> In reality I don’t think people’s political opinions change very much and they are just mad that their children individuated.

I think this probably the case as well. If I look back at how my own views shifted, the shift very likely would’ve happened regardless of if I’d attended university, assuming everything else was the same. It wasn’t the university that resulted in the shift as much as it was my getting out of my local bubble out into the world and experiencing it for myself.

Basically any kind of life experience that brings a young person to actually think and more deeply consider the world around them is likely to result in some level of individuation and shift away from inherited views. It’s perfectly natural and healthy.

People's political opinions definitely change, especially with age and wealth.

> In reality I don’t think people’s political opinions change very much and they are just mad that their children individuated.

That seems to be missing the elephant in the room - they sent kids in their most formative intellectual years to immerse themselves in a culture where there is a very high child:adult ratio. Then the kids come back with this wild culture that would make a lot of sense to a bunch of teenagers and young adults. It isn't just that the kids individuating, it is dumping them into one of the most elitist, authoritarian and artificial subcultures society maintains - populated mostly by near-juveniles I repeat - giving them independence to form themselves and discovering that dislocates them from their parents subculture.

It should be obvious that will happen but parents tend to be pretty dumb. No real training course for parenting I suppose.

And this anti elitist backlash will lead to… greater wealth inequality as the middle class is forced to cash out their equity and investments in a down market to be gobbled up by the top 1% like Elon Musk.

60% of the US workforce these days is white collar, and it's one of the great illusions of our time. Most of these jobs only exist to keep busy the 60% of the US workforce that has a degree. In the 1940's about 30% of the US workforce was white collar and only 5% had degrees. What caused this change? It's probably because blue collar workers made so much money and had so much leverage that businesses shipped all their jobs overseas. Blue collar people actually make real things and perform useful toil for society, whereas now they're working fake jobs for less money which they're told has higher social status. It's genius the way the system works. The way it takes from people (student loans, less pay) while persuading them they got a better deal. But how can you have a society where the majority of workers are administrators? Well you needn't look any further than America to find your answer. One day the music is going to stop and other nations, like China, whose workers held no such delusions of grandeur, will have the advantage. Their illusion is that the government is a dictatorship of proles, which makes people think it's high status to be a prole. Plus when your government is officially one big labor union, you can effectively ban unions from interfering with production.

Ironically, many elite universities are actually either free or nearly free, for lower-income students. The super-rich probably don't care. While we middle-class families don't qualify for need-based aid, and are on the hook to pay outrageous sums, largely to subsidize the aid for others.

I sure had to. Work study sure was nicer than the crap jobs I'd had but no cake walk: I graded a lot of homework and exams as well as helping a lot of rich kids ace their class.

[edit: I should admit that it's been 20 years, things may have shifted a lot]

I don't think you're necessarily drawing the right conclusion from what the GP said. It seems more likely to me that non-degree-holders aren't resentful about not having a degree, but are resentful that white collar work more or less requires a degree these days. It wasn't always that way; degree holders used to be a minority in white collar work.

Why has that shifted? Can we blame the university system and their "marketing" that has pushed a degree as the One True Way of leaving the working class? If so, that's an understandable reason to be anti-university.

> because they wish they had one themselves

I don't think the OP actually said this specifically. But the economy truly had, for a while, bifurcated in outcomes for people with degrees vs. everybody else. You shouldn't need a degree to live a decent life, but now we are in a timeline where you can put DoorDash on Klarna installments.

> Remember all those people who are resentful (of course that word) towards degree-holders because they wish they had one themselves?

I think the fair comparison isn't they have a degree and I don't, it's they have a better life/savings/house/car than me, which is enabled in general by getting a degree, which becomes the common contention point.

Spending massive amounts of money on sports is something state schools are very much into.

They will shutter academic departments but continue to pay a football coach more than the University president.

Not all schools do this but it is part of the conversation, sports spending has grown out of control along with everything else.

Recent events alone do not fully represent the affairs of the past 2+ decades. Community, state, ivy, all levels were gorging themselves on federal funding and endowments. I have no comment on the current admin, but blatantly inefficient use of funds is an understatement.

Its an implicit promise, and we can already see the pendulum swinging back in the form of lower enrollment as more people catch on.

Tuition is skyrocketing and wages are stagnant. I'm not making a hard claim about inversion of ROI, but I don't need to. What's the reason for college becoming so expensive?

No such thing as a free lunch! Universities exist for the benefit of society, not the other way around.

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Because torturing people is illegal and contrary to our fundamental values, while deporting illegal immigrants is a very popular and sensible policy that is uncontroversial everywhere except the United States of Exceptionalism.

If you are shocked you might consider getting out of your bubble. A recent poll shows Americans support Trump’s deportation program 58-42: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/opinion-poll-trump-economy-tari...

Meanwhile, 68% support the Supreme Court’s ban on Harvard’s affirmative action admissions policies: https://thehill.com/homenews/education/4411246-majority-supp...

Universities, as institutions, were actively working against the public on both of these issues, from legal clinics trying to block deportations to extensive programs of racial preferences. It’s not surprising many people don’t want the taxpayer to subsidize that.

Yes you are right. They shouldn't be researching how to racially discriminate at all. They should be focused exclusively on researching effective mass deportation instead of DEI.

Resentful of what? Directed at whom? There are lots of options that cost less and many are shorter than four years.

Why do they want meritocracy? The companies I've seen up close want "certified Smart Kid", in which case nearly any degree will do; "pre-trained worker", in which case they require a degree in a particular field; or "someone well-connected", in which case they want someone from a limited set of schools.

(Companies do subsidize that limited set of schools, and pretty heavily, but it probably has more to do with social connections than economic merit.)

The system might break down to the point that what you're suggesting makes sense. On the other hand, "Indebted Worker" (from any of the three types above) allows companies a lot of power over their employees, so it might not.

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-coddling-of-the-am...

A lot of these examples have been pretty thoroughly debunked as either non-existent, or about something other than the professors expressing "conservative views".

This one is, I assume intentionally, anonymized and so we can't actually verify that it happened or what the circumstances around it were. But I'll call out one of the most common "views" I've heard on college campuses from professors that got in trouble for something was that "professors should be allowed to sleep with their students." So if professors are taking heat for thinking that they should be able to take advantage of barely legal kids... I don't really care.

If there are legitimate examples of professors just expressing that they have conservative beliefs, then that is suspicious because school administrators and alumni tend to lean pretty conservative themselves, and often make the final decisions on such issues after a frustrating amount of investigation.

I probably have a skewed sample, but in my observations those with the best reasoning skills tended to have a mix of views that would be labelled "left" and "right". The better the reasoning skills the less likely they were to just agree with things like "trans women are women" or "capitalism is the best economic system" and the more likely they were to dissect the statement and terms.

Hum, kinda. Trump has tainted a lot of concepts by associating with them, and those should fall outside of our culture as soon as he loses power.

But there's an entire other set of equivalently bad-faith exclusionary and authoritarian ones that presented as in opposition of them. Those weren't actually very powerful before, but may get empowered depending on how things go.

Not true, at least on social issues, which is what the universities are getting burned for. Policy positions that were mainstream in 2000 are now painted as far-right.

Honestly man since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the left in the US threw their whole weight into pushing the Overton window on identity politics/intersectionality to the point that "real" old time leftists and communists (like my father) were treated like some sort of conservatives, lol. They went way past the sustainable point.

When the politics get crazy enough it bleeds into everything, which is why it's now acceptable to discuss here.

I mean, at a minimum, they think they're helping students. Nobody would vote for a politician who just makes things worse, that doesn't make sense.

In this case, they're trying to make universities more fair and to reduce government waste in universities by removing DEI programs. There's lots of logic to that.

> They are nit trying to make it cheaper and they are not trying to make it more accessible

Should they be doing these things?

Maybe I've read too much Caplan, but credential inflation seems to be wasting the new generation's best years.

In what way does an intellectual race to the bottom help students? If students want to learn on the cheap they can use the internet.

Students want to feel like their time spent studying is worth it, not a weird blend of trivia, online classes you finish in a week or useless skills that you spend months practicing and lose 6 months after the class.

Millions of people could be working productive manufacturing jobs, instead they are doing effectively nothing all because of a disproven belief from 100 years ago that if you study enough you will increase your innate intelligence.

It's not meant as an analogy for this case, so don't worry about it too much. My only point in bringing it up is an example of evidence for prior governments being more than willing to use funding as a lever to influence the policy of institutions they are not directly responsible for. I don't believe it was to be 1:1 to make that point, as indeed it is not.