Musk on Universities

McGill Campus

Elon Musk has recently spoken against the model of the university. He himself holds two bachelor’s degrees, but he points out the Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Larry Ellison are all dropouts.

Universities, Musk says, are geared to the average brain. Ever since the postwar years, it has been the stated ideal that everyone ought to have the opportunity to attend university. Governments promoted this idea: they were afraid of an unemployment crisis with all the soldiers returning from the war, and civil unrest as a result; for this had happened in the years after the First World War. So they passed the GI Bill—university for the masses. And the cachet of the college man was pushed relentlessly by popular culture through the 1950s.

This meant that ordinary folks without a great passion for scholarship started attending universities.

The universities could not fail more than a limited percentage of students. After all, they had paid their tuition. If most of your students fail, you go out of business. So the schools had to adjust the curriculum and the standards so that the average intellect could get through, without too much effort.

Among other things, this created teenagers starting in the 1950s. That is, a distinct culture of young people alienated from the mainstream culture. This was an inevitable result of holding them back from joining the adult world, starting a family, and assuming social responsibilities. They were all dressed up, with nowhere to go. By contrast, George Washington had a profession and was earning his living as a surveyor at age 16.

For the most intelligent, high school would already have been mind-numbingly boring: forced to do time-consuming yet meaningless dog work all day instead of reading great novels, designing software, or building a business. Now university had gone the same way, was just a continuation of high school, and they were kept in that same intellectual straightjacket for an additional four years or more.

Now that everyone was going to college, entry requirements for almost any job went up. After all, every job wanted to look like a “profession,” and therefore command higher wages.  Now you needed a four-year degree, with all the time and money that cost, to get a job as, say, a newspaper reporter or a graphic designer. Or two degrees to be a public school teacher or librarian.

This drove the very intelligent out of fields that might in the past have been their escape hatch. As a result of that, the objective quality of journalism, graphic design, teaching, and librarianship, went down.

Meantime, university tuition fees have been going up at exponential rates, especially in the US, as they spend more money on administration and less on teaching. This looks suicidal, as if they know in their hearts they are doomed, and want to soak up as much cash as they can before the gravy train ends.

The Internet and now AI should happily lance that bubble. As a practical matter, nobody needs to go to university anymore. All the information you need is on your smartphone, available when you need it. Were it not for international students, the North American colleges would already be dead. They remain relevant as a cultural experience for Asian students; now more or less a branch of the tourism industry.

I for one deeply mourn the passing of Harvard, Yale, Oxford, Cambridge, McGill, Queen’s, Yonsei, the Sorbonne, and the like. They were once places of dreams—of my own dreams. But that dream really died a long time ago.