We ask college to do a lot: an American university is supposed to train young adults for promising careers, enable them to actually begin those careers (these are not the same thing), fund basic research, and provide a nurturing social environment for four years. They should provide social mobility to students who aren’t wealthy… and help develop the workforce that the wealthy demand. Universities should be a place for learning, where students can explore the world around them by learning from experts who conduct deep research for research’s sake rather than market logic. But they also better be a good deal for students and states!

AI-generated writing is only the latest blow against a system whose contradictions threaten to tear it apart. Every writing assignment not done in class comes with the risk of getting the work of Claude instead of a student; nearly whole classes have apparently cheated on exams in some cases. How did things go so wrong? The moral character of Gen Z is not somehow inferior to the students of the past– in fact, the convictions and hopes my students show in the classroom every day have kept me teaching despite despair. I won’t even bother with the cynical view that everyone would cheat if they could get away with it– go read my book for a lengthy dismantling of that notion. Students today might be more stressed, or less prepared– we could talk about the lack of phonics or COVID– but I think these troubles only come together as they do because of the economic structure of the university. 

A four year college education at an in-state public research university reaches well into the six figures: at UConn, where I teach, 2026-27 costs are roughly $40,000 annually for CT residents. This is the least costly way to get the four-year residential degree experience– choosing a major, living in dorms or off-campus apartments, etc. Students at private universities face costs as much as double that. Thanks to a convoluted system of grants and loans, most families do not pay full price, but the costs are still significant.

Do students and parents pay these prices because they are excited about learning? …sort of! America is a wealthy country. Plenty of people can afford new automobiles– the Ford F-Series truck sold nearly a million (new) units last year, and the price of a new one ranges from full cost at an institution like UConn to full cost at an expensive private university. I learned recently with horror that some parents apparently pay double what I make per course to get their kids coaches for Greek life rushing. Plenty of parents believe in education and have enough money to spend on education for its own sake, at least in part, rather than just job training. And once their children are here, many of them believe they are here to learn, and follow their curiosity.

But the economic calculus constantly tells them not to. Six figures is a big price tag for something with intangible returns. Education is invaluable– literally. It’s the degree whose value can be quantified and measured. Employers claim they value the critical thinking skills students learn in the process of getting a well-rounded education. The actual job market experience suggests otherwise.

In the hellscape of online applications, where a resume may have to pass through several AI gates just to meet human eyeballs, recruiters barely care about students as people at all, let alone as well-rounded learners. Some students get jobs through connections like internships and networking that bypass this adversarial experience. Recruiters and employers here might like a good anecdote about how learning about Themistocles in class inspired them, but it’s not going to be what gets you the job. And students seeking employment in sectors that currently have high labor demand, like nursing, know that their employers cannot really care– in an economic sense– about the rest of their education. 

There are other experiences, of course, but the point here is that the job market is a place where abstraction and inspiration go to die. The bachelor’s degree serves a sorting function: the credential is essential for employment in many industries, while the benefits of education are easy to overlook and hard to quantify.

All of this means that economically speaking, faculty are forced to act more like toolbooth functionaries than teachers. Ultimately, I am coercing students into learning about the Bronze Age Collapse or 1750s Whig politics because the university apparatus grants me the power to check a box necessary for a credential— a credential that students need to live the lives they want to. Professors have a much better success rate getting through to our captive audiences than, say, those evangelical influencers going around preaching on planes, but they are still to an extent a captive audience. And unlike in K12— I think kids should have to go to school!— college students pay for school as a market transaction, not a public good.

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Things do not have to be so bleak. Remarkably, students choose to engage anyway. They put in real effort on difficult subjects, to think deeply about the world, well beyond what either a good grade, or even the passing one that will be more than enough for them in practical terms, demands. This is only possible because of the good will and belief of faculty, parents, students, certain legislators, some donors and administrators– and it happens in spite of the economic structure of the university. We can reach beyond the confines of narrow transactionalism, but we cannot transcend it so long as the university is structured as it is.

Fortunately there is even an economic rationale for doing so. Education, even and especially liberal arts education, has obvious economic value– we just can’t individually measure it. That means that right now, students are asked to pay hard and calculable currency for soft skills whose benefits are never particularly calculable. I took a great history class with a friend who now works in software. I would insist that courses like this make every engaged student a little bit better at everything… and I would not even consider trying to calculate how much of my classmate’s success can be causally linked to reading Margaret Spufford’s early modern agricultural social history Contrasting Communities. But the answer is probably a little! 

The filmmaker Christopher Nolan originally failed to get into film school, and instead ended up an English major at University College London. There he got his start editing in a theater basement with the UCL film society, and met Emma Thomas, his future producer (and wife). The two just made a billion-dollar movie about a millennia-old poem. UCL itself only exists because of idealistic education reformers in the 1820s, who– with various faults of course– believed in expanding education. It is as impossible to deny the power of an exploratory educational world as it is to quantify the benefits of any particular exploration. 

A narrow and transactional focus on job training thus means underinvesting in the future. In machine-learning algorithms, as Maximilian Kasy explains in his The Means of Prediction (which I should have a review of out in the near-ish future), there’s a trade-off between an algorithm “exploiting,” or making use of, already-integrated information to produce a good decision, and “exploring” unknown information and possibilities to produce a better one. Higher education is one of the only places in our economy where exploring takes priority. A majority of Americans believe a college degree isn’t worth it– I think they’re wrong, but the fact that we treat a degree as a purchase is itself a problem. Universities are at once too expensive (for students) and too cheap (to faculty, but also to the broader economy).

A better higher ed system needs not only more money, but more freedom from market logic. The customer is always right, but the customer cannot always be right if they are supposed to be learning something. Selling a degree as a good deal can mean not only abandoning a broader vision of education, but failure on its own terms: there’s no guarantee the job they are training for now will be present in four years, as students who made the once-safe choice to major in computer science can attest to.

Above all, markets run on scarcity, and education should not be scarce. This is roughly the same problem I have with intellectual property– why as an author would I want a system where I profit only by keeping the book from readers? (But since that is currently the only way I can, please buy my book.) The millions of students who can’t afford to pay the educational toll should have access to– and be encouraged to take advantage of– a broad education alongside whatever training, from vocational degrees to a trade apprenticeship, they might wish to pursue.

Colleges and universities should be free at the point of use for students. Importantly the money for this cannot come primarily from state appropriations, because states cannot debt spend the way the federal government can. That doesn’t mean we need traditional federal budgeting either– Money on the Left has done some theorizing here on alternatives. There will always be real tradeoffs at work in education as anywhere else, and “free” college would come with its own challenges– from Massachusetts trying to cram a B.A. into three years as a cost-cutting measure to the greater risks of federal meddling in education itself. But we are already dealing with austerity and a repressive federal government anyway. 

I think the public believes in universities more than right-wing legislators or NYT/Atlantic journalists do. I believe in our ability to do better as a university community as part of a broader public. I trust the dental hygienist who expressed shock at university austerity. I trust the mechanic who asked me last week how I’m dealing with AI cheating. I don’t know what political or economic changes we will have to make to not just save higher education as it was, but recreate it to become what it can be. But we can do it. 

The modern university is a jury-rigged contraption of medieval institutional norms, legislative initiatives for Job Creation™, high-modernist optimism and early modern humanism held together with spit and glue. That structure has always been compromised, and with decades of adjunctification, state austerity, federal repression, and an economy that continues to optimize away opportunities for exploration, it might be doomed now. But we turned a university system once meant to train clergy and later farmers and teachers into a global community of knowledge. We can reinvent the university again, and we have to.