The Civic Crisis of the Modern American University, Part I: How American Universities Became Credentialing Factories

The purpose of the American university should be to cultivate the educated citizens we need to self-govern our democracy.

The purpose of the American university should be to cultivate the educated citizens we need to self-govern our democracy.

The root cause of the modern university crisis isn’t incompetence, or even politics. It’s about a loss of mission. Our universities have forgotten and abandoned their primary purpose, which is educating democratic citizens. Instead of institutions built around education and civic duty, they’ve embraced a mission of credentialing America’s experts, professionals, and national elites. Their chief purpose is no longer cultivating leaders but sorting young Americans as credentialing factories. This drift in mission has created the university crisis: ballooning costs, weak curricula, and students more interested in diplomas than learning.

This mission drift is the problem we must fix to restore universities as America’s civic heart. This first part of a two-part essay will discuss how we got ourselves into this situation.

The Crisis of the Modern American University

American universities are in crisis, despite flourishing on paper. On some metrics, they’re not just the best universities in the world, but arguably in world history. They attract top students and faculty across the globe. They dominate in Nobel Prizes, patents, and academic citations, helping along transformative discoveries like the Internet, GPS, CRISPR, and AI. They’ve spread higher education throughout American society, with fully half of American adults now holding some form of post-secondary education, and 37% holding a bachelor’s degree. What possibly could be the problem?

For one thing, there’s the price tag. As the college degree has become a minimum baseline for a middle-class job, its cost has skyrocketed. The average cost of public in-state tuition is now $11,600 per year, while out-of-state public tuition is $30,800 per year, and private schools are at a staggering $38,400 per year. Elite schools are racing ahead even further, with schools like Harvard now getting close to $60,000 per year, and a few trailblazers like Brown, Columbia, and Vassar exceeding $70,000. Add in food, books, and housing, and some university degrees are getting awfully close to $100,000 per year in total expense. At that price, loans and aid are hardly sufficient when the median salary of the holder of a bachelor’s degree is around $80,000. The salary of those aged 25-34 is only around $67,000.

All this money isn’t even going into the classroom. Only about 20-30 percent of university budgets today reach classroom teachers. Most spending instead funds beautifully manicured campuses and rapidly multiplying administrators. Many universities now employ three times as many non‑faculty staff as teaching faculty, while relying on poorly-paid gig-worker adjuncts willing to teach classes for a few thousand dollars per course, and earning as little as $25,000 per year.

At least students must be getting back an extraordinary education. Unfortunately not.

The Atlantic recently set off a national discussion with an article, supported and confirmed by many professors, that American students today have trouble reading or understanding books. A 2015 AACRAO study found around 40% of college graduates lacked the complex reasoning skills needed for white‑collar jobs, such as interpreting data or evaluating evidence. In a survey of employers, HR Drive found 60% of employers said recent college graduates lack critical thinking and problem‑solving ability, and 44% lack writing proficiency. The American Institute for Research found half of students in four-year colleges lack the skills necessary to perform complex quantitative tasks such as comparing credit card offers with different interest rates or summarizing arguments in newspaper editorials. The Chronicle of Higher Education reported few American university students today actually do the assigned reading at all, and many lack the capacity to even understand it.

What about the substance of what they’re learning? ACTA’s nationwide audit of general‑education requirements found that, out of 1,134 institutions reviewed, only seven require students to learn all seven core areas of a basic education: composition, literature, foreign language, history and government, economics, math, and science. Anecdotally, it’s shocking what many highly credentialed college graduates don’t know. How many college graduates have actually read and understood Locke, Hobbes, Rousseau, Plato, and Kant? How many can use calculus, explain relativity, or know how DNA works? How many understand the basics of economics? How many can list the Chinese dynasties, or put the Assyrians, Babylonians, Romans, and Inca in the correct historical order? This lack of knowledge is no accident, since universities today make very little effort in shaping their curricula to ensure graduates emerge with a base of knowledge. They hand nineteen-year-olds dense catalogs of randomly assembled topics reflecting what professors like to teach, not what they believe students need to learn.

Most alarming, American university students have, according to studies, a shockingly rudimentary knowledge of America’s political system. Many don’t know the articles and amendments of our Constitution. They don’t know how to read a Supreme Court opinion. They don’t understand how federalism works. They don’t understand what Congress actually does. They don’t know the major events that shaped American history. They can’t recite a sentence about each of America’s presidents. Many university graduates don’t know the basics of how our democracy works. Best of luck explaining the difference between Medicaid and Medicare. Yet these graduates don’t just aspire to shape our policies and choose our leaders as members of the electorate, but feel entitled to positions of leadership where they’ll run our major institutions. Our universities claim they’re producing the nation’s future leaders, but those future leaders don’t even have the basic knowledge of competent democratic citizens.

Universities aren’t solely to blame, since many students seem to undervalue their education themselves. A NBER study a few years back found the time students spent on class each week had fallen from 40 hours in the 1960s to only 27 hours by the early 2000s. With the widespread availability of AI to write papers, today students likely spend even less. AI has dramatically increased cheating on campuses. A popular recent New Yorker article sparked national debate with college professors complaining that most of the work they now assign isn’t completed by the students, but by AIs. Students are going through the motions to get a passing grade and degree without doing the difficult but rewarding work necessary to learn things.

This all raises a question. Why exactly are we doing this? Why ask young Americans to spend four years out of their lives and assume hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt, just to spend four blissful years among gardens to be taught a random collection of topics by poorly-paid adjunct professors that have little to do with their middle-class careers? The cost is staggering, the debt is life-limiting, few are learning much, none of it seems to have any purpose, and neither the universities nor society seems to care.

All this only makes sense once you understand the real purpose of today’s universities. They’re mills designed to sort through America’s youth to decide which will obtain the necessary credentials to obtain the opportunity to join America’s leadership class and elite.

How the University Lost Its Civic Mission

In the 20th century, America transformed college from an elite civic institution into a mass system open to everyone. In the belief that America needed a broad, highly educated population to administer a modern industrial nation and compete with the Soviet Union, the government began investing heavily in research and education. This in itself was a good thing. A democracy is meant to be a meritocracy with opportunity available to everyone, while America was at the time still under the soft rule of a semi-closed establishment. In light of the Second World War followed by the Cold War, America decided it could no longer justify or afford to waste all this potential. As access widened, research boomed, and campuses ballooned, the older purpose of the university of forming capable citizens for a self-governing democracy was quietly displaced. This traced back to the fundamental challenge of democracy. Who is supposed to lead and manage its institutions?

The most divisive and difficult issue for our Founding generation was how to locate and select the talent necessary to lead and administer a self-governing democratic republic open to all the people. Democracies are meant to be meritocracies in which people govern themselves. The problem is they still need experts and professionals to lead and administer their institutions. They need trained and competent diplomats, generals, bankers, scientists, doctors, lawyers, and CEOs. In a democracy of the people, where are these leaders supposed to come from? Federalists like Hamilton believed America should train a meritocratic elite to create an educated and commercially-minded “natural aristocracy” to replace the role of the nobility. Democratic-Republicans like Jefferson found this alarmingly monarchical and wanted to instead rely on what they called “yeoman farmers,” meaning farmers who owned and farmed their own land—in theory small landholders, but in practice tending to mean wealthy plantation barons like Jefferson. This debate led them to create of our first political parties.

America’s Founders realized monarchies like Great Britain relied upon a hereditary class of nobles, which it trained from birth to lead. Young people from the right families were tutored with all the skills and knowledge necessary to become the administrators, diplomats and generals the state would need. They weren’t taught the knowledge necessary to become useful workers, but a broad liberal education in history, philosophy, religion, government, and natural sciences traditionally meant for those who would have to lead and rule. This education was also meant to instill traits of good character, civic virtue, and noblesse oblige that leadership required. Every autocratic system has come up with a similar solution for training its elites. The Chinese Empire used a bureaucratic system of mandarin officials. Modern autocracies induct promising youth into loyal party cadres, training them for top jobs while instilling the party’s beliefs and values. How would a democracy of the people solve this problem?

After years of political warfare over the question, the rival visions of Hamilton and Jefferson consolidated to create what we used to call America’s “Yankee aristocracy” or old establishment. America’s leadership would mostly come from a semi-closed social caste descended from a handful of wealthy colonial families, who would be trained for leadership from birth like the old aristocratic families of Europe. The group was technically open to new members who could earn their way into the pages of its Social Register by building independent fortunes or otherwise distinguishing themselves as in Hamilton’s vision. In practice, however, inclusion was difficult and rare, and for people from unwanted backgrounds effectively impossible. This mostly Anglo-Protestant Yankee aristocracy based in the Northeast with names like Cabot, Lowell, Adams, Astor, Roosevelt, and Forbes would, after the Civil War, intermarry with and integrate with the parallel system of Southern aristocratic families, becoming a single national establishment.

This establishment saw itself as stewards of the republic and America’s rightful ruling class carrying out a duty to preserve America’s institutions, with noblesse oblige to look after ordinary people laboring under their inherited leadership. For generations, it held almost exclusive power in government, finance, media, and law. It trained its members for leadership in a network of Ivy League schools and prep academies, which provided them with the same liberal education classically required to impart the knowledge and character necessary to lead and rule.

Historically, universities had always been small institutions of elite scholars preparing to enter a handful of elite professions that required specialized knowledge, like law, medicine, theology, or academia. Many like Harvard, Yale, and Princeton had religious roots, and they educated students in the classical liberal arts tradition with Latin, Greek, philosophy, rhetoric, mathematics, and moral instruction. The purpose of the university was to educate and form character, producing gentlemen, clergymen, and professionals prepared to assume their duties leading society. Elite families sent their sons to college to prepare them for their future roles in national leadership. University degrees weren’t open to, or expected from, working or middle-class people to enter the workforce. In 1900, only around 3% of people even sought a college education. Thus, we came to associate a university education with prestige, opportunity, and access to social mobility.

After the Second World War, after an assault from both ends, this soft aristocratic system gradually came apart. On one end, waves of immigration, a national mobilization during war, followed by the economic plenty of the postwar boom, strengthened the political power of new would-be elites outside old aristocratic families. On the other end, national mobilization followed by Cold War demands caused Americans to recognize a modernizing world required more educated people for a growing number of white-collar roles. New demands for efficiency and meritocracy saw new demands that prep schools, Ivy League universities, and powerful institutions allow in more talented Americans. These demands saw America embrace a more meritocratic ethic and America decided college should now be encouraged for everybody.

After the war, America made a powerful coordinated effort to expand access to higher education. Excluding large swaths of the population from universities—particularly talented working-class students and the children of recent immigrants like Irish Catholics, Italians, Poles, and Jews —was seen as wasting national potential. The crown jewel of this effort was the GI Bill, which offered tuition and living stipends to millions of returning veterans, many from working-class and rural backgrounds, which broadened the social makeup of universities. Governments also invested in public universities and community colleges to handle this surging demand. As the Soviet atomic bomb and Sputnik created a sense of urgency to outpace the Soviets in science, the government set up laboratories funded by the Pentagon, issued federal contracts for weapons, computing, and aerospace, and poured money into universities to drive research in physics, engineering, and math. It applied pressure to diversify and expand universities and open them up from bastions of the old establishment.

When combined, these developments saw universities transform rapidly from small institutions of scholars into mass institutions espousing meritocratic principles and open to all talent. As universities grew, they moved away from faculty governance to large administrative bureaucracies to manage enrollment, compliance, housing, athletics, and student life. This brought an end to the classical model of education based around history, philosophy, and literature, and the idea that the university is meant to inculcate civic duty and public virtue. America still needed experts, professionals, managers, and leaders. In fact, it now needed them more than ever. The universities, long trainers of America's elite, became the default institutions to select those leaders. Before long, a college degree became almost necessary for middle-class employment, turning universities into gatekeepers for social mobility.

Without intending it, we reopened the question that troubled America’s Founders. America had justly and commendably re-embraced an ethic of meritocracy and democratic opportunity open to everyone. The old American establishment wasn’t dead exactly, but pushed from center stage. Who would now decide which young Americans would be trained and elevated into positions of leadership? The default institutions left to do this job were the universities that long trained America’s establishment. University admissions replaced the Social Register as the gateway to America’s elite.

Since World War II, universities’ main job shifted from education to credentialing professionals and managers. University admissions has become a de facto sorting mechanism deciding where young American students will enter the American system. It took a few decades for the logic of this transformation to play out fully, and a few decades more until we noticed it. This is the heart of the civic crisis now tearing at the university. Important national institutions formally dedicated to forming free citizens capable of self-governing now function primarily to sort and certify elites. Everything else they do is subservient to this goal. Once you understand this, everything the universities are doing makes sense.

By what right, however, do un-elected universities claim the role of deciding who will have opportunity in America and who will not? To whom are they accountable in making such decisions, and with what transparency are they required to do it? Most important, in taking on this role, what else is being lost? What necessary jobs are being neglected, and what is the social cost of this dereliction? What about the substance of the education? America is meant to be a meritocratic society in which everyone can rise and fairly pursue their dreams. Having an unacknowledged aristocracy trained from birth to rule was clearly unjust, inconsistent with our values, and a waste of human potential. Does the present system uphold our core values, or does it hinder human potential too? How is America and its people made better by this system? Can we do this better, and if so how?

Part II will explore how we can reclaim this original mission and restore our universities to their place as the civic heart of American life.

What do you want to see in Part II? Join the conversation in the comment.