The Political Causes of the College Enrollment Crisis(themissingdatadepot.substack.com) |
The Political Causes of the College Enrollment Crisis(themissingdatadepot.substack.com) |
Young men have collectively checked out of a society that has nothing but contempt for them. When the supermajority in academia have nothing good to say about you, opine about how "toxic" your existence is, and openly deride your struggles... who would want to spend four years and tens of thousands of dollars to be "lectured" by those people?
When men are suffering from record levels of depression, dying from suicide and drug overdoses at rates never seen, still being openly discriminated against and laughed at, supporting the system that not only allows, but encourages that behavior is ridiculous.
As for "struggles", study history. The minor struggles that modern men in developed countries deal with are nothing compared to what our ancestors faced. I was never drafted and sent to assault the beach at Normandy.
It's not a complex when it's actually occurring. This is like like Russia telling the world it's not invading Ukraine, it's denazifying it: "Oh please Ukraine, let's lose the persecution complex."
>If there is any discrimination against men happening in academia it's in the clown show departments that no one cares about anyway.
This is when you're unintentionally correct. The problem being critical departments are clown shows, including ones like admissions.
>As for "struggles", study history.
It's clear you haven't.
>The minor struggles that modern men in developed countries deal with are nothing compared to what our ancestors faced.
"The minor struggles that modern women in developed countries deal with are nothing compared to what our ancestors faced."
>I was never drafted and sent to assault the beach at Normandy
This has to be satire. The largest European land war since WWII is currently raging, with drafts currently occurring.
https://connect.chronicle.com/rs/931-EKA-218/images/MaleEnro...
In case your main way of assessing information is its tribal affiliation (it shouldn't be for gods sake): this publication was written by a woman, it devotes substantial time to black male enrollment where the problem is extra bad, and the CHE leans center-left according to Media Bias/Fact Check.
But hey if you weren't at Normandy you don't have problems right? Good lord, what a non sequitur
Commenter: Men are suffering and no one cares.
Response: No they aren't and quit your whining.
This is a great example of 'reaction proves the point'.
That men can’t handle the present circumstance is pathetic. That white men in particular have a hard time dealing with a more level playing field is pathetic. Stop playing the victim. Stop being a snowflake. Stop being pathetic.
I love my sisters. I want to live in a world where they're able to live joyful and fulfilled lives, where their contributions are taken just as seriously as any other competent contribution. I would fight and die for that. I also think that, after decades of trying to figure out what my value is as a non female, I've determined that I'm also human and that I also have a right to life and the chance for fulfillment and having my contributions taken on their own merits, just like my sisters.
I think we've inherited a system that's run with a multigenerational finger on the scale and rather than remove the finger from the scale we've added more fingers to the scale. Standard distributions are everywhere. There will always be others who are underserved or over served. I can't account for all men, but the messaging that I internalized as a child was directed to all men, and whether it not it was intended for harm it left me feeling pretty disenfranchised. Again, I didn't speak for all men, but if there's a possibility that we've disenfranchised half of the species that seems like a problem worth addressing.
"When I was in graduate school in the late 90s I took a flight home for the summer break. I was reading a math research paper during the flight. An elderly man that sat next to me and asked if was reading a mathematics paper. I said yes. He said that he wanted to study math in college but in those days he wasn’t allowed to, he got drafted and sent across the world to watch his brothers in arms die. He ended up in roofing. He was still upset over that injustice."
>That men can’t handle the present circumstance is pathetic.
That women can't handle the present circumstance is pathetic.
>That white men in particular have a hard time dealing with a more level playing field is pathetic.
That White women in particular have a hard time dealing with being the most privileged human beings to ever exist is pathetic.
>Stop playing the victim. Stop being a snowflake. Stop being pathetic.
Men aren't playing victim, they're wising up to their circumstances. They're anti-snowflakes, they know society views them as expendable and fungible. They're done being viewed as "pathetic" when they're dying by the tens of thousands in the largest European land war since WWII.
All men want is a level playing field. Colleges have been discriminating against white and Asian men for decades. SCOTUS finally slapped them down, and colleges immediately started scheming to find ways to be covertly racist through proxies for race. Many colleges stopped using SAT scores, making admissions more subjective, and easier to influence with racial bias. Workplaces are doing the same thing, with DEI hiring goals that in effect mean "no white or Asian men".
Have you considered that your experience as a boomer is not representative of conditions for millennials and zoomers today?
The vast majority of Americans want _everyone_ to be represented in higher education, we don't need to split people up by identity and then tell them to take turns.
It's crazy how much influence interest rates have on the broader economy and social mobility. If the fed keeps rates higher for longer I wouldn't be surprised if we saw a cliff in college enrollment back to where it was in decades previously. And if that happens we could see a similar cliff in political affiliation. Time will tell
In reality, looking at total enrollment rate matters for very few people. That stat is only meaningful to universities themselves and the banks writing student loans.
An individual's life, or society as a whole isn't made better solely by graduating college - at that point its just a piece of paper and a huge expense. What matters is how a person's life compares to what it would have been without college, total enrollment will never tell you that.
I'm not convinced there's a crisis, perhaps lowered college enrollment is a good thing for everyone. If a student doesn't enjoy it they don't have to go, and if students don't feel welcome in theory the free market will essentially correct without random internet people needing to fret.
I think the obvious thing to do, if one presumes college education is universally good, would be to simply ask the kids who don't like college why they don't like it.
watching your parents toil in debtors prison is a great way to wind up rethinking your options for the future.
edit: this authors entire substack is mostly posts railing against DEI liberalism and flogging the culture war in general. low effort article.
Second, it's gone from merely sloppy to outright fallacious to throw around "Republican" and "conservative" as if they're synonyms, when in 2024 they're completely opposed. With the rise of Trumpism (populist reaction, to use Moldbug's own word), the Democratic party has basically been left as the home of conservatives - strong foreign policy, fiscal responsibility (pulling up from ZIRP), the rule of law, belief in societal institutions, and so on.
Tying these two points together points the way towards useful synthesis - bureaucracy heavy college campuses have actually gotten hyper-conservative (witness the harsh responses against protests of Israel's genocide - still not much "progress" there!). But it's conservatism based on the values of "intersectional" identity politics that have become part of the zeitgeist over the past several decades. The "culture war" already ended some time in the oughties, with the religious fundamentalists losing. Or did you buy into that nonsense that Fortune 500 companies are advertising with rainbow flags to "push an agenda", rather than merely tying their brands to the majority's values?
I'm quite sure there are still actual liberals on college campuses - seeing through the "intersectional" pantheon, but not falling for the comforting destructive reactionary nonsense either - looking forward to actual true progress past both. But as always, the revolution will not be televised and all that. The only question is whether us oldies will listen or if they'll have to begrudgingly wait for our deaths, too.
Someone needs to clue the author in to middle skill jobs. Plumbers, electricians, machinists, elevator repair... There are a lot of people going into industry's because of parents or extended family gave them a foot in the door. Because many of them started young and by 18 are already "middle skilled".
You now have kids in red states who understand the math behind loans because they watch their parents get burned, because they use the internet, because they know folks who went to college, didn't finish and spent years paying it off.
Candidly I would grant for many of them skipping school makes more sense than getting a degree that amounts to under water basket weaving when it comes to job prospects.
Immigration programs like H1B also sucked the market out of low end education required jobs so employers never had to reach out to entice rural kids to getting degrees and joining them. The open door to immigration left those people behind which has fueled the current class/ideology conflict in the US. Donald Trump is what half the country imagines their best case of success would look like because there’s so little of people that they identify with gaining success.
You realize that to get an H1B you need a bachelors or better, and it's a process. Rural jobs and H1B have dam near zero intersection.
1) provide the knowledge and skills that make a degteed student more valuable in the market (i.e., to get a better job, higher salary, etc.)
2) Lower the cost of tuition. Demand is down so price should follow, obviously.
Unfortunately after years of cheap and easy money (i.e., student loans) these institutions have become slow, bloated, etc. Some deserve to perish.
FTA: Elite overproduction is a concept developed by Peter Turchin that describes the condition of a society that is producing too many potential elite members relative to its ability to absorb them into the power structure.[1][2][3] This, he hypothesizes, is a cause for social instability, as those left out of power feel aggrieved by their relatively low socioeconomic status.[1][2][3] ---
The nonviolent unwinding of elite overproduction apparently happened in the 50s and 60s with strong labor unions improving the financial well-being of laborers and high taxes on the very well-to-do recycling their excess wealth back into society. I look at the current shift towards trades as another form of reversing the access number of elites.
IMO, It's worth spending some time contemplating this concept and its potential application to society today.
-----
Side note: every time I say or hear the phrase elite overproduction, I think of Bertie Wooster and the Drones club. You're welcome.
While I definitely agree that going into a trade is a great option, which should be (and, I think, sort of is) destigmatized, the problem I see is that not many plumbers or electricians get elected to congress, or the presidency, or head the gigantic tech and finance companies that rule the world. I want diverse viewpoints among my ruling elite, if I have to have them (which I do). Even if it means I don't agree with all them, and they don't agree with me, I think it's probably better in the long run. Just trying to avoid handing my grandchildren an eloi/morlock future.
The meat of this article is that right leaning kids are the ones not going to college. IM not suggesting it, its what thee article says, there's literal data for it.
The folks I know who are hard core republicans all have jobs that puts dirt under their nails. They do the sorts of jobs that your either trained for or have to go dig up some info from esoteric sources (think the whole earth catalog). It's the I, Pencil problem... there are lots of smart people out there who are very educated that have ZERO clue about how the most basic parts of our world function.
If you have a degree and give people this advice then you're probably not a good person
I can point you to plenty of people with no college and middle skill jobs who are happier with what they do and make more than people with degrees.
They also have way less debt.
There are plenty of smart people who have knowledge and training that allows them to do things most college graduates would be baffled by. Looking down on them because they have dirt under their nails was a mistake we made 50 years ago.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ve1aWWDNJ60 This is middle skill labor in action. They make more than most people who get history degrees for good reason. We only NEED one of them. (And I fuckin love history so..)
We have a lot of data that shows us it's specifically Ivy Leaguers who will do that, actually - they are massively overrepresented in public and private leadership positions.
Are you going to tell me that if the shoe was on the other foot and the Ivy League was like 90% conservatives, you wouldn't be concerned about the direction this is going to send things?
I think that's the point the person who responded to you was trying to make, the elite class which leads the country, makes the laws etc. should be reflective of the people it governs (that has been a core liberal tenet of the civil rights movement for many years).
I don't want a one party system regardless of which party it ends up being.
Universities train our future leaders and they need to be politically inclusive.
Geez, look at the article. Written by a leftie for The Left and "blaming" The Right when in fact The Right has it right. That is, "we're done being suckered."
> Conservatism and participation in its core institutions - marriage, church, and the military - are associated with better mental health
also anyone who's trying to argue that widespread educational attainment is bad for society deserves to be laughed at
You keep saying, over and over again, that as a broad generalization you simply believe white men are inferior to everyone else. That in itself is a racist and sexist statement - you're asserting that all people of a particular race and gender are inferior, because of their race and gender.
It doesn't matter if you believe this is the case because of some historical occurrence, it's still discriminatory and just as offensive as stereotyping and discriminating against anybody else would be.
It's not good to assume anyone is inferior and in your words "pathetic" because of their race and gender. I can't believe we still have to tell people this in 2024.
But I do admit my anecdotal experience might not be representative.
Sarcasm aside, your performative self-flagellation gives me second-hand embarrassment. The DEI activists at your college will never like you, no matter how much you bash young white men.
Usually there are a few equally qualified applicants for a given position. The goal is to not carry on the tradition of excluding those on the outside because they don’t “fit” with the current in group.
That aside...
Anyone who believes a degree === education deserves to be made a sucker.
Anyone who believes a degree === the ability to string thoughts together deserves to be laughed at.
Look around, we HAVE increased the ubiquity of structured education and yet we keep enlisting students who can't figure out their career doesn't pay enough to cover their excessive loans at their "I MUST go there" over-rated private college / edu.
Left or right, the overproduction system is fueled by such suckers.