"College Is Coming Apart"
College in America makes two promises. On the one hand, college is a credentialing service: It awards a degree that affirms knowledge and sends a graduate into a career. On the other hand, college is a coming-of-age service. It forms identity through social exploration and intellectual development. It is the American ideal for how a young person figures out who they are. Partying, drinking, Greek life, sports, and other forms of college life always risked undermining the educational project—and vice versa. But the two categories coexisted well enough.
. . . Now AI has separated the two purposes of college almost entirely. Writing an essay previously required doing something resembling the assigned academic work. Because AI makes it possible to complete coursework without much or any intellectual labor, AI has disconnected the output from the process (if students choose the shortcut).
He claims that the combination of AI and research cuts by the Trump administrations have somehow driven college life asunder -- but in summing things up, he contradicts his whole argument:
Undergraduate education, credentialing, scientific research, professionalization, and coming of age still occupy the same campuses. But they are clearly no longer parts of the same enterprise. They have not been so for many years—probably many decades. Looking back at my own career, I can see clearly that every single term of it has taken place in the shadow of this family of mismatches. Teaching and research sometimes align, but not always. Becoming educated has little to do with becoming an adult, apart from taking place on the same campus.
He started out claiming that two very recent developments, AI and Trump, have "destroyed the sanctity of learning", but now he concludes this has probably been going on for many decades. Certainly my experience as a graduate assistant 50 years ago was that students weren't coming out of college well educated at all. So what on earth is his point? I dunno, but he got it into The Atlantic. I'd be interested to see if an AI editor could clean this up, or maybe just tell the guy to start over.Here's the second piece; English Departments Have Lost the Plot:
WVU business professor Craig Warmke got some attention by calling out the Princeton English major course offerings. It’s all the sort of thing we have come to expect. Courses on: dolls, socialism, makeovers, capitalist burnout in contemporary fiction… You get the idea.
The problem with the Princeton syllabus is not the individual courses. Fine, study socialism and Sondheim! The problem is the overall balance. These courses are all held in equal regard. The problem is the lack of insistence upon the canonical works of English. The problem is contemporary fiction instead of Shakespeare, dolls instead of George Eliot. Of the twelve courses you take as an English major, none is obliged to be on Shakespeare, Chaucer, Milton, Wordsworth—authors our grandmothers might have read as school-leavers. Yes, the syllabus is ideological, but it is also just lame.
. . . So here is my plea to the students themselves. Challenge yourself to read the canon. Take it upon yourself to read the biggest works written in English, the grandest. You can still write about gender if you study Elizabethan poetry, as Camille Paglia did. You can still write cultural commentary if you read the old works, as Susan Sontag did. You can still be a modern if you read the classics, as Merve Emre is. The question is not what you think of the debate about woke colleges and canons—the question is whether you are up for the challenge.
The auhor, Henry Oliver, is apparently some sort of post-doc fellow, which just illustrates the problem in a different light: there aren't all that many tenure-track jobs for PhDs who specialize in tbe canon, which is maybe his real subtext. But this goes to the economic issue that neither he nor the Atlantic writer mentions -- if students don't sign up for courses, the universities won't offer them. The fact is that students prefer courses in dolls, socialism, and makeovers. The Princeton English Department requires only one pre-1700 course for a major, because students won't major in English if more are required, and that means fewer English profs.But what kind of students are Princeton and other elite schools admitting? Not long ago, I brought up ALDC, Athletes, Legacies, Dean’s Interest List (often linked to major donors), and Children of faculty and staff.
ALDC is an acronym that emerged from the Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard lawsuit, where internal admissions data was made public for the first time. It refers to four categories of applicants who receive preferential treatment in the admissions process at Harvard and, by extension, at most elite universities.
. . . The most comprehensive data on how ALDC preferences work at an Ivy League school comes from the SFFA v. Harvard trial, where Harvard’s own admissions records from 2014 to 2019 were analyzed by economists. The findings were striking.
During that period, ALDC applicants made up roughly 5% (SFFA v. Harvard, trial disclosures) of Harvard’s applicant pool but accounted for approximately 30% of admitted students. The overall admission rate for non-ALDC applicants hovered around 4.5% to 5%, while ALDC applicants were admitted at dramatically higher rates.
Recruited athletes were admitted at approximately 86% (SFFA v. Harvard, trial disclosures), making athletic recruitment by far the single largest admissions advantage available at Harvard. Legacy applicants were admitted at roughly 33%, which was more than five times the overall acceptance rate during the same period. Applicants on the Dean’s Interest List were admitted at approximately 42%. Children of faculty and staff were admitted at close to 47%.
My own estimates, looking at the reported makeup of recent Ivy first-year classes, have been that probably fewer than 25% of admissions are competitively based on the traditional criteria of grades, SATs, and extracurriculars. ALDC, for instance, omits foreign students, who are sought after, because they pay full freight. Children of faculty, as a practical matter, encompasses children of faculty at other schools as well. Among other things, this ensures a student body makeup that reflects and reinforces typical faculty attitudes.As I look back at my Ivy schoolmates now 60 years ago, I'm recognizing how many were legacies, preppies, rich kids, and faculty children, in many cases the worst possible choices for me to consider as friends. But if elite schools are admitting classes made up of 75% students who shouldn't be there, what can these writers expect from this sort of student body? Instead, they're blaming Trump and AI. But 50 and 60 years ago, the colleges were admititng the same people, who were partying and doing analog plagiarism and cheating at precisely the same rate students are using AI now.
The big problm is that universities haven't been reforming themselves, and this will need to start with admissions.
