has a moral duty to impose its views on the unwashed, including the students.
2. Off-campus private housing in Berkeley is absolutely exorbitant in price. Those who can’t afford the “luxury cruise” college option (less expensive at a state school, to be sure) often have to drive as much as two hours each way from where the affordable housing is. Berkeley may be an unusual situation; but in a place such as Berkeley (and what about NYC?), YM’s “choice” proposal is pretty unworkable in terms of lowering costs.
Not sure it'll matter. Students aren't turning against the system after they go to college; they are arriving already disgruntled, having spent the last decade of their lives forced without choice or voice to undergo a daily regimen of curriculum and testing and classroom structure designed and implemented almost exclusively by the authorities at the university level.
The effect is as subtle, insidious, and far-reaching as one would expect when a group of humans is infantilized by arrogant power. Which, in no small irony, is what our secondary school system does to anyone not academically inclined or motivated, willingly or not. Once released, it's only natural to either turn against your captors or join them.
I'm exaggerating and simplifying a bit here, but the underlying thesis is sound. We have created a relentlessly college-centered educational system whose primary response to any alternatives, when not simply ignoring them, is disparagement and contempt. Then we've gone and made life rather difficult for anyone holding 'only' a high school diploma, then forced all of those who enroll, but especially the less academic, into debt enslavement for a degree nearly half don't finish and far more question. That's a circumstance that starts long before Freshman Comp or Sociology 101.
Yes, the university system is largely responsible for their present state of affairs, but from my experience (30 years in primary, secondary and college classrooms) it's largely because its their world every student must endure before arrival, particularly from about 6th grade on.
It may well be that in this modern world, our citizens now need at least 16 years of education (rather than the 12 of a few decades ago, or the 8 of a century ago, or the...). Just not sure it's accurate or helpful and not self-defeating to presume the only path for every adult is the one which works for the academic university. College used to be a choice; now we only pretend it is, a lie many students know and resent.
Here is a proposal for another kind of unbundling to avoid ideological corruption: separate hard science research from teaching institutions. In other words, expand the national labs and move most of research there.
https://substack.com/@rozen111/note/c-113327602?utm_source=notes-share-action&r=ktk31
I like this idea. I had to put up with several “professors” who spent 90% of their effort on research and 10% on providing a quality education.
Upper middle class suburban parents.
There. I said it.
As our income distribution has stretched out since the 1980s, as the number of generations since the birth of the post-WWII middle class has increased, so has the expectation that kids who go off to school will not live any worse than they did at home. In car-dominated America, that means having control over your environment at all times.
And these are the kids schools want. They foot the bill.
Stimulating piece. But here, comparative realities matter. Academics familiar with both U.S. and European systems generally recognize the core feature of the American model in labor terms: sustained public and private investment has created far more full-time faculty positions across a wider range of disciplines than exist elsewhere, and those positions are often better paid. The latter does not apply to adjuncts, of course—yet even here, U.S. adjunct utilization rates are lower than the proportion of precarious teaching faculty in, for instance, Germany.
Much is made of “bloat,” but therapy dogs during exam week—while ubiquitous, silly, and to outsiders exotic—are not a meaningful category of excess spending. Prestige buildings and ever-growing administrative bureaucracies are. But the real question is whether leaner systems abroad actually generate as many stable faculty jobs or as much research output. If not, then the “unbundling” you propose seems bound to mean faculty losses and contraction of research--independent of the machinations of the present administration: in other words, austerity.
On another point: “Graduates from top universities abroad are much less constrained in their career choices, making it possible for them to go into public service or to take entrepreneurial risks like founding a start-up.” This is certainly a social good. Would lower tuition be a good thing for working class students? Undoubtedly yes. Would it be better for researchers? Probably not. And would it address the issue most often cited for declining confidence in U.S. universities: perceptions of ideological capture, especially on the Right? Probably not.
The "confidence in U.S. higher education" data is telling. It should be compared with the results of the same basic question asking respondents for their confidence level at the time they completed their own higher education experience. Many, like me, who attended higher education some four decades ago will rate that experience much higher. The trends would be very evident. I myself had an excellent experience in both a public polytechnic undergraduate program and six years later an ivy league graduate school. Based on this comparative data set a consortium of selected public and private universities could conduct serious research on why higher education in the U.S. is today so troubled. Then, with some level of federal funding held as a carrot, lead the implementation of the remedies. Give the effort three years max.
Today I live in Amherst, MA with a consortium of five top institutions in the immediate area (Amherst College, Mt. Holyoke, Smith, Hampshire and UMass/Amherst). It is fascinating to observe the behavior of different groups of students and their interactions with local communities in a de facto natural experiment. Truth is, despite their differences all are top schools which seem to defy the worst of the problems Yascha so well covers.
I went back to school as an adult in my late 30s. Although I lean to the left slightly, I consider myself an independent. I was shocked at how ideologically bound my undergraduate school was. There was not room for right leaning voices to be heard. That was in the late 1990s. It was pre-cancel culture, but I can certainly see how that came to flourish in that environment. I hope that changes. I hope Democrats get it that many Americans like me are in the center and we want all voices to be heard.
It sounds like this is an earnest proposal and not a "modest proposal" as the subtitle states, which would be an absurd satirical proposition as per the extremely famous essay by Swift which this phrase is an allusion to.
This is an excellent suggestion. I had a smart philosopher colleague many years ago who (motivated in part by his distaste for college athletics) worked up a plan along these lines. His idea was to offer only the humanities (the cheapest part of a curriculum) and some business coursework. Be located in a city, so that students could find their own housing and be responsible for their own meals, and where they could get access to a good library. All he needed was a half-dozen or so faculty and some office and classroom space. The result was a much cheaper college education on the "only here to learn" model.
He never did anything with the proposal except share it with some broadly sympathetic colleagues. And obviously his particular version wouldn't be for everyone. But of course there's no reason the "unbundled" experience would need to look the same at every institution.
I do think his suggestion offers a complement to Yascha's piece, though, by clarifying that the goal would not need to be reached through "unbundling" existing institutions. A group of ambitious donors could launch a new college along these lines. (And then if they could also sidestep the accreditation mafia....)
I’m with the professor on the athletics thing. The smell of the school changing rooms and the communal shower always made me feel uneasy. Never went near anything athletic at university!
There are non US role models for this: London School of Economics is one.
Yes. As Yascha points out, most European universities operate on the "unbundled" model.
1. You mention a bipartisan drop in support for universities, and then cite just the right-wing talking points about why universities are bad. Curious.
2. I agree that monoculture and ideological conformity is a problem – but the fix for this in the US is tricky, because much of what passes for conservative discourse these days is explicitly anti-intellectual and illiberal, if not outright abusive. That's what right-wingers complain is being shut out of universities. But I don't think that sort of thinking or speech need be made welcome in fundamentally intellectual, liberal enterprises.
3. Commuter campuses exist already, all across the United States. Look at my home state. UC Berkeley has students trying to get by in the city. So does UCLA. Most Cal State universities are, I think, commuter campuses. If you want that sort of experience, it's not hard to find.
4. I don't agree that gyms should be unbundled. Athletic education is a decent and legitimate part of a university's mission, even if I recoil at the utter mess we've made of it in our zeal for competition and entertainment. (Ironically, though, college football and basketball are some of the main ways the modern US university interacts with the community, if that's what you care about.)
5. I sincerely doubt a D&D club is costing the university much. Do they even get a room on campus? Similarly with many other hobby clubs you might find around universities.