Naturally, you have noticed that I am offering what amounts to an alternative to the typical four-year undergraduate education today, what I’ve called the “Liberal Arts Program in Economics and History.” I think it is a little shocking for most people to even conceive that a single person could replace, and be superior to, the entirety of the typical university today. What about a football team? Realistically, about 90% of people will dismiss the idea from the start. They have simply decided that it is not their role to deviate from the herd. Of those remaining, 80% will be interested in the idea, but won’t do anything. They will agree — with enthusiasm! — that college today doesn’t amount to much more than being financially raped by a gang of administrative goons for their own profit, so that their children can be brainwashed into “progressive” dogma while wallowing in a sewer of debauchery; the old-fashioned term for all the things their parents told them not to do. But, they sign up for it anyway. So, I am ultimately talking about the 2% of people (potential students and their parents), who look at what is available today, and decide that they would rather risk potential disappointment, than experience near-certain disappointment at the steadily-deteriorating and now-collapsing institutions extant today.
Plus, in more practical terms, this is one of the few places to formally study the Classical economic tradition today, and perhaps the only one that incorporates the most contemporary and sophisticated expression, finally embracing the entirety of economic complexity beyond the “prices, interest, money” box that tended to limit, and ultimately distort, the mid-century Classicalists.
And, it is a lot cheaper — a quarter the price of other private institutions, and that without any subsidy or endowment.
I admit that it is a little late in the admissions cycle to be starting such a thing. But, I have an intuitive confidence that the right people will show up somehow.
Most people don’t really care about learning very much — especially learning that is not immediately practical. There is real effort involved. They learn certain vocational skills, simply because they have to; this can range from operating a circular saw safely to being able to sell a sub-mediocre IPO to an institutional investor. Or, it could just be something they are interested in, like restoring a vintage motorcycle. One reason for this is the schooling system itself, in which “learning” is mostly a means to some other end: approval of one’s superiors, a grade, a degree, advancement to some other level leading ultimately perhaps to a career. Like any rational person, having (correctly) defined the situation in that manner, they want to do the least amount of learning necessary to get the maximum results. This generates a “hate of learning” attitude, which is common even among those with a long string of academic accomplishments. At the university level, this means the least amount of work (most amount of play), to get the various degrees and career connections that they aspire to. This is often accompanied by a certain cynicism; they don’t want to get too emotionally involved in the subject at hand, even if it is genuinely interesting. Real enthusiasm for a subject might lead to some sort of problematic situation, like disagreeing with a teacher, or being more concerned with content and understanding than GPA. It distracts from the goal. Are you going to be the one to say: “I think that interpreting Leo Tolstoy or George Washington along gender/race lines is an unproductive waste of time”? Better not be that person. It might jeopardize your educational investment.
For these people, it would make no sense to do something that seems to involve a lot more work and a lot more learning, and which doesn’t seem to produce the degrees and connections that are the sole reason (in their minds) that they take a break from playtime at all. More cost, less benefit.
Universities these days have more and more of a vocational focus, and for good reason. Math, science, engineering, computer science and other technical fields are essentially vocational training. For the most part, the university is pretty good at teaching these things, although still vastly overpriced. The person who goes through a course of technical training is, for the most part, competent in that field of knowledge. The social sciences and humanities have been so degraded, dumbed-down, hollowed-out, eroded by “progressive” indoctrination, that it hardly has any value at all — indeed, in many cases, it has negative value; you would be better off avoiding it altogether, than expose your mind, even cautiously, to that sort of pollution. I long thought that certain fields, like history, have been relatively immune from this deterioration, but people involved in those fields tell me that the rot has invaded there too.
In the end, our university system today really reflects the expansion that happened after WWII. It was a bit of a historical anomaly. I expect that “higher education” will, in general, be shrinking going forward, in favor of more overt forms of vocational training, perhaps undertaken at an earlier age (the old-fashioned apprenticeship typically begun around age 15), or training by employers themselves. The portion of the population that undertakes a real course of education in the “liberal arts” tradition — a more philosophical and literary realm that tends to be non-vocational — will be pretty small, perhaps under 10%. That is, probably, all that it should be. In the nineteenth century, for example, even the sons of wealthy families often did not have an education beyond their years at Eton and Harrow, but entered immediately into careers in the Navy or into some form of business. Universities were often for bookish sons ill-suited for more manly endeavor, and often led to a position in the clergy.
So, if most people are not attracted to this sort of thing, it is probably best that they are not; it reflects a sort of rugged practicality that characterizes civilizations in their prime. An overemphasis on higher education is, actually, a recognizable symptom of a nation in decline. In “The Fate of Empires” — still one of the most popular pages on this website — John Glubb reviewed the life cycle of over two dozen empires, and found that their decline was characterized by an “Age of Intellect”:
XVIII The Age of Intellect We have now, perhaps arbitrarily, divided the life-story of our great nation into four ages. The Age of the Pioneers (or the Outburst), the Age of Conquests, the Age of Commerce, and the Age of Affluence. The great wealth of the nation is no longer needed to supply the mere necessities, or even the luxuries of life. Ample funds are available also for the pursuit of knowledge. The merchant princes of the Age of Commerce seek fame and praise, not only by endowing works of art or patronising music and literature. They also found and endow colleges and universities. It is remarkable with what regularity this phase follows on that of wealth, in empire after empire, divided by many centuries. In the eleventh century, the former Arab Empire, then in complete political decline, was ruled by the Seljuk sultan, Malik Shah. The Arabs, no longer soldiers, were still the intellectual leaders of the world. During the reign of Malik Shah, the building of universities and colleges became a passion. Whereas a small number of universities in the great cities had sufficed the years of Arab glory, now a university sprang up in every town. In our own lifetime, we have witnessed the same phenomenon in the U.S.A. and Britain. When these nations were at the height of their glory, Harvard, Yale, Oxford and Cambridge seemed to meet their needs. Now almost every city has its university. The ambition of the young, once engaged in the pursuit of adventure and military glory, and then in the desire for the accumulation of wealth, now turns to the acquisition of academic honours. It is useful here to take note that almost all the pursuits followed with such passion throughout the ages were in themselves good. The manly cult of hardihood, frankness and truthfulness, which characterised the Age of Conquests, produced many really splendid heroes. The opening up of natural resources, and the peaceful accumulation of wealth, which marked the age of commercialism, appeared to introduce new triumphs in civilisation, in culture and in the arts. In the same way, the vast expansion of the field of knowledge achieved by the Age of Intellect seemed to mark a new high-water mark of human progress. We cannot say that any of these changes were ‘good’ or ‘bad’.
We are, if anything, in the waning light of our “Age of Intellect”; no longer expanding the universities, or serious about study (except for certain technological fields).
By now, most of the audience has left the room. Those that are left are probably those that really are interested in education in general, and Economics and History in particular, and see that they aren’t really going to find what they want in a university today.
If you are going to spend four years at a “college” anyway, why not make it as productive, satisfying, valuable, and meaningful as possible? What if, twenty years from now, you didn’t conclude (as most honest adults do today) that college “is mostly a waste of time,” but instead, were able to say with honesty: “It was the most valuable and rewarding time of my life”? What would you do to achieve that goal? And if you did do that, wouldn’t other people also find it valuable? If, in an unlikely burst of honesty, you could say to a potential employer: “I worked hard and learned an enormous amount,” rather than, “I jumped obediently through the requisite hoops to get my vocational union card, and also had a good time,” wouldn’t they be impressed? They went to college too, you know.
