Circularity in Higher Ed

One of the major problems with colleges today is that there are no exogenous sources of feedback. Businesses have customers who stop buying products with a decline in quality. Politicians can get voted out of office. NBA teams lose games to better competition. In other words, there is some external standard of quality that gives feedback to the organization such that they can make changes. This doesn’t exist in higher education because the quality of an institution is based on a circularity that goes like this: The best people attend a great institution because it is a great institution and it’s a great institution because the best people attend it. The prestige attracts great students and great students mean prestige. What if the university is not offering a good “product” (education)? It doesn’t matter because it still graduates the best students because it attracted the best students. Reform of higher ed., then, depends upon breaking this circularity and introducing some external standard of quality—it couldn’t be a test of just inputs (e.g., an “exit exam” or “bar passage rate” because better universities get better students who are more likely to score higher regardless of what they actually learned at the university). It would have to be a test of outputs—measuring change over the course of the education. Whoever is up to the task of developing an entrance/exit exam that can accurately measure what we hope colleges are giving their students will be doing the world a great service. This would discipline and reform higher education immediately. If we saw that Chico state produced a higher increase in critical thinking, creativity, and knowledge than did Harvard, then it would quickly displace Harvard as offering the better educational “product.” WE would see the processes happening in higher ed that we constantly see in business or sports, where the top firms of teams don’t stay there very long as they are disrupted by new, innovative entrants. We haven’t seen this disruption of education because there is no external standard of quality for disruptors to achieve, there is only a circular one (“great universities attract great students which makes them great universities”).

Equality without Agency

We live in an age that prides itself on being post-metaphysical without realizing that it is as metaphysical as any that came before, only selectively and without acknowledgement. During the era of Christian enlightenment (1700-2000), Americans believed in equality as well as agency. In our age of post-Christian enlightenment, we believe in equality without agency, which reduces everyone to victim status—puppets of systems rather than beings of choice. We’ll see how long the “equality” lasts in our post-Christian age since any non-religious ideology will have a hard time upholding any kind of metaphysics at all (since belief in both agency and equality are non-empirical and must be taken on faith).

The Scaling Up or Scaling Down Fallacy

A family is different than society, with different rules, workings, and incentives. What works for a family generally won’t work for society as a whole. Many of our political mistakes arise from the fallacy that society is just a family writ large—e.g., monarchy or socialism: if loving parents rule over a family, why can’t a loving “parent” (king or queen) rule over a country? If families just share the work and resources, why can’t nations? I’ve also seen the opposite error of starting from a macro, societal view of market economic assumptions (everyone is paid for their work) and then scaling down to say that “housewives” should be paid for their work. The same reason househusbands and house children aren’t paid: everyone is contributing communally in a micro, non-market situation. This is one of the reasons I’m bothered by the “it takes a village to raise a child” talk—it assumes that American society is like a village, but village workings don’t scale up to the national level.

The nature of left-right ideologies

Most people believe that political tribes are organized around a set of positions (ideologies). The reality is that a set of positions are organized around a tribe.

Looking Outward vs. Upward

If you don’t look upward, you will look outward. If you don’t look to God for validation, you will look to your fellow man with all the misery associated with status competition. Inasmuch as we Americans are looking upward less, we are looking outward more and social media magnifies this outward-looking orientation to a significant degree. This, as much as anything, probably explains the dramatic rise in depression, suicide, and other indicators of general unhappiness in recent years.

A short summary of our time

Technology is in a race with foolish and foolish seems to be winning

Symptoms vs. Causes of Racial Disparity

We can’t solve lung cancer with cough suppressants, and we can’t solve the racial inequity problem with affirmative action. Opening up spots at NASA and Yale for a handful of racial minorities might (if we assume no talent mismatch problem) benefit a handful of people, but the tens of millions of others in minority groups won’t be helped even if elite institutions can pat themselves on the back for alleviating a cough. The dogma that all racial disparities are caused by racism and discrimination underlies most of our action on the racial advancement front these days, and yet it’s obviously misguided. Indian Americans have better outcomes (especially on income) than do white Americans, and since this clearly isn’t the result of racism/discrimination, we must turn elsewhere for explanation. Culture is the most likely culprit and if there are cultural problems (lung cancer) killing the patient (poor white performance relative to Indian Americans), then getting to the cultural problem (opioid addiction, family breakdown, honor culture, devaluation of education) is the only solution. A palliative to suppress the cough might make a doctor feel better, but it won’t do anything for the patient. Can we call “malpractice” on those prescribing similar “cures” when it comes to racial issues?