Dec 29, 2021·edited Dec 29, 2021Liked by Nikita Petrov
The thing neither McKenna nor Prof. Loury mentioned is the massive *expansion* of the university-going portion of each generation from the pre-WWII generations through the boomers and descending down to today. As late as 1940, only about 6% of the population had four or more years of college education. By 1970 that had doubled to about 11%, and has increased in a fairly linear manner until today we're bumping up against 37-38% of the population. Under those conditions - going from being able to cherry-pick the far right tail of talent, interest, aptitude, dedication in academic matters, to having to take the whole top third of the distribution - it would be almost inconceivable for curricula and the social role of a college education to *not* radically change. In fact, having people pouring into the streets with all sorts of weird ideas just after a massive increase in the spread of high-intellectual concepts already has a precedent - the exact same thing happened when the bible got translated into the vulgar and promulgated via the printing press during the beginning of the Reformation! Look into the early protestant sects - all sorts of WILDLY crazy beliefs started running around, because suddenly people had the chance to interpret important texts themselves, without any social framework to guide that interpretation other than already-mature interpretive traditions demanding adherence rather than providing support.
I could be wrong, but I think they did mention students becoming customers, which is a direct result of the expansion and the push to lead people to believe that they need at least a Bachelors to be successful in grown up America.
I'd argue that's a related, but distinct phenomenon related to the proliferation of collegiate entities, and particularly the increase of wide-spread guaranteed tuition loans as a major revenue source for those entities. But fair enough.
The thing neither McKenna nor Prof. Loury mentioned is the massive *expansion* of the university-going portion of each generation from the pre-WWII generations through the boomers and descending down to today. As late as 1940, only about 6% of the population had four or more years of college education. By 1970 that had doubled to about 11%, and has increased in a fairly linear manner until today we're bumping up against 37-38% of the population. Under those conditions - going from being able to cherry-pick the far right tail of talent, interest, aptitude, dedication in academic matters, to having to take the whole top third of the distribution - it would be almost inconceivable for curricula and the social role of a college education to *not* radically change. In fact, having people pouring into the streets with all sorts of weird ideas just after a massive increase in the spread of high-intellectual concepts already has a precedent - the exact same thing happened when the bible got translated into the vulgar and promulgated via the printing press during the beginning of the Reformation! Look into the early protestant sects - all sorts of WILDLY crazy beliefs started running around, because suddenly people had the chance to interpret important texts themselves, without any social framework to guide that interpretation other than already-mature interpretive traditions demanding adherence rather than providing support.
I could be wrong, but I think they did mention students becoming customers, which is a direct result of the expansion and the push to lead people to believe that they need at least a Bachelors to be successful in grown up America.
I'd argue that's a related, but distinct phenomenon related to the proliferation of collegiate entities, and particularly the increase of wide-spread guaranteed tuition loans as a major revenue source for those entities. But fair enough.