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Did You Know? Repaying Student Loans Isn’t Onerous for Most Graduates
College students have taken on so much debt that many political leaders are declaring a “student debt crisis.” Certainly, many former students are facing a crisis as they struggle to pay back their loans several years after graduation. Even graduates from low-earning fields of study, however, see their salaries improve to the point where their debt-to-income ratio isn’t onerous. Though what field of study students choose can determine their post-graduation salaries, the important thing for students is to make sure they finish college with a degree.
One rule of thumb for students who need a loan is not to borrow more than they expect to make in the first year after graduating. On average, earning a college degree pays off in the long term, but a graduate’s field of study can mean dramatic differences in earnings.
The difference between first-year earnings and fifth-year earnings also matters. Median earnings typically increase by 65 percent over that period. Some majors yield relatively low salaries in the first year after graduation (such as fine arts, nutrition and sports, and therapy professions), requiring students to put aside more of their paycheck to repay student loans. However, six years after graduation, even students who studied low-paying majors such as ethnic and civilization studies typically experience enough of a salary increase that, on average, their loan repayment falls from 25 percent of their income to only 8 percent.
It’s important to remember, too, that students who drop out of college and don’t earn a degree still must repay their student loans. For those drop outs, repaying the debt is more difficult.
Of course, some majors can mean a high salary right away, and for students in those fields (such as engineering, computer science, and finance), taking out large student loans will likely prove to be a worthwhile investment. But for others, it is important to take a good look at not only projected first-year earnings, but how these earnings grow.
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Don’t Write Off the Power of a Few Intimidating Undergraduates
A vocal, tyrannical minority of students can easily threaten or damage the careers of professors with whom it disagrees.
While most undergraduates want to be exposed to a variety of viewpoints, it only takes a small number of vocal, well-connected students to meaningfully threaten a professor’s reputation and career. Thanks to the power of social media — and progressive college administrators who act as campus thought police — small numbers of outraged or even uncomfortable students can create tyranny on a campus. Many professors, most notably those who are conservative, are well aware of this threat and very deliberately conceal their ideological views to avoid it.
Regrettably, this point was ignored by the piece Heterodox Academy managing editor Musa al-Gharbi recently published in National Review, “Ideological Discrimination in Academia Is More Complicated than You Think,” which argued that faculty feel generally less threatened by the opinions of undergraduates than by those of Ph.D. students and other faculty members.
Al-Gharbi was absolutely correct in noting the transient nature of undergraduate students vis-à-vis embedded graduate students and faculty peers. He was also right to point out that many professors do not want to stand in the way of student success and are reluctant to fight with students, as they see “differences in perspectives as products of students’ relative youth, inexperience, ignorance, or unexamined beliefs.”
Unfortunately, al-Gharbi’s piece neglected to consider that in today’s collegiate “cancel culture,” a handful of engaged students can organize with administrators and disseminate attacks on heterodox faculty, jumpstarting mobs of protesters, in a matter of minutes. Even when most students want open discourse and are frustrated by such mobs, tyranny of the minority is still allowed to win out in too many cases, as I found out the hard way earlier this year. While students are generally not on tenure committees or the various professional review boards, a professor’s faculty peers can become easily alerted to his bias and do his career real harm.
The empirical evidence backs this up: I recently ran a nationally representative survey of 900 faculty members, and the data reveal that a considerable number of conservative professors still regularly censor themselves in front of students.
In the survey, I asked if faculty had ever felt intimidated in class by a student’s strong political views. In aggregate, just 18 percent said they had, compared with 67 percent who said they hadn’t. But once ideology is considered, the numbers look appreciably different. Among liberal and moderate professors, fairly small numbers — 16 percent and 18 percent respectively — claimed to have felt intimidated by students’ political leanings. But that figure jumped to 24 percent among conservative professors. Professors with tenure appeared to be generally less intimidated, but here again there was a significant gap between those who are conservative and those who are liberal. On the left, 21 percent of untenured professors and 16 percent of tenured professors said they’d been frightened by a student’s politics in class. On the right, those numbers jumped to 44 and 31 percent, respectively.
Going further, I asked respondents if they had ever seen a faculty colleague belittled due to his or her heterodox views. The responses were not particularly comforting. While 59 percent said that they had never had such an experience, 16 percent said they had, and 25 percent said they were unsure if they had. When broken down by ideology, the numbers are even more unsettling. Twenty-five percent of conservative respondents reported being aware of cases where unpopular views were disparaged, compared with just 12 percent of liberal respondents.
This is not to say that faculty are not worried about ideological discrimination from their colleagues, as opposed to students; they absolutely are. Almost half of conservative professors in my national sample report being afraid to express their political beliefs to their colleagues for fear of negative consequences, compared with just under a quarter of liberal faculty members. And 40 percent of conservative respondents believed that their colleagues would discriminate against them based on their political views, compared with just 19 percent of liberal respondents. While 40 percent is not a majority, any form of ideological discrimination in the academy is unacceptable.
In short, faculty are dealing with ideological threats from all sides: their peers, administrators, and students. Viewpoint diversity lies at the heart of higher education and should be protected, but to safeguard faculty accordingly, those who work in and care about higher education must accept that undergraduate complaints can have a very real impact on a professor’s career and approach to teaching. It is critical that the power of student intimidation not be overlooked.
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Intellectual Gerrymandering: ‘E Unum Pluribus’ on Campus
About two-thirds of the way through (page 373 specifically) his magisterial assessment of contemporary life and its foundations, The Conservative Sensibility, George Will drops a great bon mot deserving special note: “intellectual gerrymandering.” Will speaks about the highly successful efforts of various groups to significantly alter academic curricula and campus life by creating allegedly new fields of study, part of infusing identity politics into the academy. It is the belief that people should be identified and rewarded not by their individual traits such as their academic performance, intelligence, honesty, diligence, virtue, etc., but rather by some group to which they are assumed to be part of: a race, a gender, an ethnicity, etc.
The Great Seal of the United States features the motto “E Pluribus Unum”—out of many, one. Our nation is a melting pot of immigrants from throughout the world who assimilated and became members of one glorious tribe—the Americans. Contrast that to college campuses. The motto there perhaps should be E Unum Pluribus—Out of One, Many. Within university communities, identity consciousnesses often reigns, and people are identified by their race, their gender, their sexual orientation, and so forth. Most large campuses have women’s or gender studies programs, centers for LGBTQ issues, black studies majors, etc. Colleges even sometimes have separate graduation ceremonies for African-Americans and Hispanics, space reserved exclusively for nonheterosexual individuals, and so forth. In his great new book The Assault on American Excellence, former Yale Law School dean Anthony Kronman points out Yale has over 60 full-time staff playing some “pro-diversity role”—about one for every 200 students.
Much of this is unfortunate in my judgment. People are increasingly identified by things mostly beyond their control, such as their skin color. Merit and individual accomplishment are downplayed, group identity emphasized. This is precisely the opposite of the “E Pluribus Unum” policies that have made America large, rich, and great partly because of generally high tolerance of physical differences between persons. How should things change? Perhaps schools should have Principles of Free Expression and Tolerance declaring that “we accept and welcome persons into our learning community regardless of race, gender, sexual or political orientation, or religious views. The prime qualities for admission to our community are potential for academic excellence as measured by the absorption, dissemination and creation of knowledge and creative endeavors, combined with honesty, integrity, a strong work ethic, capacity for leadership, and tolerance of others.” We are not into classifying people by biological group characteristics, but care a lot about academic excellence and personal integrity.
My experience generally has been that a lot of rent-seeking goes into ostensibly highly principled attempts to make the school more “inclusive” by creating new special interest centers focusing on group characteristics. Often people promoting new centers end up working there, maintaining the joys of college life while getting nicely paid with job security. My bigger problem is that these centers are too often not genuine places of intellectual inquiry, but rather ideologically based advocacy groups doing little to expand the frontiers of knowledge.
That said, there are legitimate academic interests in studying specific cohorts of the population. I teach American and European economic history—region-specific topics—and think the study of Asian, African or Latin American economic history is also appropriate, as is the study of English, Chinese or Nigerian literature, or even the broader study of Western civilization. We can study people of differing groupings—even “History of the Jews,” or “the origins of Islam.” We can study differences in peoples and maybe even gain insights from them.
But the new forms of intellectual gerrymandering seem far more ideologically based, not a dispassionate evaluation of a core body of knowledge but an exultation of peoples based on group characteristics. Universities spend too much effort trying to be sure decision making is “inclusive”—defined as representing different group characteristics—rather than getting the best and brightest persons to do jobs independent of skin color, religion, ethnicity, sexual preference, etc. The downplaying of an appreciation of individual human accomplishment is lamentable.
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