The US Elite Undermining Of The US Universities

Diminishing The Technology Advantage And Soft Power Of the US

The boards of governors of US universities tend to be staffed by members of the oligarchy and their courtiers. Ever since the student radicalism of the 1960s and 1970s, those boards (and politicians) have striven to “tame” the universities, through such things as escalating tuition, the ongoing neoliberal casualization of the workforce (post-docs, contract staff and professors), and the implementation of a disciplinary administrative layer. The taming has been successful, but it has also lead to the degradation of the university sector which is the underlying base for US technological advantage. This is now being made worse by the direct harassment of foreign-born post-docs and professors by the Security State, and increasing state and media-driven anti-Chinese sentiments in the general population.

Loading US Students Up With Debt To Pay For Inefficiency, Luxury & Lack Of State Funding

This trend was really started by Ronald Reagan in the 1960s, as California and then other states travelled a multi-decade path of defunding state university systems; pushing the costs onto individual students who had to take on more and more debt. This was a political decision in response to student radicalism (e.g. the resistance to the Vietnam War); a Reagan adviser warned that that free college would create a dangerous “educated proletariat”. As The Intercept put it:

A core theme of Reagan’s first gubernatorial campaign in 1966 was resentment toward California’s public colleges, in particular UC Berkeley, with Reagan repeatedly vowing “to clean up the mess” there. Berkeley, then nearly free to attend for California residents, had become a national center of organizing against the Vietnam War. Deep anxiety about this reached the highest levels of the U.S. government. John McCone, the head of the CIA, requested a meeting with J. Edgar Hoover, head of the FBI, to discuss “communist influence” at Berkeley, a situation that “definitely required some corrective action.”

After Reagan had successfully cut funding to the Californian state university system:

Prominent conservative intellectuals also took up the charge. Privately one worried that free education “may be producing a positively dangerous class situation” by raising the expectations of working-class students. Another referred to college students as “a parasite feeding on the rest of society” who exhibited a “failure to understand and to appreciate the crucial role played [by] the reward-punishment structure of the market.” The answer was “to close off the parasitic option.”

In practice, this meant to the National Review, a “system of full tuition charges supplemented by loans which students must pay out of their future income.”

Political and social disciplining through debt peonage; a much used tool of control used by societal elites throughout time. From a Gramscian perspective, the US ruling oligarchy wanted to put a stop to the creation of alternative hegemonic culture projects by disciplining the intellectual “radicals”. In parallel, all universities started to massively expand their non-academic staff and their non-academic facilities (dorms, sports stadiums etc.), resulting in both much higher costs that had to be reflected in increases in tuition fees well above the rate of inflation, and a neoliberal management control layer sitting above the troublesome faculty.

In constant dollars, in 1963 college tuition for a year was US$4,600 while it was US$14,000 in 2021. The total cost of a year in college increased from US$11,400 to US$27,000 in the same period in inflation-adjusted terms. The cost of four-year state-funded public colleges increased the most. At the more expensive private colleges, one years undergraduate tuition can now cost US$50,000 or more; as reported here. The private US universities have long operated a cozy cartel where they optimize their amount of income by controlling the level of for-need student grants to a minimum. The balance is made up through student debt and parental funding (a significant amount made up by parental borrowing), with only the richest families providing a debt-free graduation for their children. The average US student now borrows over US$30,000 to earn a bachelors degree, which in many cases only provides them with an entry-level job.

As Forbes notes, the three big reasons for the increase in tuition have been:

1. Increases in “student services”, a lovely misnomer for increased administrative bloat and political oversight.

2. Reductions in state funding

3. Lack of the ability to increase productivity/reduce costs in a highly people-intensive industry. This borders on pure BS given the lengths that universities have gone to drive the actual academics and real service staff (e.g. cleaners) into penury - as I will cover below.

Its really #1 and #2, with Forbes being much more truthful in this article entitled “Administrative Bloat At U.S. Colleges Is Skyrocketing”. As the article notes:

In the past, when faced with funding shortfalls, colleges and universities attempted to “grow their way” out of the problem by opening up new sources of revenue. Many launched new graduate programs, including terminal master’s degrees (no doctoral option) and certificates. Others increased their online offerings to expand their access to part-time students beyond the gates of their campuses. And almost all opened their doors to international students who could afford to pay full price [my italics].

At the same time:

most schools went on a hiring spree; one that massively expanded the ranks of all types of employees, with one notable exception—full-time faculty. Between 1976 and 2018, full-time administrators and other professionals employed by those institutions increased by 164% and 452%, respectively. Meanwhile, the number of full-time faculty employed at colleges and universities in the U.S. increased by only 92%, marginally outpacing student enrollment which grew by 78%.

In the top 50 US schools there is one faculty member per 11 students, but one non-faculty employee per 4 students! Three times as many employees who do not produce the paid for core output, education, as ones that do! In the extreme cases there are more non-faculty staff than students, and these numbers don’t even include consultants and contractors! At such extremes there are as many as 7.5 to 9 non-faculty staff for each member of the faculty. Then add in the drive of many universities to provide resort-like facilities in their student dorms and other areas.

Unlike in many other countries, and as with healthcare, there is no central government oversight on what individual institutions can charge students; especially in the case of the private colleges. Rent seeking and profiteering behaviour is allowed to run amuck, creating highly wasteful institutions that cost society much more than in other nations while delivering the same or even worse outcomes. So the college administrators could soak the student body in an extremely unequal relationship between hope-filled teenagers with access to ridiculous levels of debt, and their parents, who have not yet fully developed their faculties of risk assessment etc. (these mature around age 24), and highly manipulative revenue optimizing administrations. The result was a massive explosion in student debt, much of it guaranteed by the state (and made impossible to escape from even in bankruptcy, in contrast to all other debts, thanks to Senator Biden), and equally massive increases in full-paying foreign students (many of them Chinese).

When there were any pressures to trim spending, the disciplinary administrative bloat has done what would be expected. It directed any cost cutting at the faculty (reduction in tenured and full-time faculty positions, increase in contract and post-doc teaching staff, holding down of post-doc remuneration) and other staff who do working class jobs (e.g. cleaners, janitors etc.). The quality of the core product, education, has been reduced while its cost kept increasing. The end result is that young individuals are increasingly seeing a bachelors as a debt-ridden journey to a low paid entry-level job, as increasingly higher degrees such as Law, MBAs and others are required for more remunerative positions. The bachelors has become so widespread that it is now more a basic entry price than a ticket to better jobs.

The situation has become so ridiculous and pervasive that John Oliver could spend 30 minutes making jokes about it:

Just as the younger generation increasingly sours on the worth of a bachelors, its numbers are falling over time and will be significantly less than the previous one; dropping by 575,000 students (15%) between 2025 and 2029. At the same time, foreign students are increasingly being provided with many alternatives to US schools; especially Chinese students. At the same time as the latter are being faced with increasing anti-Chinese racism and state security apparatus harassment.

The drop in the domestic cohort and the souring of that cohort toward a college degree, when combined with a probable reduction in the full-paying foreign student population could be a very toxic brew for all but the most elite schools. Leading to the need for extensive cost cutting, which may again be more directed at the faculty and post-docs than the fat administrative layer.

Underpaying Post-Docs

For many decades the universities have colluded to keep most especially science and technology post-doctoral pay low, especially through the misuse of the H1-B visa system to gain access to cheap foreign academic labour. US private corporations have done very much the same, with non-compete clauses and even open collusion. The result is that an individual that has progressed through an expensive bachelors (4 years), an expensive masters (up to 2 years), and an expensive PhD (4 years), accruing very large students debts along the way, faces a highly-manipulated low wage future. In addition, the reduction in tenured faculty positions with respect to PhD graduates has greatly increased the period of “post-doc” low pay for those that stay within the academic system. Even at Harvard, the minimum post-doc academic pay is currently US$67,600 - for someone aged about 28 years old; and the post-doc period may last 5-10 years. That’s early 30s before even getting a chance at a salary over US$100,000, during which the post-doc may have had to jump from one university to another while carrying huge educational debts. Even in the private sector, the starting pay for research scientists averages about US$86,000.

What person would rationally follow this path? Some US citizens still do, but nowhere near enough to fill the low paid science and technology post-doc positions. Why not take a medical, law or business degree that will lead to much higher remuneration? There is also the increasing disconnect between a post-materialist and anti-excellence administrative bloat (and the social sciences) and the materialism and excellence-orientation of STEM students. With the former starting to invade the latter through grade inflation, the overuse of “diversity” with respect to other criteria in enrolment and hiring decisions, the “deconstruction” of scientific language and practices, and required courses that are irrelevant to STEM learning. For example, a friend’s daughter and her boyfriend had to attend a Gender Studies required course that they considered to be more ideological indoctrination (with no basis in the scientific method or even social statistics) than actual academic teaching; a course they had to pay for!

North America is unique in having a four-year degree system, with the first two years “wasted” on courses (some obligatory) that may have no relevance to the final specialization. Other countries tend to have three year bachelors degrees which specialize from the beginning, as in the English system. Also, the faculty tends to have a much greater say in the running of the institution in other countries.

The universities have squared the recruitment circle by importing foreign post-docs and other early career STEM academics, many of which have had free or very low tuition costs in less rich countries and will accept the low pay. US university research is now completely dependent upon these foreign researchers, many of them Chinese. Even junior and mid-career tenured staff are not paid that much when compared to other professions, and the cost of living in many of the cities involved (such as Boston, New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles). While the cost of a US STEM education has become increasingly expensive, and its quality become open to question (especially relative to quickly improving foreign schools), the academic rewards have been diminished; especially when compared to other disciplines such as law and finance.

The result is that the US graduates many less science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) US citizen graduates in absolute terms and per capita than China. In 2020, China had 3.57 million STEM graduates, India 2.55 million, the US 820k and Russia 520k. The US population is 333 million, while China has 1.412 billion, a ratio of 1:4.24, while the ratio of STEM graduates is 1:4.354; so you may say “where’s the problem?” Well, over 50% of those US graduates are not US citizens, they are predominantly from China and India, and not counted in their own nation’s graduation statistics.

So the real US citizen STEM graduate ratio to China citizen STEM graduate ratio is much more like 1:10, with China having three times the number of citizens graduating with STEM degrees per capita than the US; with only 10-20% of foreign graduates remaining in the US after graduation. Both the absolute difference (1:10) and the per capita difference (1:3) in STEM citizen graduates will have very significant impacts on the relative abilities to develop and implement new technologies; with China far in the lead. When counting only citizen STEM graduates, Russia has an absolute number advantage (500k to about 400k) over the US as well as a per capita advantage given its population of less than half that of the US. Even Indonesia has a sizeable per capita advantage over the US! The speed at which the US falls behind in STEM in the next decade may stun many of those in power in the nation, who predominantly have non-STEM degrees; unlike the leadership of China.

Casualizing The Professorial Workforce

At one time, most undergraduates were taught primarily by actual tenured professors but that day is long past. Instead, most of the teaching is now carried out by post-docs, contract academics, and even masters graduates and students. US universities have proven highly averse to even just maintaining tenured faculty levels and highly creative in substituting low quality options. This both reduces the quality of the main product, education, to the student population (adding to its decreasing perceived value) and reduces tenured opportunities for post-docs and contract staff.

Neoliberal Woke Disciplinary Administrators

To make matters worse the administrative bloat has to find something to do to claim the need for its existence and much of that involves the harassment of the faculty. The need to regularly publish papers to meet many times completely irrelevant criteria (to actual scientific advancement) and to respond to bureaucrats with too much time on their hands (and many times paid better than the academics!) can rapidly diminish the time for truly productive work. Many a retiring academic has privately stated their happiness to be leaving the administrative make work bloat that had increasingly got in the way of their ability to both carry out their academic work and to enjoy it.

With the cost of a college education soaring, university administrators have also increasingly treated students as “customers” and the customer can never be wrong or have to experience failure! This has lead to a continual grade inflation that has made a mockery of academic excellence in many universities, and greatly reduced the authoritative position of the faculty relative to the student body; the latter many times being backed up by the disciplinary administrative bureaucracy.

Another deeply problematic side effect of the disciplinary administrative bureaucracy is a lack of commitment to academic excellence that when combined with social activism and a “customer” orientation leads to highly skewed enrolment decisions. It also affect the responses to academic failure/cheating that diminish academic integrity and further cheapen the core output of the academy in the eyes of its consumers.

The University of California at Austin (UCLA) medical school seems to be a poster child for the destruction of academic excellence, as an article in the Atlantic Monthly “What Makes a Med School ‘Woke’? A controversy over progressive policies at UCLA points to deeper questions” covers.

According to Sibarium, almost one-quarter of the class of 2025 had failed at least three shelf exams, while more than half of students in their internal-medicine, family-medicine, emergency-medicine, or pediatrics rotations had failed tests in those subjects at one point during the 2022–23 academic year—and those struggles led many trainees to postpone taking their national licensing exams. “I don’t know how some of these students are going to be junior doctors,” one unnamed UCLA professor told him. “Faculty are seeing a shocking decline in knowledge of medical students.”

The vast majority of those attending the UCLA medical school will have already gained a four-year US bachelors degree and one would assume could now focus on being taught how to be a physician. But no, even here the administrative bloat and performative social activists must intrude to instil

its student body with a social consciousness. In prior coverage for the Free Beacon, Sibarium has described the mandatory Structural Racism and Health Equity course for first-years, which, according to a 2023–24 syllabus obtained by the Free Beacon, intends to help students “develop a structurally competent, anti-racist lens for viewing and treating health and illness,” and encourages them to become “physician-advocates within and outside of the clinical setting.”

Students should not be forced to take time away from the actual work of becoming a fully trained physician. Such courses also fill the classic performative-only nature of what passes for much of “critical” theory as only culture is the focus, not the underlying political economy and questions of structural change. All paid for by the students themselves! The author of the article is with the very liberal Atlantic Monthly, so has to spend reams of words running away from the deep implications of the UCLA example. He certainly does not reference the most telling parts of the Free Beacon article that he is referring to which are quite damning, for example:

when it came time for the admissions committee to consider … a black applicant with grades and test scores far below the UCLA average—some members of the committee felt that this particular candidate, based on the available evidence, was not the best fit for the top-tier medical school, according to two people present for the committee's meeting.

Their reservations were not well-received. When an admissions officer voiced concern about the candidate, the two people said, the dean of admissions, Jennifer Lucero, exploded in anger.

"Did you not know African-American women are dying at a higher rate than everybody else?" Lucero asked the admissions officer, these people said. The candidate's scores shouldn't matter, she continued, because "we need people like this in the medical school."

Such a conversation should never happen in an admissions process, especially for a medical school, as basic competence to deal with the material taught should be a non-negotiable gating criteria.

"I wondered," the official added, "if this applicant had been [a] white male, or [an] Asian female for that matter, [whether] we would have had that much discussion."

Since Lucero took over medical school admissions in June 2020, several of her colleagues have asked the same question. In interviews with the Free Beacon and complaints to UCLA officials, including investigators in the university's Discrimination Prevention Office, faculty members with firsthand knowledge of the admissions process say it has prioritized diversity over merit, resulting in progressively less qualified classes that are now struggling to succeed.

The average person certainly does not need their physician to be a social activist, nor allowed into college even though they did not have the required level of ability; rather all they want is that their physicians are competent and careful. In all of the science-based disciplines competence has to be the core criteria, as an overwhelming majority of prospective students (especially those from outside North America) would agree. The UCLA story also acts another data point that reduces the allure of a US STEM education. Interestingly, the number of Asian matriculants dropped dramatically since Lucero’s tenure, “the number of Asian matriculants fell by almost a third between 2019 and 2022”, exacerbating a widespread level of racial discrimination against highly-qualified Asian-American students in US academia; covered up with references to the need for a diverse student body by even such universities as Harvard. The children of the rich white donors and the children of the faculty (still predominantly white) of private universities certainly do not experience such discrimination; quite the opposite. Another negative for high achieving Asian students, to add to the experience of anti-Chinese racism on many US campuses which has intensified in recent years. At UCLA, Lucero also pushed specific ethnicities over matters of relative ability:

Lucero has even advocated moving candidates up or down the residency rank list based on race. At a meeting in February 2022, according to two people present, Lucero demanded that a highly qualified white male be knocked down several spots because, as she put it, "we have too many of his kind" already. She also told doctors who voiced concern that they had no right to an opinion because they were "not BIPOC," sources said, and insisted that a Hispanic applicant who had performed poorly on her anesthesiology rotation in medical school should be bumped up. Neither candidate was ultimately moved.

Security Service Harassment & Racism

As I mentioned above, especially for the Chinese students, foreign post-docs and faculty are subject to an increasing level of security state harassment. Even to the point of intervening directly in academic personal networks to limit perceived security issues and to force academics into extremely vague and legally problematic written commitments. At the same time, the increasingly anti-Chinese messaging of the state and media produces a hostile social environment to Chinese nationals in general.

The End Result: The Undermining Of The US Academy

With Chinese universities now topping the global charts in publications in high quality academic journals, Chinese living standards continuing to rapidly rise, and the Chinese state pouring money into new research positions, Chinese scientists have been increasingly returning to China rather than staying in the West. The extremely vibrant startup environment in China has also delivered a reverse brain drain.

At the same time, Chinese students returning with degrees from foreign universities now find little advantage with respect to domestic graduates and in some respects even suffer from the lack of domestic personal relationships that those domestic graduates have built up. The worth of a foreign degree has rapidly diminished in value relative to its domestic competition. Together with the rapid build out of the Chinese university system, and significant negative demographic trends with respect to younger generations, this could lead to very significant reductions in Chinese students abroad. Negative views of foreign degrees have increased much more greatly with respect to the US than other nations, so such a reduction in foreign students may be much more heavily experienced by US universities. A Brookings Institute report is entitled “How America lost the heart of China’s top talent”. This will be in addition to the reduction in the domestic possible student cohort and the lessening of the perceived value of a college degree by younger US generations.

The US universities may then be faced with two linked crises (i) a reduction in their ability to employ foreign post-docs and professors to keep down salaries, and (ii) a reduction in both foreign full fee paying students and in domestic students. The rational way to handle this would be to slash the bloated bureaucratic layers, and utilize state/endowment money to provide better remuneration to early-career academics. But that would be expecting of senior bureaucrats to slash their own headcount, which would inevitably result in the need for less senior bureaucrats. Private university boards have also been loath to utilize their massive endowments to fund the needs of staff or students, with in many cases the endowment more seeming to be a tax-sheltered provider of funds to private equity players (some of which sit on the university boards).

The funding issue for US universities may also be exacerbated by the Chinese state’s provision of extensive funding for foreign students to study at Chinese universities. As those universities’ academic rankings have climbed they become more and more a viable alternative to the kind of well off foreign families who send children to study abroad, and to the junior academics that would take positions in US universities and corporations. The state funding of such foreign students is an investment in future soft power, as those students learn both the language, culture and worldview of the Chinese. In this respect, China is investing heavily to imbibe foreign elites with a positive feeling toward Chinese interests, the Chinese worldview, and extensive personal connections with China.

As the US elite undermines the US university sector more and more, they not only seriously damage the technological capabilities of the nation, but also greatly diminish its image and influence abroad.

The video below first covers the future probable funding problems that many US universities may have, as well as later many other industries that may be completely destabilized by Chinese ongoing moves up the manufacturing and services value added ladder.