The Anti-Productive Crisis in US Universities
US universities are caught in a maelstrom not seen since the 1960s. From a Marcusian perspective, an enlightened, freedom-loving vanguard is confronting white-male-heterosexual-supremacist, capitalist, imperialist reaction in battles of such world-historical significance that they demand alliance with savagely repressive, male-supremacist, anti-homosexual, neo-colonialist regimes. Here I present a Marxist perspective, which connects ideology to technology and class interests, but without Marx’s presumption that only material production adds value. My focus is the huge quagmire of instruction that ignores productivity or depletes it. Since unproductive graduates are increasingly unable to find private sector jobs commensurate with their expectations, they and their instructors naturally seek to cultivate broader resentment and leverage that into public sector pay and power. Like any other social class, they frame their causes as morally righteous, with the extra intensity of youth unaware of how well-intentioned the road to hell is paved. Yet their ranks are too numerous to thrive, threatened by both budgetary pressures and AI advances, and losing public respect through their antics. Their best hope is colonization of the productive university sectors, which the latter need to resist.
The primary function of universities is to educate skilled labor. Within universities, skills are esteemed mainly by awarded degrees or titles and the prestige of the awarder. Outside universities, skills are esteemed mainly by pay, which in the private sector is tied mostly to economic value added. The most striking evidence of the huge productive/unproductive divide in US tertiary education is the vast difference in returns on educational investment (ROI) by field of specialization. Here is a chart of median ROI by college major compiled by the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity (FREOPP) using data from the US Department of Education’s College Scorecard.
The general pattern is clear. The economy values technical skills in STEM, medicine and business far more than it values traditional liberal arts. This extends to blue-collar technical skills like vehicle maintenance and repair, precision metal working, HVAC technology, and electrical and power transmission installation—their median ROI is over $300,000. The differences are even more striking when we take dispersion into account. The mean returns are much higher for technical skills and the odds of negative returns much lower. Here are FREOPP-compiled ROI distributions for BA or BS degrees in engineering and education:
Worse, students are disproportionately concentrated in less-valued majors. By FREOPP measures, three in ten undergrads are likely to earn negative financial returns on their investments. Returns to masters’ degrees are even more fraught, with 43% likely to be negative and 15% sacrificing over $200 thousand. While even the losers may gain non-pecuniary advantages in leisure and satisfaction, the net benefits are concentrated among children from wealthier families who can better subsidize their lifestyles.
Granted, the details reflect past experience that the future will not exactly repeat. For example, low-level computer science jobs are now being squeezed out by AI. However, the general trends seem bound to persist and worsen, for the following reasons:
Education is valued partly (or mostly, as economist Byron Caplan contends) as a signal for intelligence, perseverance, and compliance rather than know-how. While this consideration already favors technical majors given their more demanding curricula, the differential will likely rise now that AI makes it easy to compose the kinds of essays favored in liberal arts.
Technological progress generally favors technical skilled labor although the skills needed change over time. STEM graduates tend to be particularly versatile, partly because the scientific principles driving one field tend to have analogues in other fields.
US universities arguably place too little emphasis on STEM, which augurs continued high premia for STEM skills and continued squeezes on liberal arts. According to Georgetown’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology, the share of graduates in 2020 in STEM fields was 20% in the US versus 37% in Germany and 41% in China.
For a related perspective, the US currently accounts for about 25% of global GDP but its colleges and universities supply only about 7-8% of STEM grads. Since the US excels at higher levels of STEM, its 15% share of global STEM PhDs seems a fairer measure. However, about a third of these were earned by foreign students, so any additional restrictions on skilled immigration will raise the premium for domestic STEM grads.
The US has an unusually high share of people in peak working ages of 25 to 64 that have college degrees that are not in STEM or health care. According to Google Gemini, the share is 33% in the US versus shares a 27% OECD average, 18% in Germany, 9% in India, and 4% in China. Hence many of the careers that new US liberal arts grads seek to enter are relatively saturated with more experienced liberal arts grads. Only Canada at 39% exceeds the US share, which likely explains some similar tensions.
Of course, new grads in any field bring advantages in youth, energy and enthusiasm. Furthermore, new grads are more familiar and comfortable with new technologies, which is especially important in this era of unprecedentedly rapid innovation. Much of their work in business will be highly productive. But most young grads have high expectations, prodded in part by large student debt, and their demand for jobs needing a liberal arts degree greatly exceeds the supply. Naturally they favor policies inclined to raise their ROI. These include:
cancellation of student debt.
more explicit or implicit quotas for female, Black, and/or Hispanic hires since new liberal arts grads are disproportionately female, Black, and/or Black compared to older, more experienced employees.
expansion of DEI programs and HR offices that will enforce (ii) and open up new, prestigious opportunities in training and enforcement.
expansion of training and enforcement to cover alleged non-binary discrimination, as the older generation is mostly clueless or dismissive about any letters beyond LGB.
To be clear, I make no moral judgment here, nor do I mean to suggest that young adults are more self-interested than their predecessors. I draw attention to it only because youth are particularly hungry to frame their self-interest as morally pure causes, without realizing the many ways that virtue interweaves with vice. This helps explain the spiritual appeal in universities of many woke/DEI/multi-gender causes. The closest precedent is the way the prolonged draft of college-age students during the Vietnam War helped fuel ardently leftist anti-war sentiment, with traces visible in high Boomer participation at recent No Kings protests.
In some ways, current protests merely aim to extend the sphere of individual rights to “life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness”. This was long considered, and rightly so, a Western Enlightenment tradition, even among people who faulted its uneven application. The main purpose of liberal arts instruction was to promote that tradition through enhanced respect for its strengths and focused critique of its weaknesses. Nowadays “Western” is a dirty word in most liberal arts faculties and “Enlightenment” is viewed as obfuscation. “I think, therefore I am” has been crowded out by “I feel, therefore it is”. Why?
I don’t know the answer. Here are some material clues. One is unprecedented prosperity, which most Americans now take for granted. Another is the collapse of the Soviet Union, which removed the Cold War common enemy that helped unite America’s naturally fractious polity. But I suspect the greatest factor is the information revolution.
Liberal arts academics long had a crucial edge in curating the huge mass of literature on social interactions, encompassing fact and fiction, prose and poetry, and records of all sorts. They knew what to look for and how to summarize key findings. The internet made it vastly easier for people to tap old summaries on their own. That recast the academic incentives similarly to how photography recast the incentives for artistic painting. Down with realism; be surrealist or anti-realist. Exaggerate the shortcomings of Western civilization until it looks reactionary; exaggerate the merits of other civilizations until they look progressive. Belittle the scientific revolution, technological progress, and the institutions needed to sustain them; bemoan the illusory paradises they supplanted and forecast mass extinction. Twist every achievement into failure or oppression.
This is worse than non-productive. It is anti-productive. Any civilization that comprehensively applied their approach would quickly go down the tubes. Only Western civilization is sufficiently rich, tolerant, and introspective to toy with this type of self-hate and it too is tiring. This is tragic. In these times of unprecedented change, with new AI life-forms starting to emerge, we humans need more than ever to scour past civilizations for useful lessons. What held them together? What made them thrive? What split them into warring factions? What made them fall?
What we see instead are gasps for political relevance, with proud attachment to every fashionably nihilistic cause that comes along. The more contradictory the principles the better, since there are some things so patently ridiculous that only modern liberal arts academics can fully embrace them. Queers for Palestine. Feminists for Islamism. Yesterday I read an allegation that Iran is trans-friendly as it insists on surgically altering homosexuals. Humanities and Social Sciences is morphing into the Inhumanities and Antisocial Sciences.
I would like to dismiss these as death gasps, like the X-rays emitted when stars fall into a black hole. However, global history is less sanguine. According to Peter Turchin, evolutionary biologist turned evolutionary historian, “elite overproduction”—aka, young educated elites famished for elite jobs—often is a key driver of political crisis, especially when accompanied by rising wealth inequality and fraying civil norms. He recently pointed to AI, government downsizing, and dismantling of DEI as accelerants to young elite resentment.
Furthermore, the anti-productive sectors have partially colonized the productive sectors. The overheads charged by universities on federal STEM or healthcare grants surely leak to other divisions as the levels are high and the accounting opaque. DEI mandates explicitly trade off professional merit against preferred genetic phenotypes or ethnic backgrounds. Woke struggle sessions divert research attention.
Productive university divisions best get out of the way. To this end I offer the following recommendations for them to consider:
Maximum financial autonomy from the rest of the university or reconstitution as universities of STEM, Medicine, and Business with thin offerings in liberal arts.
Roll back DEI programs wherever possible to decide admission and advancement solely by academic merit, analogous to current practices in college sports for athletic merit.
The only non-STEM course sequence required of STEM majors should be “Civilization”, which explores various aspects of what makes human civilizations thrive or fail.
My last recommendation might seem inconsistent with the rest given the high risk of ideological capture. Perhaps it is. But let me at least explain how I think we might reduce that risk to manageable size and why I am willing to take it. Insist that readings present a broad spectrum of views rather than narrow shades of The Correct View. Promote respectful debates in classrooms rather than one-sided lectures or struggle sessions. Demand that student essays discuss pros and cons of real-world institutions rather than pitting What Terribly Is against What Ought to Be. In short, let’s treat Civilization as a budding science and inject the spirit expressed so well by Feynman 70 years ago.
“All scientific knowledge is uncertain. This experience with doubt and uncertainty is important. I believe that it is of very great value, and one that extends beyond the sciences. I believe that to solve any problem that has never been solved before, you have to leave the door to the unknown ajar. You have to permit the possibility that you do not have it exactly right.”
The very effort to study Civilization in that spirit, if it can be sustained, stands to make better citizens of scientists. It would help inoculate against “I feel, therefore it is” groupthink. It could provide productive refuge for some bravely heterodox thinkers, who in turn might repopulate Liberal Arts faculties once the current inferno burns out. It also responds to the moral obligation, especially valuable in these fractious times, to reach out civilly across divides even when opponents do not.
In any case, universities seem bound to evolve long-term in more technically focused directions. Consider trends in China, which boasts the world’s longest tradition of elite bureaucrats schooled in the liberal arts. Of its seven highest-rated universities, four already focus on STEM, medicine, and business with only modest offerings in the humanities, and one of the remaining three, Fudan, has recently decided “to slash its humanities enrollments by up to half and expand its technology-focused programs”. This has sparked a lot of debate in China, as it should. I wish it would spark more debate here.
 | A guest post by
|
You almost lost me at "The primary function of universities is to educate skilled labor." No, that's the primary function of trade schools. The primary function of universities is to educate students to have flexible, agile, and ever-inquiring minds and how to best take advantage of those qualities in all situations. That suits them for a variety of careers, even with a fine arts degree. The problem, as you obliquely document, is that students are now educated to have rigid, inflexible, and lazy minds focused on a very narrow set of values that are not connected to the real world. That's why they are unemployable. Except for that opening statement, so much of what you document is true. Add to that the laziness: If students were half as creative at seeking out knowledge as they are avoiding it (cheating, essays written by AI, etc.) they wouldn't be where they are today. Another comment you made is also spot on and explains the success of Zohran Mamdami in New York: Students today come out with an inflated sense of their own worth and, if they don't get high-paying, elite jobs, they think they are hard done by and it must be someone else's fault.
A "primary function of universities" is, or was, to extend the traditional knowledge and intellectual practices of a civilization. Before the Woke/PC era, this was the goal of liberal arts departments, which taught basic, and often required, classes in subjects like Greek philosophy, English literature, and (non-ideological) history, especially of Europe and America. Prestigious schools had famous programs, like Columbia, University of Chicago, and Stanford, where these courses were called "Western Civilization". Basically first-year writing programs, in addition to teaching core academic skills like reading challenging texts and writing well-argued essays, these classes answered the foundational question "Who are we and where do we come from?", thus providing students with a common sense of identity and a context for their lives. The great nations and institutions of the Western world, including the United States itself, were built by people who consciously viewed themselves as extending the work of past figures reaching back in a continuous line to Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Julius Caesar, and others, just as current scientists understand that they "stand on the shoulders of giants" like Newton and Einstein.
Not coincidentally, these programs have come under increasing attack as US universities have diversified. Administrators caved to complaints from students who claimed to feel "excluded" or "oppressed", watering down and eliminating these programs, and new generations of faculty, now disproportionally female, fundamentally altered the content and purpose of departments in the humanities and social sciences, which now almost exclusively produce the kind of Critical Studies courses and pseudo-scholarship you identify as so damaging both to society and to universities themselves (not to mention to students, who graduate not having learned anything).
Rather than eliminating the liberal arts, we should turn back the clock to the previous understanding of what the liberal arts are and what the content of such classes should be. While an engineering major doesn't need to read the entirety of what we used to call the canon (or "the best that has been thought and said"), even someone who ends up writing code or building bridges can benefit from knowing a bit about how truly great individuals in past solved problems and thought about human life, which in certain basic ways has not changed as much as we often believe.