The collapse of the university

Ignatius of Maidstone
Mon, 19 Jun 2023 17:20 UTC

By the year 2035, the Western university system will be in complete disarray. Colleges will shut down, endowments will dry up, and even tenured professors will be laid off en masse. Brilliant young minds will find intellectual stimulation in the East: Russia, India, and China. Universities in the U.S., Canada, and Europe will be a laughing stock.

There are five factors which will precipitate this collapse.

1. Demographics. The Zoomers are fewer in number and more fragile than Millennials. Simply put, there won't be as many student-customers.
2. Ideology. Western universities have become woke indoctrination factories, churning out midwits and dilettantes.
3. Economics. The returns to a university degree are decreasing. For many young people, it is better to seek a career in the trades.
4. Management. Universities have bloated administration budgets and incompetent managers.
5. Artificial intelligence. AI and robotics can easily replace most college teachers.

I have spent my entire career as a professor, which may color my analysis. The fact that my university threatened to fire me, for refusing an experimental injection, may even cloud my judgment. Nevertheless, I believe that my dissection of the problems in higher education is impartial.

The Zoomer-pocalypse

Generation Z (Zoomers), those born from 1997 to 2012, has 4 million fewer members than the Millennials, those born from 1981 to 1996. The Millennials mostly finished college in the late 2010s, meaning that there will be fewer Zoomer students this decade. If there are fewer student-customers, then that means less tuition money for universities.

We have a historical experiment to compare against: The Boomers, those born from 1946 to 1964, and Generation X, those born from 1965 to 1980. Gen X had 5 million fewer members than the Boomers. Because there were fewer Xers to attend U.S. campuses, one would imagine that colleges would close as a result.

However, more X-ers attended college than their Boomer parents. Therefore, although the overall Gen X population size is lower, their higher college attendance meant more universities opened during their youth; the 1980s and 1990s, in particular, also saw economic growth, which allowed the U.S. to invest in higher education.

Because the U.S. economy has become more fragile, I doubt the same will occur with the Zoomers. They have come of age in a shaky economy in which the 'side hustle' is ubiquitous. College tuitions are higher than they have ever been in recent history, meaning many Zoomers will drop out of or forego university altogether.

The optimistic response is to replace Zoomer Americans with foreign students. However, the global reputation of Western universities is falling. U.S. universities, for example, declined in higher-education rankings. Because of geopolitical tensions, Chinese students are rejecting American colleges.

Foreign students will still flock to nations like Canada to get easy visas. Canada is still better than India, after all. Yet this will not be the case for long, as the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) continue to grow in economic affluence.

(Also, when you import the Third World, you get the Third World, further weakening Western nations.)

Woke and Cowardly Professors

I am not going to spend much time on this, since it is obvious that colleges are woke brainwashing factories. Others have covered this in more detail (see here, here, and here). If you cannot see that modern academia is a behemoth of Leftist Puritanism, then you are not going to make it.

That being said, I provide some anecdotes to support the corollary that free speech is dead and tenure offers no protection.

In 2016, a Canadian professor (tenured) was suspended without pay for allegedly denying the Holocaust. Anthony Hall, the man in question, did not in fact deny the Holocaust — and even if he had, as an academic he is entitled to question established narratives. Although he was subsequently reinstated, the fact that Hall was disciplined for exercising his academic freedom is chilling.

This pales in comparison to the case of Denis Rancourt, a tenured physics professor who was fired for allegedly criticizing Israel's policy towards Palestine. Rancourt spent a decade fighting the University of Ottawa in the courts, before winning a global settlement. The university did not admit to any wrongdoing.

The COVID era revealed the logical conclusion of this nonsense, with the dismissal of professors who refused to get jabbed with COVID 'vaccines.' The Altar of The Science trumped the right to question new medicines. Yet the rebel academics were correct in their assessment of vaccines, as time and experience have shown.

Given the proliferation of wokeness, it is little surprise that a majority of Americans think that a college degree is not worth it. Indeed, they are correct.

Learn to Weld, Anon

Google, Apple, IBM, and other Fortune 500 companies do not require a college degree for their white-collar positions. This, combined with the hefty pricetag for an American college education, offers a good case against attending university. Added to that is the fact that the skilled trades can generate higher returns than a university degree.

The salaries of university graduates have fallen by 11 percent over the past decade, while those of skilled workmen only continue to rise. Electrical transmission installers earn entry-level salaries of $80,000, well ahead of most college graduates. Plumbers, HVAC technicians, and electricians make above the median American wage.

The following chart neatly summarizes the argument in favor of trades school over college. Although tradesmen start off with lower remuneration, the fact that they lack huge college debt lets them build more wealth over time.

To be sure, there are college degrees, such as engineering and nursing, which will continue to pay more than skilled trades. And a good argument against the trades is that your body will be wrecked by the time you turn 40. That being said, ambitious tradesmen start their own businesses.

I know a man who earned a law degree, and then became a roofer. Having established a summer roofing business while he was an undergraduate, he soon earned six figures in cash flow. After finishing law school, he realized that law paid too little — and he expanded his roofing business instead. He has not practiced law a day in his life.

I estimate that this man's wealth is now north of eight figures.

Of course, it does not help that much of university tuition is spent on useless administrators and vanity projects.

Wasteful Spending

A university provides a simple service: professors impart knowledge to students. This fundamental relationship is unchanged, and yet college tuitions have risen steeply. The bulk of this extra money is going towards incompetent bureaucrats who run the colleges and make life difficult for students and faculty.

Administrative bloat has become a problem at most universities. At Yale, for example, there is a 1:1 ratio of students to administrators, even though there are six students for every professor. The salaries of these administrators — from the President to the LGBT campus representative — have ballooned.

Changes in Wage Expenditures by Category, over 20 years, (1998-99=100).

As the above chart shows, administration (green and yellow) commands a higher salary than professors, librarians, and those who work in enrolment. The President of Augusta University in Georgia, for example, makes just shy of $1 million. The discrepancy is stark, especially since extra administrators are a burden on campuses.

For example, woke college managers suspended one of Harvard's top economists, Roland Fryer, because of jokes he made to students. The details of his case suggest that this was a takedown: Fryer's research contradicts woke ideology about race. His findings made the Black Lives Matter movement look foolish.

This is what students' tuitions are paying for. The return on investment is bad. To be honest, even the teaching is unsatisfactory.

Behold the Robot Teacher

In the future, robots and artificial intelligence will teach college classes. This will allow universities to cut costs, while firing bad teachers. The efficiency gains from this mean that most universities will close.

Already, students are learning course content with ChatGPT, and cheating with it too. If a professor fails to explain a concept, just ask ChatGPT. It really is that simple.

This means that AI can be hooked up to a user interface, and programmed to teach first-year biology or economics. The program can interact with students. Assignments can be quickly graded. And 'office hours' would involve students chatting directly with the AI at anytime, 24/7.

Those with intimate knowledge of academia realize how possible this is, based on how lazy most professors are. The typical college instructor relies on pre-prepared slides and handouts, reads from them for an hour in lectures, and then goes home. Teaching assistants handle assignments and exams. This process is easily automated.

Therefore, unless a professor is attracting research funds, he will be let go. Universities can expand class sizes and offerings with AI professors. Most universities will shut down due to these efficiency gains, which will be captured by top institutions.

The Future of The University

Universities will not die completely. Famous schools like Harvard and Yale will continue to exist based on endowments and gullible applicants. Yet to survive, universities must return to traditional practices, emphasizing good teaching and quality research.

In my experience, students are starving for intellectual stimulation. The school I taught at is mediocre, and yet many of my students listen to Joe Rogan, watch YouTube channels like Kings and Generals, and read Substack articles. In lectures, they perk up when asked a challenging question. There is hope.

I suspect the Oxbridge tutoring model will be widely adopted. Professors will be forced to spend their days with small groups of 3 to 5 students, probing their minds and working through difficult questions. Large classes will be taught by AI, and bad teachers will be dismissed.

The quality of research must improve as well. As the anti-woke backlash continues, donors will tire of funding research into transsexual immigrants and useless mRNA treatments. Basic science will predominate again, and a proper humanities education will be prized.

In the end, we could see a Fourth Turning resurgence of traditional university education. Yet this would only occur after a bloodbath; many colleges will shut their doors permanently. The strong will survive, ushering in a new age of educational progress.