Cracks in the Ivory Tower

Cracks in the Ivory Tower by Jason Brennan and Phillip Magness

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For many people, the last twenty years have exposed the incompetence of our elites. Starting in 2001, when America suffered a total intelligence breakdown to 2019, when the elites of America's elite intelligence apparatus incompetently attempted a coup against an amateur, who seemingly has handed the elites in government bureaucracy and politics their lunch on a regular basis, the elite has never been less competent. Why is that?

One reason may be that incompetence has become institutionalized through our elite educational institutions. How those elite institutions became corrupt is what this book is about.

Authors Brennan and Magness are Economics professors at one of the Ivy League universities they analyze. They approach the issues as economists and social scientists. They explain the present dysfunction of academia not as a matter of evil motives but the working out of an incentive structure that causes the three constituencies of the academy - the professors, the administrators and the students - to distort the university acording to their goals.

The authors make some extraordinary claims that they support with studies and analysis. For example, they claim that students don't really learn in their classes. One particular example they offer is English composition. Although colleges have progressively added more and more remedial English classes to address the problem of students unable to write or reason on a college level, students are not graduating from college with any greater facility in English. In fact, the authors describe the mandatory English requirement as a kind of racket by the universities who are able to expand English departments and extract more tuition funds from students.

Given the impassibility of students to education, the authors find that most university advertising is immoral and fraudulent. The authors frankly contend that if universities sold pharmaceuticals, they would be bankrupt from losing consumer protection lawsuits. The authors point out:

“In general, Arum and Roksa determined that about half of students gained no general reasoning and writing skills in college, about 40 percent gained very modest skills, and only the top 10 percent of students gained significant skills.67 That's what $500 billion a year in higher ed spending on students appears to have gotten us.”

College admissions are also a racket. A factor that determines college rankings is the admission rate; the lower the admission rate, the higher the ranking. Accordingly, colleges will flood schools with students who have no choice of admittance just so that those students will apply, be denied, and, thereby, increase the school ranking. The ranking game also explains why there is so much non-academic construction on college campuses.

Another depressing statistic is the growth of college administrators. Between 1980 and 2010, the number of college administrators has grown from 200,000 to 800,000.

As a result of all this, tuitions have gone up dramatically, but without any increase in educational achievement. The authors point out:

“Holding all else constant, these figures demonstrate one unambiguous trend in higher education. On average, it costs about 2.5 to 3 times as much money to receive a degree today than it did to receive the equivalent degree forty years ago. Again, these figures are adjusted for inflation, so they reflect the actual purchasing power of the dollar. Of course, this assumes, perhaps mistakenly, that a degree today and a degree forty years ago are the same thing and have the same value. Higher education's annual operating costs make up one of the largest components of its expenses, and these, too, have skyrocketed. In 2015—the most recent year with complete statistics—the one-year operating expenses of the US university system topped $536 billion. Again, adjusting for inflation to current dollars, this figure is up from $167 billion in 1976. Those are absolute figures, but the cost per pupil has also risen dramatically, indicating that universities are educating fewer people per dollar that they spend. Although statistics did not record differences between public and private institutions until relatively recently, the average spending per equivalent full-time student at all universities in 1976 was about $21,000 in current dollars. Today, when we look at four-year institutions, it averages $54,000 at private universities and $41,000 at public universities.23 Again, these figures are in current dollars; we have adjusted for inflation. No matter how you look at it, the trends in university finances show that (1) college is costing its student consumers a lot more and (2) colleges are spending more per student educated. Compared to four decades ago, tuition intake and spending are up across the board. There are many reasons for these trends, including the distortions caused by student loan subsidies, the costs of regulatory compliance, the growth in spending on nonclassroom functions as well as the administrators who oversee them, and cost disease.”

The best that can be said of elite universities is that they perform a kind of sorting function that allows the universities to select the best and the brightest, except as we have seen, elites have been gaming the system to put their unworthy scions into these universities, thereby creating a kind of corrupt aristocracy. (This last is a reflection on the recent news, not something from the book.)

America spends a lot of money on academics. As the authors point out, spending on academics is a matter of justice. Every dollar spent on academics is not spent on something that might be better at promoting social utility.

In any event, Americans as citizens and taxpayer need the truth and not merely slogans.