Small Colleges closing might seem like a problem when large colleges probably need to close, but maybe some will. Last week, I spent a few minutes on an episode of the morning update about a rural Vermont College shuttering its operation. Declining student enrollment was clearly a result of a shift toward trade schools and real jobs, dirty jobs that have a secure future, can’t be replaced by AI, and that pay very well.
Morning Updates are not long enough to go deep on particulars, nor is that their purpose. An observation, some snark or commentary (often both), a few links to resources, and boom. One of the resources I should have included was this.
According to The Washington Times, “More than 90% of lifeguards, bartenders, cashiers and postal workers have college degrees, according to a report that finds too many graduates chasing too few jobs that require their advanced level of education.”
The old joke was what do you say to an art major. The answer was, “Can I get fries with that?” My personal wack at that was to make fun of social justice studies degrees. I made one up that could have actually been a credentials program. Left-Handed Albino Lesbian Studies. A certificate that could get you a low-wage-paying job as a greeter at Walmart if you weren’t so hostile to people in general or Walmart. But it encapsulates the scam private and public universities had perpetrated with the aid and comfort of the Federal Government.
Democrats, under Obama, took over the student loan programs for higher learning, not because there was a right to higher education but so they could launder money to progressive universities, leverage the relationship to control curriculums from DC, and launder minds into paper-pushing desk jobs at state where they overpaid angry single women (See; Karens, AWFLs, etc.) to agitate for Left-Wing policy from the only good paying job they might find with such a degree.
Every program Democrats create, defend, or claim is some sort of right, or just moves wealth, is to create Democrat voters. Welfare and EBT were never funded from the left to help needy people until they found a job and could fend for themselves. They are vote-buying schemes. Growing the government has one purpose. More Democrat voters.
Democrats loosen standards for EBT and other poverty benefits as a get-out-the-vote scheme, and so too was their pirating of the student loan system and the laundering of money to crank out millions of social justice morons, a small percentage of whom can find work at a woke public school, a woke corporation, or in some level of sympathetic government.
Big Businesses may have felt some relief when Trump gave them permission to jettison entire departments of assholes working under the umbrella of DEI to appease the Biden Administration, but AI and the investors would have done that and will if they haven’t been let go already. Them, and an increasing range of occupations that exist as non-productive overhead.
Sure, you need some people to manage what AI produces, and if you don’t want Google to ding you for relying on AI to write all the online stuff, you need people who can do that, but the University System can be as slow as the government at adapting to dramatic changes in the environment.
All that online course learning you’ve been pushing to cover the cost of declining on-campus enrollment is easier than ever to access by Large Language Models and chatbots.
“The analysis found that college graduates fill 68% to 95% of service jobs paying $29,000 to $40,000 a year,” adds the Times. “Those roles require, at best, a high school education and no prior experience. That includes more than 9 in 10 telemarketers, shampooers, movie projectionists, restaurant hostesses, physical therapist aides, and amusement park attendants.”
The world needs all of those things, and none of them can be replaced by AI. And while technology may find ways to leverage productivity to reduce the number of people needed for some the really smart people went and created a thing that could give anyone with a few bucks in their pocket and the time and interest access to everything they know and everything everyone else knows, in a framework that can customize output to the end user.
Put more simply, who needs to pay for a university education when I can work a trade and expand my mind on my own time for a fraction of the cost, without all the angry liberal women, woke professors, and social justice bullshit.
Thanks to AI, home education from K-thru- anything could be at stake in that cultural vampire’s heart. Not the end of it. There are ample woke podcasts and web platforms to groom people to axe-grind for any cause, but given the lack of ROI, why would anyone, short of a complete inability to embrace real progress in learning, waste all that money for so little return?
We’re not there yet. Men are already migrating away to trades to escape all the pitfalls of campus life, from liberal women to student debt to a no-income future hellhole. Even law and medicine are likely to see enrollment decline as AI has proven to be just what the patient ordered. Technology can and will replace a lot of administrative and research positions in healthcare and the industry at large. Insurance companies are already moving toward AI chat to manage online claims and more.
Plenty of schools will continue to survive and maybe even thrive. Scholarships will draw talent but not revenue, and it is true that there are plenty of things we still need colleges for, but if the White Tower thinks it can keep bilking kids or their parents for useless degrees, which seems unlikely.
Even dopey woke kids will begin to realize they need to study something that AI can’t replace. And while dopey woke legislators won’t want to use AI to put a yuge dent in their democrat voter recruitment, shedding staff at local, county, state, and federal offices is inevitable. Taxpayers will demand it or should. That’s municipal and school district staff. Remote workers can probably expect significant attrition.
It’s the industrial revolution in reverse. Instead of a rising demand for hands-on labor to optimize productivity, we’re going the other way. Software engineers will cease to exist as well. Instead of learning to code, Dems will have to shout, “Learn to swing a hammer, wire a house, hang drywall, or pour concrete.”
Colleges, to try and get back to the point, will have to specialize in a few elite functions and an increasing number of trades, more like Community Colleges, but with a lot more competition for quality and price.
We will lose more rural colleges, sure, unless they can find a way to deliver useful skills with best practices and better prices. If not, they become victims of creative destruction. But the money or the minds will not disappear; they will just show up elsewhere.
Larry the Liquidator Garfield said it well in the movie Other People’s Money. New technology. Obsolescence. We’re dead, alright, we’re just not broke. And do you know the surest way to go broke? Keep getting an increasing share of a declining market.
