
Even during a crisis, colleges abuse their economic and reputational privileges - nreece
https://www.city-journal.org/higher-ed-diversity-bureaucracy
======
MaxBarraclough
I'll zoom in on the diversity point, but I realise it's not the whole focus of
the article.

Seems to me the real point here is both blindingly obvious, and for some
reason never discussed. Education is a pipeline, and everyone is obsessing
over the final stage, forgetting the rest. It's short-term thinking that
misses the real problems.

If you want your society to produce successful university graduates from all
demographics, you need to ensure all demographics have access to quality pre-
university education. As I understand it, this simply isn't the case in the US
today. No-one seems to have any interest in improving the state of affairs.
(Perhaps because it's less glamorous than talking about universities?)

As it stands, the left-leaning suggestion is to explicitly weight the
universities' admissions criteria to ensure an increased number of
disadvantaged candidates are able to gain admission, despite falling short of
the usual academic requirements (branded _positive discrimination_ ). A
disproportionate number then fail in their studies, as the article says. The
right-leaning suggestion is to do nothing at all, as far as I can tell.

Neither is a solution. Solve the pipeline problem. Invest seriously in pre-
university education. I'm continually surprised that articles on the topic
don't even mention this in passing.

Disclaimer: I'm not an American, I'm not an academic, I'm just a random muppet
on the Internet.

~~~
MyHypatia
I agree that the needed work (and hardest work) is access to quality pre-
university education.

That being said, I find it bizarre that we fret over whether minority
applicants are given an unfair boost, while at the same time allowing legacy
admissions and athletic preferance admissions to continue. Both of these boost
applicants who otherwise would not make it through. We don't fret too much
when a spot is taken by a wealthy legacy admit or obscure sport admit, yet we
have multiple lawsuits and court cases if the spot is taken by a racial
minority.

John Hopkins University ended legacy admissions and I applaud them.
[https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/01/why-we-
end...](https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/01/why-we-ended-legacy-
admissions-johns-hopkins/605131/)

~~~
MaxBarraclough
I'm in the UK. I've never heard of 'legacy admissions' happening here, nor
admissions in return for dropping money on a university. I get the impression
from The Guardian that these things are quite unique to America, and really
don't occur in the UK. [0] [1] [2]

Similarly I've never heard of someone being admitted to a UK university for
the purpose of getting them to complete in university sports. Sports are
funded by universities, but generally, few people really care about university
sports, the way it should be. It may help in admissions if you have non-
academic achievements on top your academic ones, but sports aren't given the
special status that they are in US universities.

On the race point, the only lawsuit I'm aware of is the one against Harvard
for discriminating against Asian applicants. (There's no question that Harvard
have higher grade-requirements for Asian applicants.) The courts decided the
Harvard admissions policy wasn't unconstitutional. [4] My understanding is
that if a similar approach were taken in hiring decisions, that would be
extremely illegal.

If you'll excuse a tangent: we also don't have 'campus police' in the UK, for
which I'm thankful. Universities hire security guards, the way business parks
do. The American system is to have police officers on the payroll of a
university, expected to follow orders from the university's power-structure
[5]. Deans should not be able to issue orders to police officers.

[0] [https://www.theguardian.com/education/2019/oct/01/harvard-
ad...](https://www.theguardian.com/education/2019/oct/01/harvard-admissions-
process-white-privilege)

[1] [https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/jan/23/elite-
school...](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/jan/23/elite-schools-ivy-
league-legacy-admissions-harvard-wealthier-whiter)

[2]
[https://www.theguardian.com/education/shortcuts/2019/mar/13/...](https://www.theguardian.com/education/shortcuts/2019/mar/13/us-
admissions-scandal-oxbridge)

[4] [https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/oct/01/harvard-
ruli...](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/oct/01/harvard-ruling-
admissions-racial-bias-asian-americans-latest)

[5]
[https://www.google.com/search?q="ordered+campus+police"](https://www.google.com/search?q="ordered+campus+police")

~~~
MyHypatia
Yes, unfortunately in the US we have legacy admissions and athletic admissions
without much oversight on how athletically talented the student is.

"A study, published earlier this month in the National Bureau of Economic
Research, found that 43 percent of white students admitted to Harvard
University were recruited athletes, legacy students, children of faculty and
staff, or on the dean’s interest list — applicants whose parents or relatives
have donated to Harvard.

That number drops dramatically for black, Latino, and Asian American students,
with less than 16 percent each coming from those categories.

The study also found that roughly 75 percent of the white students admitted
from those four categories, labeled 'ALDCs' in the study, “would have been
rejected if they had been treated as white non-ALDCs,” the study said."[1]

We are already aware that the current admissions policy has the effect of
heavily and unfairly favoring wealthy white students. Then we try to "correct"
for that. For some reason we talk about and fret a lot more about policies
that tip the scales for minorities, but for legacy admissions it's just "how
things are done". In my opinion if a university uses legacy admissions, they
should be barred from receiving federal funding. When JHU stopped using legacy
admissions, the number of minority students increased. It would be interesting
to know if the number of nonwealthy white students increased as well. My point
is, there is clear favoritism for the wealthy class, and at least one easy fix
(drop legacy admissions) to get towards a more merit-based system.

[1][https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/study-harvard-
finds-43-...](https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/study-harvard-
finds-43-percent-white-students-are-legacy-athletes-n1060361)

------
samizdis
> _Almost no college is considering a tuition rebate, which implies that
> online learning should be valued at the same rate as an on-campus class.
> Students and their parents may start to ask why they should pay astronomical
> fees for a campus experience if they can get the same instruction over the
> web._

Prof Scott Galloway's blog (No Mercy, No Malice) recently took a swipe at
higher-ed fees and the ever-increasing financial burdens being placed on
students - and younger people in general. It considers this in a post-Covid-19
world:

[https://www.profgalloway.com/post-corona-higher-
ed](https://www.profgalloway.com/post-corona-higher-ed)

~~~
no_mercy
Apparently, if one engine of a four engine airplane stops working, the
airplane flies 10% slower. But this doesn't mean if all four engines stop
working, the airplane will fly 40% slower.

What I am saying is: if a large number of the newly unemployed are not
satisfied with their life circumstances in a few months, there could be a
complete breakdown of society. It is unlikely the "everything will be the
same, but only accelerate" model will play out when the acceleration also
depends on the "cooperation" of 10s of millions of suddenly unemployed people.

Here is my counter prediction to the entire article: A lot of prediction
makers are going to go back to the drawing board and come up with better
models for their predictions, because no model can adequately capture the
chaos which is almost guaranteed to ensue now.

------
jimhefferon
The article seemed to me to be a mix of two things, railing against the costs
(blamed on the rise of administrators), and railing against the existence of
diversity administrators.

I'm a professor employed at my present institution, a small liberal arts
school, since 1990. I am not an administrator of any kind, don't read the
_Chronicle_ , and don't understand where all the money goes. I will say
though, that when I started we had very few students who were not white. Very
few, particularly if you omitted athletes. But today a good chunk, 40% maybe,
of the student body is, to my eye, nonwhite. I don't know how much of that can
be ascribed to the diversity officer but it is IMHO a very good thing.

~~~
fastball
The US is 72.4% white. You would then expect there to be 27.6% non-white
students at any particular institution, assuming no racial discrimination,
etc. So then why is 40% non-white a desirable outcome? I thought the point was
to compensate for exclusion / marginalization / discrimination, in which case
the target should be that aforementioned 27.6%.

EDIT: since many people are replying to me saying that using the national
demographic stats is a bad thing to do, I will use the stats for GP's state,
which appears to be Virginia. Using these stats (94.2% white), you would
expect the school to have only 5.8% non-white students, assuming _a complete
lack of racial discrimination compared to the state population_.

I personally still think using the national stats is a better idea, as the
goal of a college / university should not be to only educate people from the
state it is located in.

~~~
battery_cowboy
Man, you twisted this comment so much to extract that message. The commenter
is likely saying it's good that the campus is more representative, not that
they're for the elimination of whites or some shit. Also, you don't know where
they live. Where I come from, it's about 80 percent nonwhite. Before you
comment, consider that the story you make up in your head isn't always the
most likely.

Edit: Hawaii has 25 percent whites, so my estimate was correct.

~~~
fastball
I am using national statistics given a lack of information by the GP. If the
GP wants to update with a more accurate location, they are free to, and we can
have this discussion with better accuracy. Without that, the "story in my
head" is, in fact, the most likely.

~~~
battery_cowboy
Also: It doesn't even matter what statistics are correct, your assumption that
the original commenter was celebrating antiwhite sentiment is absurd by
itself.

Original:

You're using statistics for the whole USA. There are half a million people
here, you're just regressing to the mean, some states have a larger percent
nonwhite people.

Hawaii has 25 percent whites, so my estimate was correct.

Edit: also, your stats are wrong, see the other comment and get some
perspective.

~~~
fastball
I'm confused, why are you going on about Hawaii?

From looking at the GP's account info, they seem to teach at a school in
Virginia, which is 94.2% white.

------
dstola
Makes me sad for the fall and discarding of meritocracy in favour of filling
enrolment and diversity quotas

~~~
dlp211
Meritocracy is the lie we tell ourselves to justify inequality. There has
never been a meritocracy.

~~~
dstola
I think you have that other way around

------
Shinobi881
Is this about how D&I efforts are ruining higher ed or about higher ed being a
"Ponzi Scheme"?

The conversation is starkly different here vs. the Disqus conversation on the
article page.

Also, authoring "The Diversity Delusion: How Race and Gender Pandering Corrupt
the University and Undermine Our Culture." makes me question the author's
motive/bias.

------
liveoneggs
> ever more marginal students who stand little chance of graduating

> Before their inevitable withdrawal...

> ...even larger pool of likely dropouts...

rambling mishmash of concepts and overt racism gets in the way of complaining
about tuition and crass lack of support for students during COVID here. Oh
well.

~~~
plausible
It's like they couldn't resist saying that those non-white students are
inherently less performant. "They're condemned to failure if they get in (look
at their slightly lower grades), so it's better not to give them an
opportunity at all!"

Their barely contained despise, hatred and anger bleed through the lines. It's
funny how decades of racial segregation were simply ignored, almost like
diversity initiatives popped out of nowhere in a society that has always
provided equal opportunities.

------
say_it_as_it_is
No, not a ponzi scheme. Inflows aren't funding outflows under an illusion of
value creation.

~~~
RhysU
The article claims that, pre-covid, an increasing number of bureaucrats were
being funded by an increasing number of increasingly ill-prepared freshman.
Those freshman were not receiving value. If one accepts the article's
perspective, why was that condition not a ponzi scheme?

------
plumeria
Curious to know what people here think about industrial PhD programs.

------
plausible
For a while I thought it was about bureaucracy, but it's just someone annoyed
by seeing non-whites at American universities. Nothing to see here.

------
linguae
As someone who has planned on returning to grad school this fall to finish my
PhD in computer science in hopes of becoming a professor at a teaching-
oriented university, I am worried about the future of the occupation of being
a university professor, particularly from the standpoint of being able to do
research. One of the things I wonder about the post-COVID-19 world is what's
going to happen to research as a career, whether it's in academia or in
industry. In computer science I've noticed these two trends occurring in the
past 30 years:

1\. Industry has largely moved away from funding long-term blue-sky research,
increasingly shifting toward short-term, product-driven research projects. We
have moved from places like Bell Labs and Xerox PARC where researchers had a
large degree of freedom to places like Google today where researchers are
assigned to product teams (see the paper "Google's Hybrid Approach to
Research" which describes how research at Google is operated:
[https://research.google/pubs/pub38149/](https://research.google/pubs/pub38149/)).

2\. Academia has its own challenges: (1) the competition for a professorship
due to the fact there are more PhD graduates than there are professorships,
(2) the competitive environment for obtaining research grants from the NSF,
and (3) the increased reliance on adjunct faculty members, who don't have
tenure.

The economic effects of this COVID-19 pandemic will undoubtedly lead to
universities reducing their hiring. Some universities may even face closure.
The sudden shift to online teaching may also have permanent effects on the
future of university education.

I believe that there are many opportunities for students that will become
available if online education becomes the new normal, especially if online
education leads to reducing the cost of a university education, which is a
serious problem in the United States given the student loan crisis.

However, I'm concerned that a move toward online education will accelerate the
trend of adjunctization occurring across academia and may even lead to the
concept of tenure disappearing at all but the most competitive schools. I
believe places like Stanford, MIT, and Harvard will emerge from the post-
COVID-19 world just fine. I also believe that public research universities
like UC Berkeley and University of Washington will emerge fine. But what about
regional comprehensive universities such as the California State University
system? What about small private universities that don't have the prestige of
places like Caltech or Harvey Mudd? It's these types of universities that will
face the most pressures to adapt to a world of compelling online educational
choices.

I'd like to still be able to pursue a career in research, ideally with
autonomy and the ability to pursue long-term projects, but between the trends
that have been occurring for the past 30 years as well as the challenges of a
post-COVID-19 world, I might not be able to pursue such a career.

~~~
DeathArrow
>1\. Industry has largely moved away from funding long-term blue-sky research,
increasingly shifting toward short-term, product-driven research projects. We
have moved from places like Bell Labs and Xerox PARC where researchers had a
large degree of freedom to places like Google today where researchers are
assigned to product teams (see the paper "Google's Hybrid Approach to
Research" which describes how research at Google is operated:
[https://research.google/pubs/pub38149/](https://research.google/pubs/pub38149/))

Industry wants their money to produce other money fast. Maybe having the state
sponsor long time research is a better thing to do. In some parts of Europe
much of the research is sponsored by the state. I think that's true for China,
too.

As for online teaching, I don't think that can be as good as participating in
person.

Maybe the crisis will cut just the beaurocrats and live knowledgeable people
to do their work.

------
0xddd
I can't help but suspect some bias in an article that defines neoliberalism as
"academic-speak for capitalism". No mention of public university tuition
rising in response to cuts in state funding?

~~~
andrenotgiant
> After the 2008 recession, colleges made up for the drop in state support by
> raising fees. Tuition jumped nearly 30 percent nationwide from 2007-2008 to
> 2014-2015, while real median income fell roughly 6.5 percent, according to
> Paul Friga of ABC Consulting.

------
martin_a
One can only shake his head when you hear about how things work in America.

Why are you so hostile against each other and/or the weaker/younger/non-
wealthy people?

In most of Europe, education is free. You'll obviously have to take care of
your own cost of living, but there are no real fees where you come out of your
education and have 100k in debt.

Why do things in America work so different? It's not (yet) a third world
country, it could probably easily finance things like these for its residents.
But instead you milk your youth, leave them with debt and shrug your shoulders
about things like these?

Why?

(free = Universities in Germany have what is called "Semesterbeitrag". This
varies but for my university it was like 700 €/year and you would get free
transportation in NRW with that and more benefits.)

~~~
firebacon
The other difference of course is that in Germany, only a fairly small
proportion of high school students is even allowed to go to Uni.

People that were not placed into Gymnasium at age 8 are set on a course where,
once they turn 18, do not get to go free Uni; they simply are not allowed to
go to Uni at all!

Also the problem of cost of living while studying isn't exactly trivial.
Accommodation, food and participating in general student life all are things
that cost a lot of money. You will need at least 1k-1.5k EUR net per month,
which means earning 2k or more gross. That's not exactly easy to do on the
side, since most degree programmes are full-time only; you are expected to put
your 40 hours a week towards the degree and not some other job to finance
yourself.

When polled, 87% of students answered that they were dependent on financial
support from their parents and 12% received state-sponsored loans [1].

So let's not kid ourselves. The question of whether you will go to Uni or not,
in Germany, also depends to a very large degree on who and how wealthy your
parents are.

Statistically speaking, your chance to go to Uni is 27% if your parents are
blue collar workers. It is 79% if your parents also hold academic degrees. If
your parents have no professional training at all, the probability is 12%. [2]

So maybe we should focus on our own issues first ;)

[1] [https://www.sueddeutsche.de/bildung/studienfinanzierung-
so-k...](https://www.sueddeutsche.de/bildung/studienfinanzierung-so-koennen-
studenten-ihr-studium-finanzieren-1.3172337)

[2] [https://www.forschung-und-lehre.de/lehre/nichtakademiker-
kna...](https://www.forschung-und-lehre.de/lehre/nichtakademiker-knapp-ein-
drittel-der-kinder-studiert-597/)

~~~
eulenteufel
> You will need at least 1k-1.5k EUR net per month, which means earning 2k or
> more gross.

I am currently living as a student with ~ 500 EUR per month from working a
student job in Berlin. This is not the most comfortable life, but is certainly
is doable. On top of that we have BAföG which, if your parents don't earn very
much, can be enough to study or at least be a good support. While BAföG is
still some kind of loan, you only have to pay back half of it and the rest has
no interest.

From what I found [1] about 41% of children are eligible for studying at a
university. While I don't think this is ideal and the unfortunately the early
tracking still does it's part to keep people from less privileged backgrounds
out of uni, I do think that a system where access to higher education is tied
to formal graduation sounds fairer than a system where you have to be well off
or very gifted to make it to uni.

[1]
[https://www.welt.de/print/die_welt/politik/article156291438/...](https://www.welt.de/print/die_welt/politik/article156291438/41-Prozent-
der-Jugendlichen-machen-inzwischen-Abitur.html)

~~~
fastball
> I do think that a system where access to higher education is tied to formal
> graduation sounds fairer than a system where you have to be well off or very
> gifted to make it to uni.

Seems like a false dichotomy.

~~~
eulenteufel
You can have both success in school and wealth as a filter if that is what you
mean, but I don't think that is very desirable outcome.

The other answer mentioned state scholarships, which are offered to gifted and
poor students. The options to go to uni are now: \- Have parents who can pay
for your studies \- Be gifted/hard working enough to get a scholarship (I
don't know how easy that is.) \- Be lucky to get a state scholarship for poor
people \- Take massive student debt

This still doesn't look very nice in my eyes. Of course I am heavily
influenced by my own perspective. I most probably wouldn't have been able to
study in the US system. My teenage self was way to inexperienced to even
consider taking a massive student loan.

------
aurizon
Yes, a true racket in Ponzi style, and in Ponzi style, the crash will be
huge...

~~~
battery_cowboy
Tech is gonna get hit hard just like every sector, so you better learn how to
say that phrase too, buddy.

~~~
DeathArrow
Every non essential sector will be hit. Tech by large is essential.
Beaurocrats are not.

~~~
battery_cowboy
A bunch of tech is advertising and shit, there's a lot of techies working in
that and other areas. Not all of us have jobs at places where they can weather
the storm, remember that. Also, there is a lot of required essential work
outside of tech and science, and your narcissism has blinded you to thise
workers' value.

