Yes, but what do you do about it?
Here are some possibilities:
1. Tell them not to. But how are you going to know if they are complying? A Reform government is not going to have the personnel it can trust to do this.
2. Make them fully independent. End grants, abolish student loans. You could even remove their Royal Charters. There’s going to be a hell of a backlash. But if you can get through that they should get back to education again.
3. Make university education less attractive. I’ve heard it said that people need degrees because IQ tests are illegal. Is that true?
4. Declare all universities “indoctrination centres” and remove all funding until proved otherwise. If they bleat about “independence” then you can say they’ve got what they wanted. The proof could be in the form of each member of academic staff being asked for their opinions on communism and DEI. Could produce some interesting results.
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@Patrick Crozier
There is a fifth possibility:
5. Invent a technology that makes the large majority of university education worthless.
Of course we have that technology, it is called the internet. For the most part (outside of some specific professions) universities provide students with four things: an education (Which is now no longer relevant since you can learn anything 1% of the cost by other means), a certification, which surely we can legally circumvent by setting up a skills based certification system (though see below), networking opportunities which only really matter at very high end and lower end universities — the majority in the middle do not provide value here, and a fourth, letting the kids PARTY. Presumably kids can have a really good time elsewhere too.
The certification is the big issue, but surely there are other ways to prove one’s skills? Certainly in my area of expertise I’d rather have someone as a Certified AWS architect than a poncey degree from Harvard. That is a cultural change though, and I think it is coming. But in truth AI and robotics is going to largely eliminate jobs in this middle part anyway.
I say let them die their natural death. One easy fix? Eliminate student loans and payments and let students bear the full cost of their education while keeping the government out of the “student loan” business. That’d shake things up PDQ.
As I said there are exceptions, people with highly specialized training like Medical doctors and lawyers.
Those are much broader than suggested, though. When I did my chemistry degree, lab work was a large and indispensable part of the course. The internet as a learning tool won’t substitute for the hands-on experience of using gas chromatographs, HPLC, NMR, mass spectrometers, x-ray crystallography setups, high intensity lasers, vacuum lines and similar equipment, and it won’t give you experience handling hazardous chemicals, dealing with reactions involving radioisotopes, planning experiments to support or disprove hypotheses and actually carrying those out, critiquing experimental designs from all angles, and dozens of other skills.
Chemistry isn’t alone among the sciences, either; biologists in training won’t learn microscope technique from the internet, nor breed fruit flies selectively, learn biohazard handling, etc. Undergraduate students in physics, electronics, chemical engineering, electrical engineering, and more–they all get lab time, and the hands-on experience in their specialised devices and techniques isn’t something we can replace with “the internet”.
By all means deal with the multitudinous problems of the universities, but don’t pretend that it is only a handful of professional disciplines which need to teach things beyond what’s found in online courses.
Option 2 (get rid of government funding – including the “loans” that have made tuition fees go into outer space, subsidy programs always do that with costs) – but go back to promoting from within an organization, rather than having “graduates only” policy for higher positions in an organization.
It did not use to be the case that someone needed to a university degree to get into a senior position – it used to be the case (in both Britain and the United States) that people worked their way up by experience and merit – which is how it should be.
A liberal-arts university degree is, in reality, a thing this is nice to have – but does not really make you a better businessman or administrator, or whatever. And that is when liberal-arts were NOT the mutant-form of Marxism they have become – even subjects such as English literature have been systematically ruined.
anon – yes the physical sciences resisted longer than the liberal-arts, due to the basic nature of the physical sciences.
However, even the physical sciences in universities are starting to be influenced (corrupted) by leftist doctrine – the situation is not good.
@anon
etc. Undergraduate students in physics, electronics, chemical engineering, electrical engineering, and more–they all get lab time, and the hands-on experience in their specialised devices and techniques isn’t something we can replace with “the internet”.
Sure but auto mechanics and cosmetologists have similar needs and they don’t go to a $50,000 a year university.
You raise an interesting concern which is at the heart of the question — namely what is a university even for? How is it different than a vocational school? In the past it was for a liberal arts education, more to make you a more rounded person than provide you with a specific skillset. However, Universities have tried to transform themselves into technical schools plus a liberal arts education. That is why you have to take History, Spanish and Social Justice courses even if you are training to be an electrical engineer. It is a certain pomposity, a, “we are training the elite” attitude. Which is funny since nearly half of kids go to university in the USA and the people who don’t often out-earn the graduates by a considerable amount if they get a good technical skill.
Funnily just today I was stuck in a doctor’s waiting room and had nothing else to do so I read this article “What AI Can’t Do: The case for the liberal arts just got a lot stronger” from Washington Monthly because its headline seemed so silly to me. And his argument essentially is that a liberal arts education gives you the ability to think clearly, reason rationally, present your ideas clearly and so forth. I’d say that the average graduate of an American University indoctrinated with endless bullshit would offer a counter example to this claim. But what struck me most about it is that these very things are surely what we should be coming out of high school with, not tertiary education. The argument for public education is that by having a broad base of educated public offers a “lift all the boats” result that makes us all richer. And I am not entirely unsympathetic to that argument except to say — look at what public education ACTUALLY produces and you’d have to say that that claim does not match the data.
So, again I think we stop public funding of university students — they gain far and away the most benefits from it, so let them pay for those benefits — and rather promote the focused trade school model for things that are traditionally caught up in the mess of the pomposity of university and the idea of the liberal arts education. Why can’t you learn to be a chemist in a trade school, or, for that matter why can’t a Doctor? Of course it’d take longer than learning how to fix hair, but at least it is focused on the goal for which most people continue education, rather than it being a conduit for what the powers that be, the inteligenzia, think we should all be thinking. Because by “rounded” they mean “more like me”. By “rational” they mean “agreeing with me”.
And, fwiw, since the article raised AI, and I know y’all think I won’t shut up about it, but the simple fact is that AI’s today have better judgement than the vast majority of humans, better ability to reason, better ability to present a case. All the very things that the article I linked present as arguments for a liberal arts education being superior to AI. And, I might add, an awful lot of the bread an butter middle courses of this sort coming out of the confused purpose university system are going to be replaced in large part by AI both generative, agentic and eventually embodied.