Catastrophic normal accidents will happen with increasing regularity

Wednesday, September 2nd, 2026

In the first decades of the twentieth century, Harold Robertson explains, the idea that individuals should be systematically evaluated and selected based on their ability rather than wealth, class, or political connections, led to significant changes in selection techniques at all levels of American society:

The Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) revolutionized college admissions by allowing elite universities to find and recruit talented students from beyond the boarding schools of New England. Following the adoption of the SAT, aptitude tests such as Wonderlic (1936), Graduate Record Examination (1936), Army General Classification Test (1941), and Law School Admission Test (1948) swept the United States. Spurred on by the demands of two world wars, this system of institutional management electrified the Tennessee Valley, created the first atom bomb, invented the transistor, and put a man on the moon.

By the 1960s, the systematic selection for competence came into direct conflict with the political imperatives of the civil rights movement. During the period from 1961 to 1972, a series of Supreme Court rulings, executive orders, and laws—most critically, the Civil Rights Act of 1964—put meritocracy and the new political imperative of protected-group diversity on a collision course. Administrative law judges have accepted statistically observable disparities in outcomes between groups as prima facie evidence of illegal discrimination. The result has been clear: any time meritocracy and diversity come into direct conflict, diversity must take priority.

The resulting norms have steadily eroded institutional competency, causing America’s complex systems to fail with increasing regularity. In the language of a systems theorist, by decreasing the competency of the actors within the system, formerly stable systems have begun to experience normal accidents at a rate that is faster than the system can adapt. The prognosis is harsh but clear: either selection for competence will return or America will experience devolution to more primitive forms of civilization and loss of geopolitical power.

[…]

The Air Traffic Control (ATC) system used in the U.S. relies on an intricate dance of visual or radar observation, transponders, and radio communication, all with the incredible challenge of keeping thousands of simultaneously moving planes from ever crashing into each other. Since air controlling is one of the only jobs that pays more than $100,000 per year and does not require a college diploma, it has been a popular career choice for individuals without a degree who nonetheless have an exceptionally good memory, attention span, visuospatial awareness, and logical skills. The Air Traffic Selection and Training (AT-SAT) Exam, a standardized test of those critical skills, was historically the primary barrier to entry for air controllers. As a consequence of the AT-SAT, as well as a preference for veterans with former air controller experience, 83 percent of air controllers in the U.S. were white men as of 2014.

That year, the FAA added a Biographical Questionnaire (BQ) to the screening process to tilt the applicant pool toward diverse candidates. Facing pushback in the courts from well-qualified candidates who were screened out, the FAA quietly backed away from the BQ and adopted a new exam, the Air Traffic Skills Assessment (ATSA). While the ATSA includes some questions similar to those of the BQ, it restored the test’s focus on core air traffic skills. The importance of highly-skilled air controllers was made clear in the most deadly air disaster in history, the 1977 Tenerife incident. Two planes, one taking off and one taxiing, collided on the runway due to confusion between the captain of KLM 4805 and the Tenerife ATC. The crash, which killed 583 people, resulted in sweeping changes in aviation safety culture.

Recently, the tremendous U.S. record for air safety established since the 1970s has been fraying at the edges. The first three months of 2023 saw nine near-miss incidents at U.S. airports, one with two planes coming within 100 feet of colliding. This terrifying uptick from years prior resulted in the FAA and NTSB convening safety summits in March and May, respectively. Whether they dared to discuss root causes seems unlikely.

Given the sheer size of the U.S. military in both manpower and budget dollars, it should not come as a surprise that the diversity push has also affected the readiness of this institution. Following three completely avoidable collisions of U.S. Navy warships in 2017 and a fire in 2020 that resulted in the scuttling of USS Bonhomme Richard, a $750 million amphibious assault craft, two retired marines conducted off-the-record interviews with 77 current and retired Navy officers. One recurring theme was the prioritization of diversity training over ship handling and warfighting preparedness. Many of them openly admit that, given current issues, the U.S. would likely lose an open naval engagement with China. Instead of taking the criticism to heart, the Navy commissioned “Task Force One Navy,” which recommended deemphasizing or eliminating meritocratic tests like the Officer Aptitude Rating to boost diversity. Absent an existential challenge, U.S. military preparedness is likely to continue to degrade.

[…]

The U.S. has embraced a novel question: what happens when the men who built the complex systems our society relies on cease contributing and are replaced by people who were chosen for reasons other than competency?

The answer is clear: catastrophic normal accidents will happen with increasing regularity. While each failure is officially seen as a separate issue to be fixed with small patches, the reality is that the whole system is seeing failures at an accelerating rate, which will lead in turn to the failure of other systems. In the case of the Camp Fire that killed 85 people, PG&E fired its CEO, filed Chapter 11, and restructured. The system’s response has been to turn off the electricity and raise wildfire insurance premiums. This has resulted in very little reflection.

[…]

The path of least resistance will be the devolution of complex systems and the reduction in the quality of life that entails. For the typical resident in a second-tier city in Mexico, Brazil, or South Africa, power outages are not uncommon, tap water is probably not safe to drink, and hospital-associated infections are common and often fatal. Absent a step change in the quality of American governance and a renewed culture of excellence, they prefigure the country’s future.

Posted in Education, Policy | 3 Comments »

They gathered their neighbors, formed organizations, accepted responsibility, and built institutions together

Monday, August 31st, 2026

People often describe homeschooling as opting out, Robert Pondiscio notes, but he suggested something different to a group of “graduating” homeschoolers:

Your parents may have exited one educational institution. But they didn’t stop there. For just a moment, they were consumers. They looked at the educational marketplace and concluded, “This school is not the right place for our child.” Then something remarkable happened. They stopped consuming. They became producers. They didn’t merely purchase an education. They built one.

The most diligent homeschooling families are performing a profoundly American act of strengthening civil society:

Tocqueville famously observed that Americans possessed a remarkable habit of association. Faced with problems, they didn’t simply petition the state. They gathered their neighbors, formed organizations, accepted responsibility, and built institutions together.

I wanted the graduates to leave with something more than pride in their accomplishment. I wanted them to understand what their parents had really given them. An education, yes, but also a brilliant example of citizenship. Their parents saw something they believed needed doing and, instead of waiting for someone else to do it, accepted the responsibility themselves. Whether the graduates someday homeschool their own children is beside the point. What I hoped they would inherit was that instinct: When something important isn’t being done well enough, don’t complain or blame others. Build.

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They evaluated Texas’s efforts not on predictable culture-war grounds, but on their educational merits

Saturday, August 22nd, 2026

Within the span of 10 days, Robert Pondiscio notes, opinion pieces in The Atlantic and The New York Times did something remarkable that would have been hard to imagine even a few months ago:

They evaluated Texas’s efforts not on predictable culture-war grounds, but on their educational merits.

In his Times op-ed, veteran journalist James Traub writes that Texas is right to insist that students encounter a common body of important texts, including the Bible. Invoking E.D. Hirsch, Jr.’s work on cultural literacy, he notes that we become good readers “by acquiring the vocabulary, grammatical knowledge and stock of information that allow us to make sense of a text.” He praises Texas for moving away from a skills-based, content-neutral approach to reading instruction.

Similarly, poet and literary critic Adam Kirsch’s essay for The Atlantic argues that “for a high school graduate not to know about the parting of the Red Sea or the Sermon on the Mount is a disadvantage, for the same reason that not knowing about the Puritans or the Civil War is a disadvantage: It leaves them ill-equipped to understand America’s past, and therefore its present and future.” He points out, for example, the value of the Psalms for understanding Lincoln’s speeches or the Book of Jonah for reading Moby-Dick.

[…]

When you’re no longer confident that schools are producing capable readers at all, old arguments about what children should read—and how they should be taught to read—begin to sound different. If you’re honest and fair, you become open to other ideas.

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The mass education of our public school system is a vast experiment on the effect of reducing all three of the above factors to minimal values

Tuesday, August 18th, 2026

Harold G. McCurdy explores The Childhood Pattern of Genius, writing in the 1950s:

In summary, the present survey of biographical information on a sample of twenty men of genius suggests that the typical developmental pattern includes as important aspects: (1) a high degree of attention focused upon the child by parents and other adults, expressed in intensive educational measures and, usually, abundant love; (2) isolation from other children, especially outside the family; and (3) a rich efflorescence of phantasy, as a reaction to the two preceding conditions. In stating these conclusions I by no means wish to imply that original endowment is an insignificant variable. On the contrary. Galton’s strong arguments on behalf of heredity appear to me to be well-founded; and in this particular sample the early promise of these very distinguished men cannot be dissociated from the unusual intellectual qualities evident in their parents and transmitted, one would suppose, genetically as well as socially to their offspring. It is upon a groundwork of inherited ability that I see the pattern operating. Whether the environmental phase of it summarized under (1) and (2) is actually causally important, and to what extent the environmental factors are related to the blossoming out of phantasy, are questions which could be examined experimentally, though obviously any thorough experiment would require both a great deal of money and a certain degree of audacity. It might be remarked that the mass education of our public school system is, in its way, a vast experiment on the effect of reducing all three of the above factors to minimal values, and should, accordingly, tend to suppress the occurrence of genius.

(I’ve mentioned this work before.)

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Homeschooling done well delivers six evidence-backed benefits

Friday, August 14th, 2026

The honest list of homeschool benefits — the ones supported by representative-sample research, not advocacy material — is shorter and more conditional than Internet listicles might suggest:

Homeschooling done well delivers six evidence-backed benefits: pace customization, stronger family relationships, escape from a measurably toxic peer environment (40% of U.S. high schoolers report persistent sadness, per the CDC’s 2023 YRBS), higher-quality cross-age friendships, higher life satisfaction in long-term homeschoolers (Cheng & Watson, 2025), and time for deep, interest-driven work. These homeschool benefits hold when families build intentional social structure. They weaken sharply without it.

[…]

In the 2024–25 school year, roughly 3.4 million American children — about 6.3% of K-12 — were homeschooled. That share has nearly doubled since 2019. Homeschooling is now growing at about 5.4% annually for 2024–25 — roughly three times the pre-pandemic rate of ~2% — per Johns Hopkins’ Homeschool Hub, which tracks the data state by state. Ten states hit their highest-ever enrollment in 2024–25 — exceeding even the pandemic peak. The federal numbers tell the same story from a different angle. The Department of Education’s 2023 National Household Education Survey reports the share of K-12 students homeschooled rising substantially between 2018–19 and 2022–23.

[…]

The stereotype is white, rural, religious, wealthy. The stereotype is wrong.

Start with the federal data. The NHES 2023 survey — the gold standard for this category, with 19,562 K-12 students sampled between January and August of 2023 — gives the cleanest picture available. Homeschooling has grown across nearly every demographic line. The portion of homeschoolers who are White dropped 4 percentage points from 1998 to 2023. About 41% of homeschool families are now non-white or Hispanic, with the fastest growth among Black and Latino families. The Mississippi State team writing in The Conversation in 2026 tracks the same shift.

The income picture is even more counterintuitive. NCES Condition of Education data shows households earning $25,000–$49,999 homeschool at higher rates (8.8%) than households earning more than $150,000 (5.5%). That’s not what most people imagine when they hear “homeschool family.”

What predicts whether a family continues to homeschool? The Mississippi State research, surveying parents who started during the pandemic and continued after schools reopened, found the strongest single predictor wasn’t income, education level, or political affiliation. It was flexibility of work arrangements — whether at least one parent had a schedule that could accommodate being home during the day. The shift to remote and hybrid work that the pandemic accelerated didn’t just keep homeschooling alive past 2022. It restructured the population that could plausibly do it.

[…]

40% of U.S. high school students experienced persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness in the past year. Among girls, the figure is 53%. The 2013 baseline was 30%. The 2023 number is up by a third in a decade, with no sign of inflection. One in five high schoolers seriously considered suicide. Nearly one in ten attempted it.

Then there is the peer environment. The CDC YRBS 2023 found 19% of high schoolers were bullied at school, up from 15% in 2021. The Pew Research analysis of cyberbullying data found 46% of teens reporting they’ve experienced cyberbullying.

[…]

A classroom of 25 students has to target the median learner. Move too fast, half the class is lost. Move too slow, half is bored. The structural pace is always wrong for most of the room.

[…]

Long-term homeschoolers (8–13 years of homeschooling) had the lowest depression and anxiety scores and the highest life satisfaction scores of any educational group studied.

[…]

Traditional schooling fragments attention by design. Forty-five-minute periods. Bells. Forced transitions between unrelated subjects. The structural assumption is that no academic activity should sustain longer than 45 minutes — an assumption that breaks the moment you watch a teenager who actually cares about something. A 14-year-old who has spent four hours reading a single novel, three hours coding a single feature, or a full afternoon working a single math problem to its bottom is doing something the school day structurally cannot let them do.

[…]

Peter Gray’s work at Boston College has tracked this for decades. His book Free to Learn and his survey with Gina Riley of 232 unschooling families (2013) find consistent patterns of deep, sustained, interest-driven work when kids are given the time. Daniel Greenberg’s longitudinal data from the Sudbury Valley School — a fully self-directed K-12 environment operating since 1968 — shows the same.

[…]

Self-Determination Theory, developed by Edward Deci and Richard Ryan, identifies three universal psychological needs that predict motivation and wellbeing: autonomy (feeling self-governed), competence (feeling capable), and relatedness (feeling connected). When all three are met, motivation rises. When any is systematically thwarted, both motivation and wellbeing fall. The 2020 Ryan and Deci review in Contemporary Educational Psychology is the canonical citation.

[…]

SDT is one of the most replicated frameworks in motivational psychology. Yang and colleagues’ 2022 systematic review covered 31 longitudinal studies and 20,804 participants and found autonomy support consistently predicts rising classroom engagement; autonomy thwarting consistently predicts disengagement. The mechanism is established. The application to homeschool is direct: environments that genuinely support autonomy produce different outcomes than environments that don’t.

[…]

In 2014, Homeschool Alumni Reaching Out (HARO) conducted the largest survey of homeschool alumni to date — 3,702 respondents, with data analysis support from the Coalition for Responsible Home Education. About 26% reported poor, very poor, or no socialization during their homeschool years. The quality of socialization predicted how prepared they felt for adult life.

The sample is self-selected. The alumni who answered the survey were the ones motivated to answer it, which skews toward people who have a story to tell. But the size of the sample is large enough that the figure can’t be dismissed as a few outliers. And it converges with the qualitative findings of Daniel Hamlin and Albert Cheng’s 2022 mixed-methods study in the Journal of School Choice, which interviewed 31 former homeschoolers and surveyed 140 more. Most reported their social needs were met. A meaningful subset described “culture shock” transitioning into adult environments.

The 25% are not random. They are concentrated in families that homeschooled in isolation — without co-ops, sports, mixed-age peer access, or structured community. The 75% who reported positive experiences are concentrated in families that built intentional social structure.

[…]

Pure unschooling — total absence of routine — underperforms. Pure replication of school at home underperforms. The middle path is real structure (a routine, deliverables, accountability, scheduled check-ins) with real freedom inside it. Strong homeschool families operate more like a deliberately scaffolded environment than like either a classroom or a free-for-all.

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Can you say…hero?

Thursday, August 6th, 2026

Tom Junod’s 1998 Esquire piece Can You Say…Hero? profiles Mr. Rogers:

He was barely more than a boy himself when he learned what he would be fighting for, and fighting against, for the rest of his life. He was in college. He was a music major at a small school in Florida and planning to go to seminary upon graduation. His name was Fred Rogers. He came home to Latrobe, Pennsylvania, once upon a time, and his parents, because they were wealthy, had bought something new for the corner room of their big redbrick house. It was a television. Fred turned it on, and as he says now, with plaintive distaste, “there were people throwing pies at one another.” He was the soft son of overprotective parents, but he believed, right then, that he was strong enough to enter into battle with that—that machine, that medium—and to wrestle with it until it yielded to him, until the ground touched by its blue shadow became hallowed and this thing called television came to be used “for the broadcasting of grace through the land.” It would not be easy, no—for in order to win such a battle, he would have to forbid himself the privilege of stopping, and whatever he did right he would have to repeat, as though he were already living in eternity. And so it was that the puppets he employed on The Children’s Corner would be the puppets he employed forty-four years later, and so it was that once he took off his jacket and his shoes…well, he was Mister Rogers for good. And even now, when he is producing only three weeks’ worth of new programs a year, he still winds up agonizing—agonizing—about whether to announce his theme as “Little and Big” or “Big and Little” and still makes only two edits per televised minute, because he doesn’t want his message to be determined by the cuts and splices in a piece of tape—to become, despite all his fierce coherence, “a message of fragmentation.”

He is losing, of course. The revolution he started—a half hour a day, five days a week—it wasn’t enough, it didn’t spread, and so, forced to fight his battles alone, Mister Rogers is losing, as we all are losing. He is losing to it, to our twenty-four-hour-a-day pie fight, to the dizzying cut and the disorienting edit, to the message of fragmentation, to the flicker and pulse and shudder and strobe, to the constant, hivey drone of the electroculture…and yet still he fights, deathly afraid that the medium he chose is consuming the very things he tried to protect: childhood and silence. Yes, at seventy years old and 143 pounds, Mister Rogers still fights, and indeed, early this year, when television handed him its highest honor, he responded by telling television—gently, of course—to just shut up for once, and television listened. He had already won his third Daytime Emmy, and now he went onstage to accept Emmy’s Lifetime Achievement Award, and there, in front of all the soap-opera stars and talk-show sinceratrons, in front of all the jutting man-tanned jaws and jutting saltwater bosoms, he made his small bow and said into the microphone, “All of us have special ones who have loved us into being. Would you just take, along with me, ten seconds to think of the people who have helped you become who you are….Ten seconds of silence.” And then he lifted his wrist, and looked at the audience, and looked at his watch, and said softly, “I’ll watch the time,” and there was, at first, a small whoop from the crowd, a giddy, strangled hiccup of laughter, as people realized that he wasn’t kidding, that Mister Rogers was not some convenient eunuch but rather a man, an authority figure who actually expected them to do what he asked…and so they did. One second, two seconds, three seconds…and now the jaws clenched, and the bosoms heaved, and the mascara ran, and the tears fell upon the beglittered gathering like rain leaking down a crystal chandelier, and Mister Rogers finally looked up from his watch and said, “May God be with you” to all his vanquished children.

Posted in Education, Media | 1 Comment »

Once they were no longer censored, they ceased to have a subject

Sunday, August 2nd, 2026

Fifteen summers ago, Ann Manov was spending 15 hours a week in a neurology lab, sorting fruit flies under a microscope, freezing them in liquid nitrogen, and pureeing their sliced-off heads, but the only thing that made her want to get out of bed in the morning was a class on the Russian short story that was taught by a nervous Russian woman:

I remember only a few things about that class, but among them is Venedikt Yerofeyev’s observation that much of Soviet literature collapsed remarkably quickly with the disappearance of censorship—the work of not just those who wrote in support of socialism, but of those who had opposed it too. Once they were no longer censored, they ceased to have a subject, a raison d’être.

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The Senses Taker would love social media

Tuesday, July 21st, 2026

Phantom Tollbooth by Norton JusterI haven’t read The Phantom Tollbooth since they had us read it in sixth grade. Like A Wrinkle in Time, it’s an elementary school teacher’s idea of science fiction.

I didn’t know the book’s origin:

Architect Norton Juster was living in his hometown of Brooklyn, after three years in the Navy. In June 1960, he gained a $5,000 grant from the Ford Foundation to write a children’s book about cities. Juster argued that the young baby boomers would soon have responsibility for the cities, and many lived in the suburbs and did not know them. In his proposal, he said he wanted “to stimulate and heighten perception — to help children notice and appreciate the visual world around them — to help excite them and shape their interest in an environment they will eventually reshape.” Beginning with great enthusiasm, he ground to a halt with too many notes and too little progress. He took a weekend break with friends at Fire Island, and came back determined to put aside the cities book and seek inspiration in another writing project.

[…]

Juster shared his house in Brooklyn Heights with cartoonist Jules Feiffer whose bedroom was immediately below, and who could hear him pacing in the night. Feiffer was surprised to learn that his friend’s insomnia was not caused by the cities book, but by a book about a boy. Juster showed Feiffer the draft to date and, unbidden, the artist began sketching illustrations. Feiffer knew Judy Sheftel, who put deals together in the publishing trade and was his future bride. Sheftel got Jason Epstein, an innovative editor at Random House with a deep appreciation for children’s literature, to agree to review the manuscript.

Inside the Box by David EpsteinDavid Epstein thinks about Oliver Burkeman‘s advice (in Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals) to “consolidate your caring” whenever he reads The Phantom Tollbooth to his son:

There is a character in the book, dressed like a census taker, called the Senses Taker. He eagerly helps people “find what they’re not looking for,” and in so doing diverts them from their priorities and wastes their limited time. The Senses Taker, I’m sure, would love social media.

Phantom Tollbooth Senses Taker

They made it into a movie, by the way:

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The median salary for an aviation technician was $79,140 in 2024

Friday, July 10th, 2026

Graduates in aviation maintenance from the Pittsburgh Institute of Aeronautics are in demand, NPR reports, due to a labor shortage:

After shifting their tassels and hugging their parents, they head to a nearby building for one last test.

“Every one of the 54 Maintenance students took their final test graduation day or the morning after,” says Derek Vrabel, the student services coordinator at PIA.

The test isn’t for a class grade. It’s to earn the Federal Aviation Administration’s Airframe and Powerplant (A&P) certification for mechanics to work on plane airframes and engines. The coveted credential offers a foothold in an industry eager for new hires: Even before putting on their cap and gown in late June, nearly half of the graduates had already locked in new jobs, while others were narrowing down their choices. Options range from small regional airlines to loftier aspirations.

“I do have a couple of interviews next week with a couple of contractors, and SpaceX in Texas,” says class salutatorian Jon Wojcik, from Buffalo, N.Y. “I’d be applying my airframe skills for that, for the assembly of Starship rockets.”

As for how the new graduates did on the series of oral, practical and written exams that make up the test, Vrabel says 47 of them succeeded on their first attempt. He expects the remaining seven to pass in the coming days.

[…]

“There’s a shortage for both pilots and mechanics,” Wojcik says. “All these people are retiring, I think the average age is 57, of mechanics.”

The commercial aviation industry will need to hire 123,000 aviation maintenance technicians in North America through 2044, according to a forecast in Boeing ‘s widely cited Pilot and Technician Outlook. Compare that to nearly 161,000 U.S. jobs in the field as of 2024, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Many of the awaiting jobs promise good wages. The median salary for an aviation technician was $79,140 in 2024, according to federal data. That’s $30,000 above the median wages for all jobs — quite a leap for a program that takes less than two years to complete and costs about $42,000 at PIA.

[…]

There are about 220 aviation mechanic schools around the country, according to the FAA. They range from specialized schools like PIA to programs at community colleges, which usually cost less, and at universities.

Data from the U.S. Department of Education puts the cost of attending PIA at well above the mid-point for U.S. certificate-level colleges. But the agency’s College Scorecard also reports that, four years after graduating, PIA’s graduates earn a median of $80,825 — more than twice the wages of other certificate-granting colleges.

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Fewer than half of students at colleges that close continue their educations

Wednesday, July 8th, 2026

More than 440 of the nation’s 1,700 private, nonprofit four-year colleges and universities, or about a quarter of the total, are at risk of closing or having to merge within the next 10 years, according to an estimate by the Huron Consulting Group:

The federal government is promising to streamline the process through which struggling colleges are taken over by healthier competitors, for instance. States are ramping up protections for consumers when campuses close anyway, and there is a proposal to do the same thing at the federal level. Lawsuits are multiplying, brought by students and employees against schools that closed. And institutions are trying to identify new sources of revenue.

Twenty-two states now make private higher education institutions pay into “tuition recovery” funds, typically requiring that a percentage of tuition collected be put aside in state accounts from which students could be compensated if the colleges close. While many of these funds were started to protect students at for-profit schools, nearly half have been extended to nonprofit degree-granting colleges.

[…]

In Massachusetts, where 26 colleges have shut down since 2014 and a 27th has announced that it will close at the end of this year, a state law now requires private colleges and universities to provide financial reports to anyone who wants to see them. Regulators have begun conducting annual reviews to determine and publicly disclose whether institutions are at imminent likelihood of failing.

[…]

Meanwhile, legal firms have started filing lawsuits on behalf of students, faculty and staff of colleges that have already closed, generally accusing them of fraud and breach of contract. Three class-action federal lawsuits have been brought against the University of the Arts in Philadelphia alone, which shut down abruptly in 2024.

[…]

So much attention has begun to be focused on college closures that the Education Department has produced instructions for students about what to do if it happens to them. “Try not to panic,” it advises.

That might be hard, considering that fewer than half of students at colleges that close continue their educations, according to the most comprehensive study of this, by the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association. Many of those who do continue lose credits they’ve already earned and paid for, and fewer than half ultimately earn degrees. The 442 colleges Huron projects to be endangered have a collective enrollment of 670,000 students.

Consumers whose colleges close can at least apply to get their federal loans forgiven through two existing routes: the Borrower Defense to Repayment and the Closed School Discharge programs. But that shifts the debt onto taxpayers, who have already had to cover billions of dollars in loans that will never be repaid.

[…]

Agnes Scott College in Georgia started in June to rent out three historic homes it owns. Sweet Briar College in Virginia sells hydroponic lettuce grown in its greenhouses. The University of California, Davis, has launched a line of products from the olives it cultivates for research. The University of Alaska sells permits to harvest firewood from forests it owns. New Mexico State University has licensed its brand for coffee, whiskey and tequila; Mississippi State University for cigars; and the University of Nevada, Reno, for beef jerky.

Posted in Education, Policy | 2 Comments »

His supposed deal with the devil became a marketing trope

Monday, June 29th, 2026

Inside the Box by David EpsteinBlues music is respected now, but, as David Epstein’s explains (in Inside the Box), it was known in its early days as “the devil’s music.”

Pious families learned that blues shouldn’t be played in the house. [Robert] Johnson learned a different lesson: that competent guitar players could attract whiskey, women, and a little spending cash.

[…]

He was so poor that he had to start on a diddley bow—just a wire nailed to the side of a shack. At fifteen, he upgraded to a real guitar, albeit missing two strings.

[…]

Johnson played across the entire fretboard, using complex patterns and chords more typical of jazz. He used repetitive guitar riffs to add structure to a song, and he managed to emulate boogie-woogie piano players by doing two things at once with his right hand: picking out a steady, rhythmic bass line with his thumb while simultaneously playing elaborate melodies with his other fingers. That’s why Keith Richards, decades later, would think he was hearing two guitars.

[…]

During stops in San Antonio and Dallas in 1936 and 1937, Johnson recorded the only twenty-nine songs he left behind. A famous producer heard a recording and went looking for him. The producer meant to invite him to perform at a venue about as alien as possible to a juke joint: Carnegie Hall. He had trouble reaching Johnson, and before he could extend the invitation, the producer learned that Johnson was dead, the first member of what would become known as the “27 Club” of famous musicians who died at that age.

[…]

Led Zeppelin, The Rolling Stones, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and The Doors all covered his songs. His supposed deal with the devil became a marketing trope.

[…]

Rather than to the crossroads, Johnson had gone back to Hazlehurst, and sought out Zimmerman, a proficient guitarist who was a few years his elder and could teach him how to play. Johnson moved in with Zimmerman and his family in nearby Beauregard, Mississippi. The teacher would take his student to Beauregard Cemetery at midnight, and joked about playing for ghosts, but the real reason was perfectly simple. As Zimmerman’s daughter told a historian in 2007: “He said [he’d go to the cemetery] ’cause he could play better ’cause it was still… real quiet. Real quiet…. And I think when he was carryin’ Robert up there it was so Robert could really concentrate on his guitar…. He was determined not to let him fail.” And why midnight? “I think because it was quiet and nobody around to walk and interfere.” Her father and Johnson would sit on two of the tombstones and carry on their lessons. Johnson’s progress, which seemed so magical that it engendered the most renowned ghost story in music, was the result of something more like the approach Isabel Allende employed to produce forty years of bestsellers.

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But most people don’t use the Internet for spiritual enrichment

Monday, June 8th, 2026

Case Against Education by Bryan CaplanIn Latin, Bryan Caplan notes (in The Case Against Education), “alma mater” means “nourishing mother”:

A rich metaphor. A nourishing mother doesn’t merely teach you practical skills or help you land a well-paid job. She nurtures your whole person, teaches you right from wrong, and shows you the magic of life.

[…]

I sincerely take the humanist critique to heart. For all my iconoclasm, I love ideas and culture. “Impractical” ideas and “uncommercial” culture are my life.

[…]

Old-school humanists nevertheless overstate their case. Education definitely can be good for the soul. But that hardly shows actually existing education achieves this noble end. In practice, education often turns out to be a neglectful or abusive mother rather than a nourishing one.

[…]

Modern education’s staunchest fans don’t nourish their souls by watching YouTube videos of average teachers. No one does.

[…]

Once everyone can enrich their souls for free, government subsidies for enrichment forfeit their rationale. To object, “But most people don’t use the Internet for spiritual enrichment” is actually a damaging admission that eager students are few and far between. Subsidized education’s real aim isn’t to make ideas and culture accessible to anyone who’s interested, but to make them mandatory for everyone who isn’t interested.

[…]

Today’s adults are the product of over a decade of mandatory exposure to abstract ideas and high culture. If educational force-feeding worked well, most educated adults would adore these nerdy realms—and eagerly tap the Internet to revisit them. To understate, they rarely do. “Kim Kardashian” gets about twenty times as many Google hits as “Richard Wagner” and about two hundred times as many as “David Hume.”

[…]

First: the humanist case for education subsidies is flimsy today because the Internet makes enlightenment practically free. Second: the humanist case for education subsidies was flimsy all along because the Internet proves low consumption of ideas and culture stems from apathy, not poverty or inconvenience. Behold: when the price of enlightenment drops to zero, enlightenment remains embarrassingly scarce.

[…]

Education can’t be responsible for more than 100% of the high culture our society consumes.

Let’s start with books. Consumer demand is shockingly low overall: Americans spend 0.2% of their income on all reading materials, barely more than $100 per family per year. Americans used to spend more on reading but never spent much: back in 1990, well before the rise of the web, reading absorbed 0.5% of the family budget. Today’s Americans spend about four times as much on tobacco and five times as much on alcohol as they do on reading. Within this small pond, high culture is no big fish.

[…]

By and large, literature teachers fail to “get through” to their captive audiences: they rarely spark love of reading, much less love of the genres they urge their students to admire.

In music, pop culture’s victory over high culture is even more decisive. The Three Tenors in Concert is the best-selling classical album ever. With twelve million copies sold, it does not even break into the top fifty albums of all time. Looking at overall sales, classical music is only 1.4% of the U.S. music market. Country is eight times as popular, and rock/ pop over thirty times as popular.

[…]

Even if American schools cause all U.S. consumption of classical music, their combined efforts boost its market share only from 0% to 1.4%.

[…]

Anyone reading this book is probably a bird of a different feather. You may even remember the names of the teachers who opened your eyes to the finer things in life. I owe my love of classical music to Mr. Zainer (General Music, seventh grade), and my love of literature to Mrs. Ragus (Honors English, eleventh grade). A quick look at the basic facts, however, shows our experiences are abnormal. The vast majority of our classmates emerge from years of cultural force-feeding with their aesthetic palates unchanged.

Posted in Economics, Education, Policy | No Comments »

Making kids study irrelevant material for a decade-plus is timelessly dysfunctional

Saturday, June 6th, 2026

Case Against Education by Bryan CaplanIn backward nations, youths work, Bryan Caplan notes (in The Case Against Education), while in advanced nations, youths study:

As civilization advances, the young spend ever more years sequestered from paid employment. The modern fear is that work might interfere with school, never that school might interfere with work. These rules are so ingrained they seem like laws of nature.

The logic is elusive. As society evolves, teaching the young different occupations is common sense. Teaching them no occupations and hoping they adapt to the job market after graduation is not. It doesn’t matter how futuristic our society becomes. Making kids study irrelevant material for a decade-plus is timelessly dysfunctional.

[…]

Sticking with the classic curriculum instead of trying to forecast the job market is looking for your keys under the streetlight because it’s brighter there. Sure, teach the genuinely general skills: reading, writing, math. But otherwise, schools should make educated guesses about future career opportunities, measure students’ aptitudes, then expose them to plausible occupations.

[…]

Visualize a world where 16-year-olds have real job skills and earn enough to provide for themselves. Visualize a world where academically uninclined preteens look up to apprentices instead of delinquents. Visualize a world where students find their lessons either practical or interesting.

[…]

Instead of fearing a dystopian future, we should gawk at our dystopian present. In modern societies, achievement-oriented kids spend almost two decades in school. Most find the curriculum dreadfully dull. During this drawn-out ordeal, students are either poor or financially dependent on their parents. When they finally join the “real world,” graduates apply only a sliver of what they studied.

Posted in Economics, Education, Policy | 1 Comment »

Most academic classes amount to vocational training for ultrarare vocations

Thursday, June 4th, 2026

Case Against Education by Bryan Caplan The objection that the vocational track teaches students specific skills they need for their first job, while the academic track teaches students general skills they need for every job, is confused, Bryan Caplan argues (in The Case Against Education):

While literacy and numeracy are genuinely general skills, most academic classes amount to vocational training for ultrarare vocations.

[…]

“Traditionalists” want to train everyone for long-shot, prestigious careers like author, historian, political scientist, translator, physicist, and mathematician. So-called vocationalists want to train students for careers they’re likely to enter. The traditional route is painless for educators: teach your students whatever your teachers taught you. The vocational route is painful for educators: to follow it, we must keep tabs on student aptitudes and the job market.

[…]

What’s the point of prepping students for the economy of 2015, when they’ll be employed in the economy of 2025 or 2050? Fair enough, but this is no argument for old-school academics. Ignorance of the future is no excuse for preparing students for occupations they almost surely won’t have. And if we know anything about the future of work, we know that demand for authors, historians, political scientists, translators, physicists, and mathematicians will stay low.

The crowd-pleasing objection to vocationalism, though, is not epistemic, but egalitarian. Placing everyone on the academic track seems more equal than sorting children by “aptitude” and assigning them to “suitable” training. You could say equality is already an illusion; despite the fiction of college prep for all, colleges count only honors and A.P. as the genuine article.

[…]

Keeping bored, resentful kids on the academic track backfires. Instead of “downshifting” to vocational training, they settle for unskilled labor—or worse. Remember: about 20% of Americans never earn a standard high school diploma.

[…]

Historically, teachers trained students for three specific professions: the clergy, law, and medicine. The modern curriculum is more versatile but has changed far less than educators like to think. Today’s schools prepare students for careers as authors, poets, mathematicians, scientists, artists, musicians, historians, translators, and professional athletes. Yet the fraction of students who enter these occupations is trivial. Contrary to popular proeducation rhetoric, schools devote little time to “general skills.” Instead, students spend their days training for jobs few want and even fewer get.

Posted in Economics, Education, Policy | 1 Comment »

School is not vocational education’s only venue

Tuesday, June 2nd, 2026

Case Against Education by Bryan CaplanSchool is not vocational education’s only venue, Bryan Caplan points out (in The Case Against Education):

If learning job skills in the school is good, wouldn’t learning job skills on the job be better? Unfortunately, we have an innocuous yet infamous label for kids learning job skills on the job: “child labor.”

Civilized adults recoil at the name. Children with joy in their hearts don’t belong in gray workshops, toiling all day long, cogs in the machine. They’re kids, not robots! Well, unless the gray workshop is called a “school” and the cogs earn zero wages.

[…]

Federal regulations do more than exclude minors from dangerous jobs. Outside of family businesses, farming, newspaper delivery, and performing arts, work for kids under 14 is all but prohibited. U.S. federal law caps 14-and 15-year-olds’ work at three hours a day on school days and eighteen hours a week on school weeks. Plenty of states have stricter regulations. Under California law, 16-and 17-year-olds may not work without school permission or more than four hours on a school day.

When children languish in school, adults rush to rationalize. Making kids sit at desks doing boring busywork may seem cruel, but their pain trains them for the future. Why then is child labor so reviled? Toil may not be fun, but it too trains kids for their future.

[…]

The silliest objection is that businesses “exploit” our children, handing them a pittance for their toil. No one expects schools to pay their students; the training kids receive is payment enough. Why hold firms to a higher standard? College students ferociously compete for unpaid internships because training is valuable compensation—and total compensation, not cash alone, is what counts.

[…]

When researchers compare working students to comparable nonworking students, work has a clear upside and no clear downside. Early job experience has durable dividends, boosting postgraduation earnings by 5, 10, or even 20% for at least a decade.

[…]

Since the minimum wage doesn’t vary by age or experience, we shouldn’t worry that youths will be “exploited.” We should worry that youths—especially Poor Students—won’t be hired at all. Under current law, untrained workers must produce the cost of their training plus $7.25 an hour to be profitably employed. Quite a catch-22, especially for slow learners: you need training to become a productive worker, but firms won’t train you unless you already are a productive worker.

[…]

Unpaid internships survive because authorities hypocritically fail to enforce the letter of the law. As long as interns are college students or recent college grads learning a college-like job, government turns a blind eye. If McDonald’s hired unpaid trainees, prosecution would be swift. Unlike orthodox observers, I hasten to add, I say we need more hypocrisy. Instead of ending the unofficial exemption for college interns, we should grant it to everyone.

What else should policy makers do? Deregulate and destigmatize child labor. Early jobs are good for kids and good for society. Parental oversight isn’t a perfect way to root out abuses, but we rely on it in virtually every other sphere of life. Parents can make their kids devote their childhoods to sports and music—no matter how much they hate playing. Parents can sign their kids up for mountain climbing. Parents can take their kids to dangerous countries. Holding nonfamilial employment to stricter standards than mountain climbing is senseless.

[…]

What about setting up a formal apprenticeship system? The best regimes are jewels, but they’re notoriously difficult to emulate. Most countries can’t be Germany.

[…]

Before using taxpayer dollars to jumpstart apprenticeships, government should get out of the way and take stock of all the opportunities the labor market provides.

Posted in Economics, Education, Policy | 2 Comments »

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