Forget the Ivies. The Economy Depends on the Land Grants
There's an economic crisis in higher education, and it has nothing to do with Claudine Gay or Bill Ackman.
Michigan State University, located in East Lansing, MI (not Ann Arbor).
Are you sick of hearing about elite private universities? Yes, I am too. But because of their serial transgressions in the culture wars (well, to be honest, transgressions that go beyond culture war skirmishes) all of higher education is receiving increased skepticism from the general public. This skepticism is misguided and harmful. Misguided because these elite institutions are much less important to the U.S. economy than media coverage would suggest, and harmful because the U.S system of higher education remains a key ingredient for our long-term prosperity.
I choose as my metrics the total number of degrees awarded and the number of engineers being trained. This is not to denigrate degrees in the humanities, the social sciences, or the hard sciences; but if you’re going to choose a field of study that correlates with economic growth, engineering is the gold standard. With that in mind, here’s a comparison of seven land-grant universities (public universities funded in part by federal legislation in the 19th century) to seven elite counterparts:
I pulled these data on January 6 from the Department of Education’s Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS). The land-grant universities graduate five times as many students as the elite universities, and enroll ten times as many undergraduates in engineering. The elite institutions have many engineering graduate students, but the public institutions have many more.
The U.S. economy obviously needs the cutting-edge research produced by all universities, most especially the elite universities (notwithstanding their bloated overhead). But the first and most important task required of any institution of higher education is the preparation of talent. Unfortunately, public institutions that excel at that have been subjected to long-running financial stress, including reduced public support from state legislatures. Having elite institutions muddy the reputation of higher education doesn’t help.
This financial distress for public universities is worthy of scrutiny (public institutions have their own less celebrated dysfunctions). Our leaders and our media should expend more effort addressing these difficulties and less spotlighting the travails of the Ivy league and their kind.
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Over 70% of the elite college graduates go to wall street to promote the make a buck skim off the top do nothing fake money gov printing industry . After all what's an MBA for ,,, forget engineering make real productive products and services . Modify those a I programs and make big bucks , who needs a college education ,,, a gamer would do better ,,,both in war " robots " and peace ..
Forget silicon chips it's cubit time , ( IBM -1000 )
Legislators in Florida are messing with our state universities, wanting to undo DEI, and eliminate initiatives and programs they don't like as too "woke," generally providing "solutions" to problems that don't exist. Here's an anecdote shared by a close friend who owned his own engineering company with contracts all over the world. When his company was growing and hiring, he told me he got lots of applications from all over the country. He said he put them into two stacks: University of Central Florida engineering graduates and all other engineering graduates. He preferred hiring UCF engineering grads; claimed they were the best prepared and most likely to experience success in an industry that requires working with different cultures and people. For students that don't go to "elite" schools, state universities are the best bargain around and provide outstanding educations. And, students can wind up with a 4 year degree by starting in a community college, which is much less expensive. As a person with an undergraduate degree from the University of Texas and 2 post graduate degrees from the University of Central Florida, I agree we should place emphasis on supporting these institutions and stay out of their way.