The End of College Life - Wash U Prof's article in the Atlantic

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:The obvious magas on her are just making stuff up. So annoying to take this serious work so lightly.[/quote


Huh? I’m not MAGA at all but I 💯 agree that colleges are filled with bloat, far too expensive for what they deliver and a course correction needs to be made. I don’t want to see research cut, but I think people - parents!- need to get real about what education is supposed to be for.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:There is so much waste on the college campuses of today particularly those that do research. I live in a Division 1 college town and have friends that work for the university and rarely have to step foot on campus. A lot of my friends frequently travel around the world going to conferences.

How is that a waste?

Zoom in to a conference.
Read a published paper?

But you are also screaming that federal workers need to travel to offices to do their zooms and read their papers, am I right?

I’m not screaming this. But let’s be honest. There is a lot of bloat in colleges, and some of it has little to do with education, it’s all the other nice to haves. And suddenly a ‘cheap’ in state school is 40k a year and some schools are 90k a year. Something is broken

[Anonymous]

Is there a gift link?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:All Americans - liberal, conservative, and apolitical - should be very concerned about the future of college given how Trump & Vance are attacking it. It is arson with no architecture. They don't have a vision for fixing it, they just want it to die.

I am paying careful attention and am very happy with the changes. These are much needed.

The people who are unhappy are those who are content to receive funds without needing to demonstrate any results.

Now the fun part - the supposed liberals who are "open" to new ideas and alternative viewpoints, think none of the above is an "acceptable" viewpoint. Because the above must have been written by a MAGA advocate and therefore not a valid view.

-A moderate democrat who voted for Kamala

+1000 to all of this. If college life is truly "dying," there are many reasons why that is happening, starting with sky-high costs for increasingly meaningless degrees.

-A conservative republican who voted for Trump

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:All Americans - liberal, conservative, and apolitical - should be very concerned about the future of college given how Trump & Vance are attacking it. It is arson with no architecture. They don't have a vision for fixing it, they just want it to die.

I am paying careful attention and am very happy with the changes. These are much needed.

The people who are unhappy are those who are content to receive funds without needing to demonstrate any results.

Now the fun part - the supposed liberals who are "open" to new ideas and alternative viewpoints, think none of the above is an "acceptable" viewpoint. Because the above must have been written by a MAGA advocate and therefore not a valid view.

-A moderate democrat who voted for Kamala

Researchers have to demonstrate results. Often they are contractually obligated to publish their results no matter what. They don’t have to demonstrate success. That is an important concept in science and engineering. You can’t guarantee success, nor should you, when trialing new concepts in basic and applied research.

An epic cope!

This is ridiculous. Do you think all experiments work out the way a scientist expects/wants them to?

+1 and scientists learn even when experiments don’t support the hypothesis.

Of course in a lot of fields they won’t be able to publish unless their results fit the prevailing orthodoxy.

Please provide some support for this. If this is true, why not just defund those projects? Why defund health and energy research at the same time?

One obvious be is research on stereotype effect. https://replicationindex.com/2022/02/15/rr22-stereotype-threat/

Can’t help you with the second question because I don’t know. I think there’s something of real value here that’s being rolled out in a haphazard and destructive manner.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:But college life as we know it may soon come to an end. Since January, the Trump administration has frozen, canceled, or substantially cut billions of dollars in federal grants to universities. Johns Hopkins has had to fire more than 2,000 workers. The University of California has frozen staff hiring across all 10 of its campuses. Many other schools have cut back on graduate admissions. And international students and faculty have been placed at such high risk of detainment, deportation, or imprisonment that Brown University advised its own to avoid any travel outside the country for the foreseeable future.

Higher education is in chaos, and professors and administrators are sounding the alarm. The targeting of Columbia University, where $400 million in federal grants and contracts have been canceled in retribution for its failure to address campus anti-Semitism and unruly protests against the war in Gaza, has inspired particular distress. Such blunt coercion, Princeton University President Christopher Eisgruber wrote in The Atlantic earlier this month, amounts to “the greatest threat to American universities since the Red Scare.” In The New York Times, the Yale English professor Meghan O’Rourke called it and related policies “an attack on the conditions that allow free thought to exist.”

Those assessments are correct, but they’re also incomplete. So are the many paeans to the social and economic benefits of university research that schools have posted in the past two months. Yes, academic freedom is at stake, along with scientific progress. But the government’s attacks also threaten something far more tangible to future college students and their parents. The entire undergraduate experience at residential four-year schools—the brochure-ready college life that you may once have experienced yourself, and to which your children may aspire—is itself at risk of ruination.

Few administrators have talked about this risk in public, but they take a different tone in private as they try to figure out how broken budgets can be fixed. I’ve spent the past month discussing the government’s campaign to weaken higher learning with current and former college presidents, provosts, deans, faculty, and staff. And in the course of these informal, sometimes panicked text exchanges, emails, and phone calls, I’ve come to understand that the damage to our educational system could be worse than the public comprehends—and that calamity could arrive sooner than people expect.

Any one of the Trump administration’s attacks on research universities, let alone all of them together, could upend the college experience for millions of Americans. What’s at stake is far from trivial: Forget the frisbees on the quad; think of what it means to go to college in this country. Think of the middle-class ideal that has persisted for most of a century: earning a degree and starting a career, yes, but also moving away from home, testing limits, joining new communities, becoming an adult.

This might all be changing for fancy private schools and giant public universities alike. If you, or your son, or your daughter, are in college now, or are planning to enroll in the years ahead, you should be worried.

If a school’s athletics program is unable to cover its own costs, it may need to scale back spending on its sports teams. I’ve also heard from colleagues at schools across the country that construction projects have been scrapped, that study-abroad programs are getting canceled, and that career services face cuts. In the meantime, faculty hiring freezes such as those adopted at Harvard, the University of Pittsburgh, and the University of Vermont could mean that fewer classes will be taught next year.

For two months now, universities have had no idea what, if anything, might stave off further punishments. The state-flagship-university official I spoke with admitted to hoping that the problem will just go away. Perhaps one scalp will be enough, a message sent. For the moment, though, the demands themselves (whatever those might be for different schools) seem less destructive than the sudden, chaotic application of extreme financial leverage: “It’s all arson and no architecture,” the official said. Universities might be amenable to adjusting the terms of their relationship with the federal government, but they cannot do so quickly and under such duress. The Trump administration appears to want them not to talk, but to die.

As for future college students and their parents, the campus experience they expect—the one that generations of Americans took for granted—is no longer guaranteed. Here on campus, the undergraduates seem unaware of this alarming fact. The crisis for universities may be existential, but another spring is blooming on the quad. College has persisted for a whole lifetime in its present form, in a pastoral setting, underwritten by federally funded research, with football crowds cheering in the distance. Last week, a student in my course on artificial intelligence bounded into the lecture hall, full of energy and optimism. “How was your break?” she asked. I’d designed the class to give undergraduates from across the university insights into the changes AI might wreak on their future professions, but just then I found myself wondering more about the future of my own. Not because technology may disrupt it, but because my own government seems intent on destroying it. “It was good,” I said, faking a smile, unsure of what to say. “It was good.”

see longer full article here:
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2025/03/end-of-college-life/682241/

F the Atlantic. Please.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:All Americans - liberal, conservative, and apolitical - should be very concerned about the future of college given how Trump & Vance are attacking it. It is arson with no architecture. They don't have a vision for fixing it, they just want it to die.

This

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Is there a gift link?

Use https://archive.is/
They archive all articles, so you can read anything you have the link for. Just copy and paste in the above link.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:All Americans - liberal, conservative, and apolitical - should be very concerned about the future of college given how Trump & Vance are attacking it. It is arson with no architecture. They don't have a vision for fixing it, they just want it to die.

I am paying careful attention and am very happy with the changes. These are much needed.

The people who are unhappy are those who are content to receive funds without needing to demonstrate any results.

Now the fun part - the supposed liberals who are "open" to new ideas and alternative viewpoints, think none of the above is an "acceptable" viewpoint. Because the above must have been written by a MAGA advocate and therefore not a valid view.

-A moderate democrat who voted for Kamala

+1000 to all of this. If college life is truly "dying," there are many reasons why that is happening, starting with sky-high costs for increasingly meaningless degrees.

-A conservative republican who voted for Trump

No there are no "conservative republicans". They are traitors and stupids. Literally the dumbest cult ever. WH today spelled two words wrong on one of their announcements one was the word "April". Who can not spell the month of April for god's sake.

You are too dumb to understand what is happening with colleges. Trump wants you dumb and begging him ie slaves. Musk as well.

I can not wait for red states to rot.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:There is so much waste on the college campuses of today particularly those that do research. I live in a Division 1 college town and have friends that work for the university and rarely have to step foot on campus. A lot of my friends frequently travel around the world going to conferences.

How is that a waste?

Zoom in to a conference.
Read a published paper?

But you are also screaming that federal workers need to travel to offices to do their zooms and read their papers, am I right?

I’m not screaming this. But let’s be honest. There is a lot of bloat in colleges, and some of it has little to do with education, it’s all the other nice to haves. And suddenly a ‘cheap’ in state school is 40k a year and some schools are 90k a year. Something is broken

Trump's attacks on colleges has nothing to do with affordablilty or education or bloat.
It's about control of of the uneducated. Draining science, Christian Nationalist.

[Anonymous]

Send your kid to Wash U you are a horrible parent.
Missouri Officials Seize Control of St. Louis Police, in Latest Bid to Shutter Local Reforms
The takeover returns St. Louis to a Civil War-era arrangement of state control. A local official calls the move "a clear gesture of white men wanting to control urban areas."

Not good.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I see both sides. Universities have been on a wild spending spree- lazy rivers in dorms, every kid gets their own room and bathroom, cleaning ladies for dorms, massive gyms for regular students to work out in.

My best memories in college were spent in a triple (to the horror of current college students). It was so much fun that we all requested triples the next year too. College can be fun even if colleges spent less money on luxe facilities.

That being said- I love how Americans go off to college. My European friends all either lived at home or they lived in a big city and rented an appt near their university. It sounded totally different than my experience.

My maga in-laws biggest gripe is the massive endowments of these universities who are still accepting federal funds. I really can’t speak to that, but it gets brought up again and again.

Oh and to the person up thread AC is not a luxury.

The endowments have nothing to do with the "federal funds". Most of the "FF" are for research. They are being paid to do research, something that is much more cost effective with cheap undergrads and PHD students as 90% of the team than out in private industry where the "lowest level person" has their MS or PHD. We (as a society and country) reap the benefits of this scientific research, especially in medicine areas.

[Anonymous]

A recent paper published by the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas found that government investments in [R&D] accounted for at least a fifth of U.S. productivity growth since World War II.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Sorry, but I just don't buy it. In 1997, the most expensive four-year private colleges cost $100,000 for everything. That's $199,000 in today's dollars. Today, the most expensive privates are $360,000. Put another way, if college was as expensive in 1997 as it was today, it would have been $180,000--80% more expensive. Where has this 80% increase in cost gone? Not to faculty--tenured faculty positions have been stable or even cut almost everywhere, replaced by temps. My daughter is a Freshman at a T10 research university and *all* of her STEM profs have been temps so far. The money has gone to three things: Administrative bloat; athletics; and buildings and amenities. It will be hard, but undergraduate colleges can easily find the solution to their problems by cutting the bureaucracy (Deans, Assistant Deans, VPs, etc.), freezing the absurd athletics programs that serve as a weird pipeline for rich kids whose parents can afford travel sports, and stopping new building construction. Kids will be fine--in fact they'll be much better off. They don't need to be bubble wrapped; they can live in crappy dorms like we did and be fine; and parents might realize that the whole travel sports thing for hopes of a D1 admit is an absurd, irrational, and deeply unfair money grab. A correction is badly needed, and college will be better for it when it gets back to its core mission: Education and becoming an adult through controlled adversity.

What you don’t get is that this will just kill off most schools.

People struggle to see the value of a degree anyhow; destroy all the fun and you might as well make college into a trade school.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:
What you don’t get is that this will just kill off most schools.

It won't kill off most schools, but it will force them to cut the flab and make choices on how to spend limited money. It will kill some schools, that is a much needed Darwinian fitness test.