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.
Thanks for your probing comment. You nailed a core weakness of my essay -- I didn't define "productive skills". However, l do consider "learning how to learn" THE most productive skill of all -- that's where LLMs vaulted past previous machine learners -- and your longer definition of the primary function of universities strikes me as elaborating on that. So your contrast of flexible vs rigid seems highly correlated with mine of productive vs anti-productive, with the additional merit of favoring (as I too would favor) thoughtful debate about a great novel over memorization of mathematical recipes. Personally i think that core learning-how-to-learn or flexible-agile-and-ever-inquiring minds should be taught in K-12 and that if one waits until university it is largely too late.
I recently came across a novel expression of young elite resentment: "moral injury". Once used to describe the experiences of soldiers who had PTSD from committing heinous acts in war, I've recently seen it applied to primary school teachers who disagree with their school administrative policies and feel they are acting in violation of their morals. The dissonance, they claim, causes them a moral injury since they cannot act according to their conscience. These teachers aren't describing having to administer corporal punishment - they simply disagree with the idea of suspension and things like that.
On another note, I agree with commenter Judy Parrish that the definition of universities is to create flexible and inquiring minds rather than to educate skilled labor. While the Marxist critique offered by Mr. Osband is compelling, another causal chain may be that social factors like extreme progressive political bias of the faculty and a largely female student body lead to orthodoxy in the liberal arts that inhibit critical thinking. I do wish we had more engineering-type-minds in the liberal arts - perhaps people like Mr. Osband and the creator of this substack, Dorian Abbot - that would bring some balance and a refresh to an absolutely vital part of college education.
I'm all for "engineering-type-minds in the liberal arts". The Western world's best exemplar was Leonardo da Vinci and the Italian-Renaissance-craft tradition he represented. Would that our educational system cultivated many more.
Whoa that article was actually a little frustrating to read. It sounds like they think more DEI is the answer ("restorative justice" yeah right) but DEI caused that awful environment to begin with. What public school teachers are feeling is exactly what it would feel like under a socialist totalitarian regime where the state is the only employer.
This deeply feminine concept of "moral injury" is completely blind to the benefits of punishment and failure, of being "scared straight", of learning from mistakes, however painful or humiliating. It ignores or doesn't even recognize how young people can reform themselves from a single bad brush with authorities (teachers, parents, others) and how sometimes these can be a wake-up call that inspires people to change the course of their lives. It's almost like these teachers claiming "moral injury" have such an anxious terror of making kids feel sad or wrong, of robbing them of precious life-sustaining self-esteem, that they can't see any of the positive side of punishment.
Educators have become incubators of anxiety and neurosis and are so besotted by their incontinent compassion that they've raised a generation of emotional cripples.
Yeah, “when you have a hammer you think everything is a nail” definitely applies to the woke/DEI-mindset. To use a medical analogy, they assume the problems they face exist because the DEI-dose is too small, so if you just increase the dose, you will fix it. But increasing the dose will just make the patient even worse.
How does “a largely female student body” contribute to the demise of higher education? What is “engineering-type-minds”? I have an engineering degree, social sciences degree, and Ph.D. In humanities, but I don’t understand the distinction you are drawing. Also, since I taught GE courses, I had students from all disciplines, and my engineering and hard sciences students had the worst ability to argue and support their contentions.
I do agree with the presence of extreme progressive bias, but I question some of your assertions above.
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.
These are excellent points and deserve elaboration into a separate article. As father to four children who started with heavy liberal arts emphasis and are now in highly STEM-oriented jobs, I have witnessed both the usefulness of a great liberal arts education and its sharp deterioration in the US. It's not the political slant I object to; it's the shallowness.
I tried to get a lot of exposure to liberal arts and fine arts, while taking as much STEM as possible. It was somewhat challenging, but I think things would be even worse now since most of the non-STEM subjects seem to be incredibly corrupted with woke nonsense.
It reminds me of stories I heard from people who had gone to college in the USSR. There was so much contamination of the nonSTEM subjects with communist nonsense that they were almost completely worthless, in their estimation.
Terrific post. It had so many killer turns of phrases that were stand-alone things of beauty (in addition to the overall trenchant point). So many, but I think my favorite is, "I think, therefore I am” has been crowded out by “I feel, therefore it is.' Tweeted it out earlier today, and its got like 13k views and 100 retweets.
Yes, there are other purposes that universities serve besides educating a labor force, but their use to nations is to make their nation stronger. Physics, chemistry, and medicine have long been the foundations of militaries from the ancient Egyptians and Romans to today. Rhetoric and "humanities" have long been how political elites were maintained.
I see the lack of support for students by government as the key problem behind the negative changes. In 1970, the level of funding per student in the University of California was ~$20,000. In today's dollars, if this had been maintained, this would be over $170,000 per student, more than sufficient to educate well in any field, feed and house students at all levels. However, a student that did not keep their grades up to par would not continue to be funded.
Germany, and most of Europe, funds its students, paying for education, and providing a stipend for living. The proviso being that those students must cut the mustard. Poor grades move the student into trade schools. If the student can cut it, they can keep going as far as they like. For Chinese students, costs are quite low also. The government decides what areas of education will be funded, and to what degree.
In the USA, the boomers took advantage of nearly free education, and could potentially work their way through college with no debt. Most boomers finished college with little or no debt in that era.
The private universities liked the effect of defunding higher education. The boomers cut off the money supply to higher education and feathered their nests with the results of that. (Prop 13, etcetera.) The privates got more students when the cost gap narrowed. And the era of student as customer to be served came into being. Programs to give students grants to start them on the path, and put students into debt as they went down that path, were joined by law to remove bankruptcy as an option for discharging student debt. This "improved" the finances of all universities, public and private, with no serious discussion of how that was all predicated on the removal of public support. For public universities, research grant administrative fees became the lifeline on which the universities thrived.
This path was not, and is not, sustainable. In context of the harsh reality that for government, "The primary function of universities is to educate skilled labor," (and get a scientific lead on competitive militaries) this unsustainable path is crashing. That is what we are seeing.
For Art and Humanities departments, the game has become (like law schools) to accept as many students as possible, including grad students. This pumps up the budget with payments (effectively conned) from student loans. In law schools, 30-40% may graduate. From art graduate programs, also low. They collect payments for a year or two from students that are never going to make it, and dump them. And as we see, humanities departments pump up their graduates and dump them on the street with high debt and for most, no path to paying it off. Contrast this with medical schools which have very high graduation rates. Med schools are also more picky on the front end, and provide more help to their students to get through. (And medical and many grad STEM degrees can get their debt paid by government service, for instance in underserved areas of the nation, or in the military.)
We have to change fundamentals. Students entering higher education are flatly incompetent to decide collectively where to enroll and what to major in. In that sense, those angry graduates are, "hard done by." Perverse incentives rule the day.
I would have liked to see the ROIs as percentages, too, like someone else mentioned. But the graph is pretty square with what I'd expect it to be based on my experiences with undergrads and recent grads. The fact that biology and the life sciences is above only education and fine arts also checks out. I have told many students not to go into biology. It's incredibly over-saturated and as such the jobs in both industry and academia pay very poorly. Biology is STEM, technically, but the very low math requirements mean students who are excited about STEM but can't actually do it FLOCK there. This is not to attack people with biology PhDs and Masters degrees who are doing just fine and are productive, or the savvy biology bachelors degree holders who got into industry right away and moved up the ladder. You guys are the exception, not the rule. We could move biology way up the scale if it had the same math requirements as chemistry, with required courses in bioinformatics. Quantitative skills are more transferable. Or encourage students (who aren't interested in medicine/health) to go into life sciences degree programs that aren't called Biology -- Forestry, Wildlife and Fisheries Science, Agriculture, and so on. There are actual skills to be learned in those majors that are real-world applicable and you still get to nerd out about biology topics.
So you said that pay is determined by economic value added. I personally think it is supply and demand that determines what jobs pay (what labor costs) but maybe what you meant by economic value added had that embedded in it. Maybe not though. Can you clarify? It sounded like labor theory of value which is Marxist although you did say you were offering a Marxist perspective.
The fact that so many students are concentrated in the low-value majors is probably not going to change in my own opinion. I am too cynical now. I think the Pareto distribution applies here. Most people are going to be unable to keep up in the high tech world and the same ratio of versatile, talented, and flexible individuals to "regular people" will always exist. Those few will carry the rest of us. (Btw so I am not misunderstood as arrogant, I consider myself to be among the regulars.)
We have a lot of people in the system, who think they are special, when they cannot actually do ANYTHING. And these people tend to gravitate into management jobs, where their opinions are less than worthless. They are "antiproductive".
We effectively give these characters infinite power, with complete impunity. And they effectively do whatever they can to obstruct productive enterprises and efforts.
You lost me completely by expressing ROI in dollar amounts. Shouldn't it be measured in percentages (or, alternatively, indicate the dollar amount of investment)?
You're right. I cited FREEOPP's findings without noting its non-standard definition of ROI "as the increase in lifetime earnings a student can expect from that degree, minus the direct and indirect costs of college". It's actually a Net Present Value (NPV) calculation, as this methodological discussion indicates that returns are discounted at a 3% annual rate. https://freopp.org/whitepapers/how-we-calculated-the-return-on-investment-of-a-college-degree/
I believe FREOPP used inflation-adjusted dollars, in which case the discounting is not that different. While I think that FREOPP made a sincere attempt to calculate this fairly despite the non-standard use of ROI, let me acknowledge that some assumptions are necessarily "heroic". The biggest issue by far is that it projects past earnings experience to future earnings experience. But that's not really FREOPP's fault; it's the fault of our vexing universe that won't let us sample from the future. The best defense I can offer is Mark Twain's: "History doesn't repeat itself, but it often rhymes".
As a recovering social science professor (Emeritus), I endorse the proposal to enhance STEM and business fields and cut back on (what were once) social sciences and humanities disciplines. Now that the social sciences and humanities (and education, social work, law, and medicine) faculties have rejected science and adopted extremist politics and activism, the problem is how to cleanse these faculties of their ideological corruption. How exactly could the current corrupted and compromised professors be replaced? The same is an issue with university administrators who have encouraged and endorsed the anti-Enlightenment and anti-science university. And, yes, it is even worse in Canada.
Requiring balanced budgets at the federal level would go a long way to reimposing sanity in the system. Reduce the percentage of government spend, eliminate as much as possible of these patronage systems, and force people to fend for themselves in a market economy. For a start, eliminate subsidized education loans to areas without ROI. If it's worth funding, private capital can do it. Big government, as per usual, turns out to be the root of the problem.
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.
Thanks for your probing comment. You nailed a core weakness of my essay -- I didn't define "productive skills". However, l do consider "learning how to learn" THE most productive skill of all -- that's where LLMs vaulted past previous machine learners -- and your longer definition of the primary function of universities strikes me as elaborating on that. So your contrast of flexible vs rigid seems highly correlated with mine of productive vs anti-productive, with the additional merit of favoring (as I too would favor) thoughtful debate about a great novel over memorization of mathematical recipes. Personally i think that core learning-how-to-learn or flexible-agile-and-ever-inquiring minds should be taught in K-12 and that if one waits until university it is largely too late.
I recently came across a novel expression of young elite resentment: "moral injury". Once used to describe the experiences of soldiers who had PTSD from committing heinous acts in war, I've recently seen it applied to primary school teachers who disagree with their school administrative policies and feel they are acting in violation of their morals. The dissonance, they claim, causes them a moral injury since they cannot act according to their conscience. These teachers aren't describing having to administer corporal punishment - they simply disagree with the idea of suspension and things like that.
Link: https://theconversation.com/it-feels-like-i-am-being-forced-to-harm-a-child-research-shows-how-teachers-are-suffering-moral-injury-258821
On another note, I agree with commenter Judy Parrish that the definition of universities is to create flexible and inquiring minds rather than to educate skilled labor. While the Marxist critique offered by Mr. Osband is compelling, another causal chain may be that social factors like extreme progressive political bias of the faculty and a largely female student body lead to orthodoxy in the liberal arts that inhibit critical thinking. I do wish we had more engineering-type-minds in the liberal arts - perhaps people like Mr. Osband and the creator of this substack, Dorian Abbot - that would bring some balance and a refresh to an absolutely vital part of college education.
I'm all for "engineering-type-minds in the liberal arts". The Western world's best exemplar was Leonardo da Vinci and the Italian-Renaissance-craft tradition he represented. Would that our educational system cultivated many more.
Whoa that article was actually a little frustrating to read. It sounds like they think more DEI is the answer ("restorative justice" yeah right) but DEI caused that awful environment to begin with. What public school teachers are feeling is exactly what it would feel like under a socialist totalitarian regime where the state is the only employer.
Off topic, I know. Couldn't resist.
This deeply feminine concept of "moral injury" is completely blind to the benefits of punishment and failure, of being "scared straight", of learning from mistakes, however painful or humiliating. It ignores or doesn't even recognize how young people can reform themselves from a single bad brush with authorities (teachers, parents, others) and how sometimes these can be a wake-up call that inspires people to change the course of their lives. It's almost like these teachers claiming "moral injury" have such an anxious terror of making kids feel sad or wrong, of robbing them of precious life-sustaining self-esteem, that they can't see any of the positive side of punishment.
Educators have become incubators of anxiety and neurosis and are so besotted by their incontinent compassion that they've raised a generation of emotional cripples.
Bravo - well said!
Thanks!
Yeah, “when you have a hammer you think everything is a nail” definitely applies to the woke/DEI-mindset. To use a medical analogy, they assume the problems they face exist because the DEI-dose is too small, so if you just increase the dose, you will fix it. But increasing the dose will just make the patient even worse.
How does “a largely female student body” contribute to the demise of higher education? What is “engineering-type-minds”? I have an engineering degree, social sciences degree, and Ph.D. In humanities, but I don’t understand the distinction you are drawing. Also, since I taught GE courses, I had students from all disciplines, and my engineering and hard sciences students had the worst ability to argue and support their contentions.
I do agree with the presence of extreme progressive bias, but I question some of your assertions above.
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.
These are excellent points and deserve elaboration into a separate article. As father to four children who started with heavy liberal arts emphasis and are now in highly STEM-oriented jobs, I have witnessed both the usefulness of a great liberal arts education and its sharp deterioration in the US. It's not the political slant I object to; it's the shallowness.
I tried to get a lot of exposure to liberal arts and fine arts, while taking as much STEM as possible. It was somewhat challenging, but I think things would be even worse now since most of the non-STEM subjects seem to be incredibly corrupted with woke nonsense.
It reminds me of stories I heard from people who had gone to college in the USSR. There was so much contamination of the nonSTEM subjects with communist nonsense that they were almost completely worthless, in their estimation.
Terrific post. It had so many killer turns of phrases that were stand-alone things of beauty (in addition to the overall trenchant point). So many, but I think my favorite is, "I think, therefore I am” has been crowded out by “I feel, therefore it is.' Tweeted it out earlier today, and its got like 13k views and 100 retweets.
Yes, there are other purposes that universities serve besides educating a labor force, but their use to nations is to make their nation stronger. Physics, chemistry, and medicine have long been the foundations of militaries from the ancient Egyptians and Romans to today. Rhetoric and "humanities" have long been how political elites were maintained.
I see the lack of support for students by government as the key problem behind the negative changes. In 1970, the level of funding per student in the University of California was ~$20,000. In today's dollars, if this had been maintained, this would be over $170,000 per student, more than sufficient to educate well in any field, feed and house students at all levels. However, a student that did not keep their grades up to par would not continue to be funded.
Germany, and most of Europe, funds its students, paying for education, and providing a stipend for living. The proviso being that those students must cut the mustard. Poor grades move the student into trade schools. If the student can cut it, they can keep going as far as they like. For Chinese students, costs are quite low also. The government decides what areas of education will be funded, and to what degree.
In the USA, the boomers took advantage of nearly free education, and could potentially work their way through college with no debt. Most boomers finished college with little or no debt in that era.
The private universities liked the effect of defunding higher education. The boomers cut off the money supply to higher education and feathered their nests with the results of that. (Prop 13, etcetera.) The privates got more students when the cost gap narrowed. And the era of student as customer to be served came into being. Programs to give students grants to start them on the path, and put students into debt as they went down that path, were joined by law to remove bankruptcy as an option for discharging student debt. This "improved" the finances of all universities, public and private, with no serious discussion of how that was all predicated on the removal of public support. For public universities, research grant administrative fees became the lifeline on which the universities thrived.
This path was not, and is not, sustainable. In context of the harsh reality that for government, "The primary function of universities is to educate skilled labor," (and get a scientific lead on competitive militaries) this unsustainable path is crashing. That is what we are seeing.
For Art and Humanities departments, the game has become (like law schools) to accept as many students as possible, including grad students. This pumps up the budget with payments (effectively conned) from student loans. In law schools, 30-40% may graduate. From art graduate programs, also low. They collect payments for a year or two from students that are never going to make it, and dump them. And as we see, humanities departments pump up their graduates and dump them on the street with high debt and for most, no path to paying it off. Contrast this with medical schools which have very high graduation rates. Med schools are also more picky on the front end, and provide more help to their students to get through. (And medical and many grad STEM degrees can get their debt paid by government service, for instance in underserved areas of the nation, or in the military.)
We have to change fundamentals. Students entering higher education are flatly incompetent to decide collectively where to enroll and what to major in. In that sense, those angry graduates are, "hard done by." Perverse incentives rule the day.
We're doomed, aren't we?Just say it.
Love this!
I would have liked to see the ROIs as percentages, too, like someone else mentioned. But the graph is pretty square with what I'd expect it to be based on my experiences with undergrads and recent grads. The fact that biology and the life sciences is above only education and fine arts also checks out. I have told many students not to go into biology. It's incredibly over-saturated and as such the jobs in both industry and academia pay very poorly. Biology is STEM, technically, but the very low math requirements mean students who are excited about STEM but can't actually do it FLOCK there. This is not to attack people with biology PhDs and Masters degrees who are doing just fine and are productive, or the savvy biology bachelors degree holders who got into industry right away and moved up the ladder. You guys are the exception, not the rule. We could move biology way up the scale if it had the same math requirements as chemistry, with required courses in bioinformatics. Quantitative skills are more transferable. Or encourage students (who aren't interested in medicine/health) to go into life sciences degree programs that aren't called Biology -- Forestry, Wildlife and Fisheries Science, Agriculture, and so on. There are actual skills to be learned in those majors that are real-world applicable and you still get to nerd out about biology topics.
So you said that pay is determined by economic value added. I personally think it is supply and demand that determines what jobs pay (what labor costs) but maybe what you meant by economic value added had that embedded in it. Maybe not though. Can you clarify? It sounded like labor theory of value which is Marxist although you did say you were offering a Marxist perspective.
The fact that so many students are concentrated in the low-value majors is probably not going to change in my own opinion. I am too cynical now. I think the Pareto distribution applies here. Most people are going to be unable to keep up in the high tech world and the same ratio of versatile, talented, and flexible individuals to "regular people" will always exist. Those few will carry the rest of us. (Btw so I am not misunderstood as arrogant, I consider myself to be among the regulars.)
I like the term "antiproductive".
We have a lot of people in the system, who think they are special, when they cannot actually do ANYTHING. And these people tend to gravitate into management jobs, where their opinions are less than worthless. They are "antiproductive".
We effectively give these characters infinite power, with complete impunity. And they effectively do whatever they can to obstruct productive enterprises and efforts.
You lost me completely by expressing ROI in dollar amounts. Shouldn't it be measured in percentages (or, alternatively, indicate the dollar amount of investment)?
You're right. I cited FREEOPP's findings without noting its non-standard definition of ROI "as the increase in lifetime earnings a student can expect from that degree, minus the direct and indirect costs of college". It's actually a Net Present Value (NPV) calculation, as this methodological discussion indicates that returns are discounted at a 3% annual rate. https://freopp.org/whitepapers/how-we-calculated-the-return-on-investment-of-a-college-degree/
thanks for this explanation. The non-percentage ROI was making me really question the source for your graphs.
that's a funny discount rate to choose given the loans for these studies are often at 5-7%.
I believe FREOPP used inflation-adjusted dollars, in which case the discounting is not that different. While I think that FREOPP made a sincere attempt to calculate this fairly despite the non-standard use of ROI, let me acknowledge that some assumptions are necessarily "heroic". The biggest issue by far is that it projects past earnings experience to future earnings experience. But that's not really FREOPP's fault; it's the fault of our vexing universe that won't let us sample from the future. The best defense I can offer is Mark Twain's: "History doesn't repeat itself, but it often rhymes".
I don't doubt the overall conclusions much, but was definitely intrigued by the method. Thank you.
As a recovering social science professor (Emeritus), I endorse the proposal to enhance STEM and business fields and cut back on (what were once) social sciences and humanities disciplines. Now that the social sciences and humanities (and education, social work, law, and medicine) faculties have rejected science and adopted extremist politics and activism, the problem is how to cleanse these faculties of their ideological corruption. How exactly could the current corrupted and compromised professors be replaced? The same is an issue with university administrators who have encouraged and endorsed the anti-Enlightenment and anti-science university. And, yes, it is even worse in Canada.
Requiring balanced budgets at the federal level would go a long way to reimposing sanity in the system. Reduce the percentage of government spend, eliminate as much as possible of these patronage systems, and force people to fend for themselves in a market economy. For a start, eliminate subsidized education loans to areas without ROI. If it's worth funding, private capital can do it. Big government, as per usual, turns out to be the root of the problem.