On November 7, Arnold Kling, formerly a co-blogger on this site, said: wrote:
I can pinpoint the exact moment I started sleeping because of higher education in America. This was in the spring of 2012, during my daughter’s graduation from Brandeis University. The main graduation speaker was in the middle of an unmemorable lecture when she said, “And I was reading this morning in the New York Times that America will be more than 50 percent non-white by 2050.”
To me this would have been a simple observation, neither good news nor bad news. But the students greeted it as if they had just heard that their favorite sports team had won a championship or that their favorite political party had won an election. They whooped, shouted and cheered for minutes. It was by far the biggest applause line of her entire speech.
I get it. This is difficult. If you read Arnold’s entire post—and I recommend you do—you probably won’t be any less concerned.
Arnold concludes:
I believe that colleges and universities can no longer be saved.
But what if, for example, you are someone who loves economics and loves the idea of teaching economics to young minds? If you were to say that colleges are beyond saving, you would probably conclude that you should choose to become an economist in a think tank, a consulting economist, or something else.
Even if the vast majority of colleges and universities are beyond saving, that doesn’t mean all colleges are. And that doesn’t mean that even those who can’t be saved can’t have nice niches.
One of the benefits of being on Facebook is that many young economics students and assistant professors of economics have heard of me and are trying to become friends with me. Unless I see something majorly negative – and I rarely do – I accept it. This allows me to follow what they do in their careers: what they teach, how they teach and how students respond to their teaching. I read a lot of positive stories. I think about Art Carding at Samford University (who is actually a professor now – how time flies), Jonathan Murphy at Nicholls State University, and Michael Makovi at Northwood University, to name three off the top of my head. I could easily name five or six others.
So even if you’re pessimistic, like Arnold and I, about the future of universities, it’s important to know how much you want to teach people. If it scratches an itch, as it did for me, remember that all you have to do is find one good job and do it well. There are niches out there.