"Are We Seeing the Beginning of the End of College as We Know It?": A Follow-Up

Some time ago I speculated about the "end of college as we know it."

What I had in mind was the way that pursuit of a degree--and especially adherence to the "Cult of the Good School"--had become crushing relative to the return to be hoped for from it (to the point that the use of the word "bubble" has some justification). This seems all the more the case for the evidences that young people have become more skeptical about the economic value of a college degree--in part because of the disappointing experience of their elders in an economy ever more remote from the post-war boom and its hazy notions of generalized "middle classness," premised on the piece of paper you get on graduation being a ticket exchangeable for the life of an "organization man" (and the encouragement of "everyone" to go to college by centrist "liberals" more comfortable with preaching individualistic aspirationalism to being something other than working class than doing things that actually help out the working class--as seen in the matter of who pays the bill).

In recent the months "the conversation" has seen two significant, interrelated alterations. One is that, while we have not seen progress in the performance of artificial intelligence in tasks involving "perception and manipulation" such as would suggest an imminent revolution in the automation of manual tasks, progress in "Large Language Models" has called into question the livelihoods of the "knowledge workers" that college trains people to become. (Indeed, one thoughtful study of GPT-4 by a team of Microsoft scientists contended that "general artificial intelligence," in however primitive and incomplete a form, may have already arrived.) The other is a bit of cooling off of the chatter about there not being enough STEM graduates as instead commentators wring their hands over a shortage of personnel in the "skilled trades"--as the chatbots put "the coders" out of work, but still leave us needing electricians.

One can only wonder if those assumptions will prove any more enduring than those which preceded them--if the sense of imminent massive job displacement among knowledge workers will not prove to be hype, if the claims of a skilled trade worker shortage will not prove as flimsy and self-serving as the eternal claims of a STEM worker shortage. (Employers always say there is a shortage of workers--which is to say they always think wages are too high--and the media being what it is faithfully and uncritically reports their views, and no others, while much of the commentary has a nasty streak of intergenerational warfare about it, with grouchy old farts snarling that young people are too lazy or afraid of getting their hands dirty for "real work.")

Nevertheless, if there is any truth to all this--and even if there is not, but people act as if there is--there will be consequences for how we educate, credential, hire and work. However, we should remember that, contrary to the rush of the advocates of the powerful to insist that "There Is No Alternative" as they inflict pain on the powerless, facing those consequences there will be social choices--necessitating a critical attitude from the public toward those claqueurs who instead simply applaud.