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Notes -
(Stupid) Kids These Days
Article link - no paywall
Rough summary:
(Emphasis above added)
Excellent CW quote:
UCSD isn't an online for profit school. It has traditionally admitted kid from middle to upper middle class families that maybe weren't deeply thinkers, but were assumed to be strongly better than average. Their grads go on to form the professional classes of California suburbs, albeit not the ones with $2m media home price gated communities. Far from a bad life.
And the faculty be saying kids are real, real dumb. Like, really tho.
The rearward looking CW angle is too obvious; DEI, affirmative action, grade inflation in High Schools and a "no child left behind" attitude. I'd sprinkle on some helicopter-parent pressuring as well. For those of you interested in that angle, I await your hopefully hilarious takes.
I'm more interested in the future CW angle. Color me skeptical that these kids, already 18+, are going to really buckle down and crack the books now. If you've been retard-maxxing for nearly two decades, it's hard to slow the Downs and speed up the study. But, as the Dean in Animal House, said, _"Fat, Drunk, and Stupid" is no way to go through life. So what happens to these kids?
10 years from now, are we seeing a new sub-class of horrifically incompetent 30 year olds? If so, how does that change policy outcomes. A lot of well intentioned liberals have been smashing the vote button for welfare programs for going on six decades now because they see "structural" problems everywhere - of course the less fortunate need our benevolent support (definitely not noblesse-oblige). But when it just becomes plainly obvious that the COVID generation just has permanent banana brains, does that suicide empathy actually start to dry up?
There's a lot of discourse on the online dissident right about what will finally "wake up" the productive members of society. It usually ends up in HBD adjacent spaces. I wonder if the real "oh shit" moment will be far more obvious - stupid people, of any race, create massive problems and we've been boosting the stupid coefficient for somewhere near 15 years straight now.
One angle that isn't discussed here (because I'm not sure it's relevant yet) is that there will soon be fewer college age kids. As the number of young adults decreases, colleges will either realign to enroll less qualified individuals or they will close. For now, that outcome has been staved off with immigration. But the good times will not last forever.
Is there a large population of people who would go to college but were rejected from every college? People in Community College are basically this demographic, right?
So that number seems to be going down. Is it going down because institutions have lowered their requirements? I don't know. I think this is what we'd see if it was, though.
Enrollment should go down purely on account of the fact that we have far too many people enrolled already. There are ‘way’ too many kids in higher education than there should be.
I don’t think the major universities or even community colleges will likely close. Maybe their endowments should change. Some commitments these institutions have put upon themselves may have to be rolled back as a consequence of them perhaps being involved in programs and outreach they shouldn’t be involved in. But I doubt it’ll be a closure similar to what people have worried about, with libraries closing for instance because of the digitalization efforts and also a far smaller population of readers (which is sad).
There is probably a minimum number of kids a college needs to maintain the facilities they have already built. If a college with dorms and lecture halls to support 10,000 students over the course of a few years suddenly only has 5,000 students apply, they are going to have to try to give away property to avoid going bankrupt. And that's ignoring administrative bloat, post docs, etc.
The top 20% of schools would see the same number of students apply and they are selective enough there wont be much change. The next 20% of schools might need to start accepting people they wouldn't normally. The bottom 20% of schools will start to see fewer kids apply, because all the kids they used to get are applying and getting into the second quintile of schools. And so on as demographics collapse.
The alternative is to admit foreigners. But even foreign demographics will collapse eventually.
Already starting to happen -- see Figure 1 near the end. The top quintile will probably do fine, and the larger schools in the next quintile (which is so far unaffected) can probably "build down" by consolidating campuses and programs. Schools lower than that and not part of a system don't have a clear path to survival; it seems inevitable that many of them will not survive.
I know at least in New York State, community colleges are already in trouble. I don't think any have closed but at least one lost its campus and had to co-locate with the nearby SUNY school.
ETA: See here for about how I expect this to go with most state university systems.
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