No brain, no pain

I must study Politicks and War that my sons may have liberty to study Mathematicks and Philosophy. My sons ought to study Mathematicks and Philosophy, Geography, natural History, Naval Architecture, navigation, Commerce and Agriculture, in order to give their Children a right to study Painting, Poetry, Musick, Architecture, Statuary, Tapestry and Porcelaine. (John Adams, letter to Abigail Adams, 1780)

“Politicks and War” were the 18th century version of “Business and Criminal Justice”—the practical workforce majors beloved by parents and directionless students. Adams, possibly our smartest president, knew those are at the bottom of the hierarchy. Once those grubby affairs were settled, then his children could move on to the more important liberal arts (truth) and his grandchildren the fine arts (beauty).

That is a lovely and noble vision, although for some reason we have a hard time getting past the first stage. In fact, we’re now faced with a race to the bottom, where people aren’t even pretending that education has intrinsic value, and instead they are gaming the system in any way they can to get a credential that, through their own actions, they are debasing and making worthless.

Thus we get Christie Williams:

The North Carolina human resources executive spent two months racking up credits through web tutorials after work in 2024, then raced through 11 online classes at the University of Maine at Presque Isle in four weeks. Later that year, she went back to earn her master’s — in just five weeks. The two degrees cost a total of just over $4,000. Since then, she has coached a thousand other students on how to speed through the state college, shaving off years and thousands of dollars from the usual cost of a degree. “Why wouldn’t you do that?” Williams asked. “It’s kind of a no-brainer if you know about it.” source: Washington Post

A no-brainer indeed. No brain required at all! Even better are AI-powered bots that can integrate directly into course-management software like Canvas and do all the assignments in nothing flat with no human supervision. This leaves students with more time to go to Starbucks and look at their phones. At this rate students will soon be able to just write a check, have their AI bot talk to the college AI bot, and instantly receive an emailed diploma. You know what, let’s simplify this process even further with the very legitimate and equally worthwhile method of simply creating our own diplomas.

Hey, this is every bit as real as the FIFA Peace Prize. Or the Gold Medal in Philology, which a minor French academic completely invented and awarded to himself in a world-class act of onanism. The end result of this process is obviously the destruction of universities as means of credentialing workers. This, I will argue, is OK.

I’m not doomsaying the end of college. Not at all. Too many are convinced that cynicism and realism are the same thing, so the more cynical you are about college, the more you doom-monger, the more based you are. That is mistaken.

Sometimes you see people saying “why do we need college? You can just teach yourself! Everything is online or in a library, just go for free and give yourself an education.” This is stupid fantasizing. You’re not going to do this. No one is, apart from some very rare and probably annoying autodidacts. At best you’ll go read up on a topic that interests you and get an intro-level understanding. Before you start telling me how you like to read algebraic topology for fun, you went to college already, right? Where you got a very solid grounding in that sort of thing? You’re not this guy and neither am I:

Features of the university

• Purposes
• Goals
• Functions

Purposes. There are two purposes to the modern 4-year university: teaching and scholarship. We teach students in order to bring them up to speed on what is already known. At most places they get a good sample of what’s on offer in the different disciplines (through general education) and a sufficiently deep understanding of one field that the next step is learning how to advance it. The faculty research to advance theoretical knowledge (as opposed to the practical knowledge offered in trade schools) in our different disciplines.

Different institutions assign differing weights to these purposes. Teaching might matter a great deal at one school but research is the most important thing at another. Sure, we can debate what the right mix is. But it’s frustrating when students complain about college chiefly because they picked the wrong kind of school. Attending a research university and then griping that your intro class is taught by a grad student is like going to a teaching hospital and complaining that a student doctor is the one who gave you stitches.

If you want entry-level classes taught by senior faculty, go to a state regional or a small liberal arts college. For example, I teach four courses per semester. Only community-college faculty or desperate adjuncts trying to cobble together a livable wage teach more. A friend of mine at an R1 once told me that if he had my teaching load he wouldn’t even try to publish. But for him, research is most important part of his job.

Goals ought to be in the service of the purposes. I have a goal of publishing books and journal articles, but those are the products (or at least the indicators) of my research. Publishing is not the purpose of research; it is the purpose of dissemination. My goal this week is to get my students’ finals graded and their graded submitted, but that is not the purpose of my job. Colleges have the goal of graduating our students with degrees in a reasonable amount of time. However, those degrees are meant to be reflective of their learning and our successful teaching. Degrees aren’t purposes either. Students very reasonably have the goal of graduation and getting the degree, but when they mistake that for the purpose of college, then you get the speedrunners and the AI scammers.

Functions. The biggest confusion, and the one leading to the most cynicism, is when people think functions of the university are either its goals or purposes. This is when you get “wits” who say that Harvard is just a hedge fund with a college attached, or Ohio State is a football team that also has classes. Here is an incomplete list of university functions:

1. Keeping young people occupied for a few years before they have to get a job
2. Solidifying the social position of the elites
3. Providing low-SES students with social mobility and an entree into the middle class
4. Serving as a mating market for young adults
5. Hosting and funding semi-pro sports teams
6. Promoting DEI
7. Credentialing—telling white-collar businesses that graduates have a minimum IQ, will be employees who can sit in a seat, do what they are told, and show up for work on time.
8. Direct job training

Some of these are clearly a good idea, like (3). Others are perfectly fine, like (4). Still others are controversial and criticized, e.g. (2). Some started off small and reasonable, but then turned into something else, like sports. College sports were once just reflective of the ideal of mens sana in corpore sano and a way for students to burn off energy and have non-drunken fun when not studying. At small NCAA Division II and III schools this is still mostly true. At D1 schools, sports can be the tail that wags the dog, even though they retain an important community-building aspect.

Other university functions have metastasized, like DEI. When it is a indicator of being welcoming to a variety of students and treating them without prejudice or favor, it is a fine plan. When it becomes a loyalty test or an ideological filter, then things have gone off the rails. Worse is when DEI gets baked into the mission statements of universities. Even if you love DEI hard, it is a deep confusion to mistake a function of college with its purpose. Why wouldn’t you expect blowback?

The same is true ten-fold for credentialing and job training. Only a handful of degrees are specific job pathways; nursing, journalism, elementary education, a few others. Properly seen, credentialing is a side-effect. I’m not blaming students for this confusion. As the cost of college has gone up and the number of high school graduates has gone down, the poorer universities have increasingly sold themselves as either a direct pathway to a job or as providing the credentials you need to get one.

AI, speedrunning, and other hacks will kill the credentialing function. No employer will be able to trust a signal buried in the noise of “The University of AI.” But you know what? That is fine. Certifying job candidates was never the purpose of a university to begin with. Elevating that to our purpose sacrificed our long-term value for short-term solvency.

Colleges are like restaurants. Why aren’t all restaurants Michelin-starred? Because most people don’t want that, can’t/won’t pay for it, and are unlikely to appreciate it.

As Steven Mintz writes,

Mass institutions cannot assume a shared commitment to demanding intellectual work. They serve students with very different levels of preparation and very different lives—students who are working, raising families, and managing financial pressure. Under those conditions, institutions have to adapt. They standardize, they accommodate, and they lower or moderate expectations. This is not a moral failing. It is a practical necessity.

My students want Slim Jims and Red Bull, not five courses at Noma. That’s OK, but real education is slow food, and part of our job is to get them to appreciate that fact. Even if sometimes they still reach for gas station hot wings, so long as they learn there is a greater world of intellectual gastronomy worth pursuing, we can judge our purpose has been achieved. But it is vital that we help students and their parents see the difference among the purposes, goals, and functions of college, and that we ourselves not lose sight of it.