Given everything we now know about institutional inertia, bureaucratic constraints, faculty governance, accreditation capture, federal funding streams, and political realities, is meaningful reform of existing universities even possible?
The key to reform is to remove taxpayer money from the political patronage scheme that is academia and university system. By reducing the rentier system of credentialism and increasing competition with education systems based on more efficient economics, the DEI will be purged by economic necessity instead of legislative fiat. Whether it be in grade school, high school, or universities the funding must be tied inextricably with student choice. This will require a revolution in funding education at the local, State and Federal levels. Subsidized Federal loans need to be eliminated entirely. Government schools will need to compete for students if they want to survive. Creating an economically advantaged taxpayer funded system would inevitably result in mediocrity and political corruption.
Along these lines, if anyone is interested, today I've published a (work-in-progress) interactive mapping of every four-year college and university in the U.S., positioning each institution along two composite dimensions: Institutional Resilience and Post-College Market Position, along with a new Artificial Intelligence Exposure measure.
The tool is designed for institutional leaders, enrollment strategists, and policy researchers in higher education, but also, it's meant to aid and facilitate conversation about the myriad challenges the industry faces.
You can also use the tool to search for your institution, compare across peers, and examine the component-level scores driving each school's position.
That's an interesting measure set, both the AI exposure and the Resilience v Post market.
I'm not sure how to capture what Klainerman discusses here on such scales. Why? Because what he talks about is not measured much. If we cannot measure it we cannot track it. So being able to measure and track it becomes a possible avenue. Think of how the ratings by US News have affected universities.
My growing alarm regarding AI is that students are not learning how to think! This is way worse than what Sowell spoke of. I see exposure to AI as having terrible effect. What kind of terrible? Losing a war and becoming vassals because we're stupid now terrible. Because that is what happens to idiot societies.
And decline in math skills is worrisome. The WW2 generation had excellent skills. The Boomers, not as good. The gen X and millennials? Whoa. I am, right now in a situation with a powerful high ranking professor who is pulling out all the stops on some math that is just... astonishing. And his buddies are all with him. Supposedly physicists.
Appreciate the thoughtful engagement. A few threads to pull apart here.
On measurement: you're putting your finger on a real limitation. The framework measures what federal data can measure — institutional finances, completion rates, earnings outcomes, program mix, demographic pipelines. It can't measure what students are actually learning, how well they're thinking, or whether graduates can reason through novel problems. Those are genuinely important outcomes, and you're right that if we can't measure them we can't track them. The hope is that a tool like this at least makes the structural positioning visible, even if it can't speak to the deeper educational quality question.
On AI and learning: the framework treats AI exposure as a labor market construct — which career pathways have task structures that overlap with current AI capabilities. That's a different question than whether AI is affecting how students learn to think, though I take your point that they're connected. An institution could score well on every structural indicator in this framework and still be failing its students intellectually. That's a limitation worth being honest about.
On the U.S. News comparison: that's actually a live question in the feedback I'm getting. The short version is that I deliberately avoided producing a single ranking because the most consequential and least empirically grounded step in any composite measure is the weighting — and a single ranking invites exactly the kind of Goodhart's Law dynamic that U.S. News created. Two dimensions isn't perfect, but it at least forces the conversation to specify which dimension matters for which question.
I wasn't intending to say that a one-dimensional measure was the way to go.
What I meant is that measurement itself, and publicizing ranking(s) is an effective tool for moving universities. I remember when my brother and I were fighting University of Phoenix, they got their graduation rate removed from the ranking database we started citing. That was 20 years ago, U of Phoenix had a 4% graduation rate. But, we could keep citing it for the year we had copied off. While I can't claim, "We did that." those documents and legislative education efforts were ultimately successful. At least we helped stall them until John Sperling, the (IMO socipathic) founder of Apollo Group died.
Accreditation was the original method used to get rid of junk schools of yore. But now, we have entities like CACREP that have captured universities. CACREP appears to create garbage education programs, and I suggested that a lawsuit to destroy that organization and tear a lot of money out of the universities that bent over for them is the way to go. Perhaps Thiel or Jordan can fund that. It could be a Qui Tam case, taking back the grant money given to students for that junk education.
It's going to take a variety of tactics and strategy. The cadres certainly have that.
I always advise friends in China not to send their children to American universities (with the possible exception of graduate-level STEM fields). The danger is that they will return as Marxists.
There is much truth in this article...but I must re-emphasize an important point regarding the K-12 Education system. The universities provide the nation's teachers so the failings of the teacher corps and the schools they run arise directly from the universities themselves. One major reform to restore the K-12 schools would be to STRIP universities of any role in teacher preparation with the appropriate defunding of the universities with resources being dedicated to new institutions designed for this purpose.
Agree that reforms must be wide-ranging and much broader than universities themselves. For example, one seemingly minor but important factor in the dilution of meritocracy stems from ADA. Schools and universities freely hand out 'accommodations' including extra time to students who know how to use the system, effectively dividing students into two cohorts. Professors are not allowed to push back (possibly threatened with lawsuits) and not allowed to mention in recommendation letters that a student took the course under relaxed conditions. This has to be battled in the court system, likely by people who did not receive accommodations and were therefore at a relative disadvantage, but I have not seen much interest in this. These 'accommodations' have also ruined the even playing field of standardized testing, including for competitive high school admissions.
Courage. The ability to challenge entrenched nonsense without fearing consequences is key to destroying DEI and related evils. Compromise must be avoided, and saying over and over that Leftist “ideals” are pure evil is mandatory.
The probability of internal reform could be far from zero but only if we include negative probabilities, whatever that means. I want to state my opinion that it is impossible for universities to reform themselves. I welcome any external help, especially that from the Manhattan Institute.
I am an optimist when it come to almost everything. I am an optimist that universites can be reformed but a pessimist when it comes to whether universites can reform themselves.
It's time to build a chain of Classical Education K-12 schools across the country. Require Latin and Greek, foundational US and World History, grammar, reading and composition, Great Authors, advanced math and science, computer and AI literacy, debate, rhetoric, and formal logic.
Nope. Liquidate them. There is no requirement for a society to have universities. The progress of knowledge and the arts would be much higher without them.
I agree with Professor Klainerman. Things look very grim. Institutions are highly unlikely to reform themselves without immense outside pressure, and maybe not even then.
Some of this outside pressure can be provided by competition.
I hope we can reform these organizations, but I am doubtful, given what I know and have observed.
Another key measure that is necessary to starving this system is to get rid of or massively reduce government student loans. Maybe restrict them to STEM and/or the trades, like nursing and business. Not all degrees should be supporting by loans.
Excellent, I agree with all you say.
The key to reform is to remove taxpayer money from the political patronage scheme that is academia and university system. By reducing the rentier system of credentialism and increasing competition with education systems based on more efficient economics, the DEI will be purged by economic necessity instead of legislative fiat. Whether it be in grade school, high school, or universities the funding must be tied inextricably with student choice. This will require a revolution in funding education at the local, State and Federal levels. Subsidized Federal loans need to be eliminated entirely. Government schools will need to compete for students if they want to survive. Creating an economically advantaged taxpayer funded system would inevitably result in mediocrity and political corruption.
Along these lines, if anyone is interested, today I've published a (work-in-progress) interactive mapping of every four-year college and university in the U.S., positioning each institution along two composite dimensions: Institutional Resilience and Post-College Market Position, along with a new Artificial Intelligence Exposure measure.
The tool is designed for institutional leaders, enrollment strategists, and policy researchers in higher education, but also, it's meant to aid and facilitate conversation about the myriad challenges the industry faces.
You can also use the tool to search for your institution, compare across peers, and examine the component-level scores driving each school's position.
Link directly to the tool: https://kylesaunders.com/university-map/
Link to my substack about the tool: https://kylesaunders.substack.com/p/mapping-the-structural-divide-in
I hope you'll find it useful, and share it with others.
That's an interesting measure set, both the AI exposure and the Resilience v Post market.
I'm not sure how to capture what Klainerman discusses here on such scales. Why? Because what he talks about is not measured much. If we cannot measure it we cannot track it. So being able to measure and track it becomes a possible avenue. Think of how the ratings by US News have affected universities.
My growing alarm regarding AI is that students are not learning how to think! This is way worse than what Sowell spoke of. I see exposure to AI as having terrible effect. What kind of terrible? Losing a war and becoming vassals because we're stupid now terrible. Because that is what happens to idiot societies.
And decline in math skills is worrisome. The WW2 generation had excellent skills. The Boomers, not as good. The gen X and millennials? Whoa. I am, right now in a situation with a powerful high ranking professor who is pulling out all the stops on some math that is just... astonishing. And his buddies are all with him. Supposedly physicists.
Appreciate the thoughtful engagement. A few threads to pull apart here.
On measurement: you're putting your finger on a real limitation. The framework measures what federal data can measure — institutional finances, completion rates, earnings outcomes, program mix, demographic pipelines. It can't measure what students are actually learning, how well they're thinking, or whether graduates can reason through novel problems. Those are genuinely important outcomes, and you're right that if we can't measure them we can't track them. The hope is that a tool like this at least makes the structural positioning visible, even if it can't speak to the deeper educational quality question.
On AI and learning: the framework treats AI exposure as a labor market construct — which career pathways have task structures that overlap with current AI capabilities. That's a different question than whether AI is affecting how students learn to think, though I take your point that they're connected. An institution could score well on every structural indicator in this framework and still be failing its students intellectually. That's a limitation worth being honest about.
On the U.S. News comparison: that's actually a live question in the feedback I'm getting. The short version is that I deliberately avoided producing a single ranking because the most consequential and least empirically grounded step in any composite measure is the weighting — and a single ranking invites exactly the kind of Goodhart's Law dynamic that U.S. News created. Two dimensions isn't perfect, but it at least forces the conversation to specify which dimension matters for which question.
I wasn't intending to say that a one-dimensional measure was the way to go.
What I meant is that measurement itself, and publicizing ranking(s) is an effective tool for moving universities. I remember when my brother and I were fighting University of Phoenix, they got their graduation rate removed from the ranking database we started citing. That was 20 years ago, U of Phoenix had a 4% graduation rate. But, we could keep citing it for the year we had copied off. While I can't claim, "We did that." those documents and legislative education efforts were ultimately successful. At least we helped stall them until John Sperling, the (IMO socipathic) founder of Apollo Group died.
Accreditation was the original method used to get rid of junk schools of yore. But now, we have entities like CACREP that have captured universities. CACREP appears to create garbage education programs, and I suggested that a lawsuit to destroy that organization and tear a lot of money out of the universities that bent over for them is the way to go. Perhaps Thiel or Jordan can fund that. It could be a Qui Tam case, taking back the grant money given to students for that junk education.
It's going to take a variety of tactics and strategy. The cadres certainly have that.
I always advise friends in China not to send their children to American universities (with the possible exception of graduate-level STEM fields). The danger is that they will return as Marxists.
There is much truth in this article...but I must re-emphasize an important point regarding the K-12 Education system. The universities provide the nation's teachers so the failings of the teacher corps and the schools they run arise directly from the universities themselves. One major reform to restore the K-12 schools would be to STRIP universities of any role in teacher preparation with the appropriate defunding of the universities with resources being dedicated to new institutions designed for this purpose.
No, universities cannot be reformed.
Thomas Hobbes, 1588 - 1679
“The universities have been to the nation as the wooden horse was to the Trojans.”
Agree that reforms must be wide-ranging and much broader than universities themselves. For example, one seemingly minor but important factor in the dilution of meritocracy stems from ADA. Schools and universities freely hand out 'accommodations' including extra time to students who know how to use the system, effectively dividing students into two cohorts. Professors are not allowed to push back (possibly threatened with lawsuits) and not allowed to mention in recommendation letters that a student took the course under relaxed conditions. This has to be battled in the court system, likely by people who did not receive accommodations and were therefore at a relative disadvantage, but I have not seen much interest in this. These 'accommodations' have also ruined the even playing field of standardized testing, including for competitive high school admissions.
Courage. The ability to challenge entrenched nonsense without fearing consequences is key to destroying DEI and related evils. Compromise must be avoided, and saying over and over that Leftist “ideals” are pure evil is mandatory.
Dear Sergiu,
The probability of internal reform could be far from zero but only if we include negative probabilities, whatever that means. I want to state my opinion that it is impossible for universities to reform themselves. I welcome any external help, especially that from the Manhattan Institute.
I am an optimist when it come to almost everything. I am an optimist that universites can be reformed but a pessimist when it comes to whether universites can reform themselves.
Bring in the Manhattan Statement!
thanks,
randy
It's time to build a chain of Classical Education K-12 schools across the country. Require Latin and Greek, foundational US and World History, grammar, reading and composition, Great Authors, advanced math and science, computer and AI literacy, debate, rhetoric, and formal logic.
Nope. Liquidate them. There is no requirement for a society to have universities. The progress of knowledge and the arts would be much higher without them.
I agree with Professor Klainerman. Things look very grim. Institutions are highly unlikely to reform themselves without immense outside pressure, and maybe not even then.
Some of this outside pressure can be provided by competition.
I hope we can reform these organizations, but I am doubtful, given what I know and have observed.
Another key measure that is necessary to starving this system is to get rid of or massively reduce government student loans. Maybe restrict them to STEM and/or the trades, like nursing and business. Not all degrees should be supporting by loans.