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A Conservative Definition of Diversity
Conservatives have always believed in diversity. It is enforcing diversity and restricting diversity to racial diversity that conservatives object to. Some intellectual diversity on campus would be really great
Are conservatives against the campus diversity administrative machine or are they opposed to diversity itself?
The argument in favor of the former seems like an easy one. Ever since debates over affirmative action heated up in the ‘60s and ‘70s, conservative groups and publications—this Center included—have marshalled an impressive array of data, stories, and philosophical arguments in favor of merit-based acceptance of students into college and against what seems like artificial boosterism that leads to unintended and negative consequences—even for the beneficiaries of affirmative action themselves.
However, there is a great difference between elite conservatives and the rightwing “man on the street.” The fact that Turning Point USA, one of the most popular conservative student groups, repeatedly gets caught in scandals involving support for white supremacy and open and covert bigotry toward their fellow citizens means that too many young conservatives hear conservative leaders rallying against the liberal conception of “diversity” and think they mean diversity as such.
It’s more than odd or embarrassing that this is the case—it’s tragic. Ever since the rise of modernity in the form of the French Revolution, conservative thinkers of all stripes and across the globe argued fiercely for the diversity and variety of human life against the pulverizing flattening of modernity and of progressive thinking.
Edmund Burke famously railed against the French destruction of its local traditions and regional identities in favor of mathematical départements. British conservatives fought for local variety in their country in the nineteenth century against the utilitarians seeking to flatten everything based on mathematical formulas. America’s own conservative movement in the ‘50s arose against the crushing political conformity of that era. All throughout, conservatives everywhere celebrated or at least tolerated a degree of human variety as a bulwark against uniformity and as an expression of human wonder and growth.
One would think, then, that the now-dominant liberal idea of diversity, while not necessarily aligning with conservative views, would be a welcome sight and a matter of negotiation between the two sides rather than an all-out war.
We may not agree with the Millian approach arguing for constant disruptive social experiments or the Marxian obsession with power relations among groups one can see nowadays, but that is a matter of the practice and parameters, not the overall principle.
So why is this not the case? Why do conservatives not actively celebrate diversity and variety in a way that aligns with their own principles?
There is of course the sad and tragic reality that some on “our side” oppose diversity measures because they oppose diversity, period. This includes a belief that being “too open” to people around the world could result in America’s losing its identity and Republican unease at other kinds of diversity in American life. The questions of how many diversity opponents exist, and how influential are they, does not erase their reality and presence. Dealing with them is unpleasant, but necessary.
Another reason is the nostalgia throughout the United States for the same conformist and non-diverse era of the ‘50s, for various reasons (conservatives due to the relative social stability and prosperity, liberals due to the power of unions and other groups). Arguing in favor of diversity seems like an argument for chaos against the backdrop of a longing for a “simpler time,” even if many conservatives themselves found that time quite stifling.
Even if we set aside those issues, conservatives would see very little in common between their idea of diversity and variety and the liberal conception.
The conservative idea of diversity is not as easy to define as the liberal one; the latter is based on an easily applicable formula of groups broken down by race, gender, and class. The liberal approach is also often laser-focused on just a few issues concerning those groups—fairness, justice, equality, power relations.
Important as those issues are, they are not all that man is. And traditional conservatives are interested in variety not (only) as a means to correct previous injustices but because they see wisdom and value in the existence and interplay of different human groups from different times, places, and origins as such. Sometimes the differences can be understood and explained—such as differences in religion or language—and sometimes they are more instinctive, such as habits or superstitions.
A liberal will be interested in a black man or woman on account of their race and past mistreatment. They will often discuss this in depth. A conservative will go further—what local culture do they hail from? What interests do they have? What do we share in common and what not? What interest do they have in the great ideas formed by great but flawed men of the west or east? A conservative who values diversity would seek to understand the individual before him—not discounting immutable parts of their person, but not considering them the whole story, either.
The result of the liberal view of diversity is ironically quite homogenizing—all black and brown Americans are a hivemind, all gay men and women have (or should have) the same values, working-class people all have the same interests, and so on. Even when more subgroups of diversity are created within liberal-approved groups, they tend to be no less uniform. The old centralizing instinct of modernity, with its exact formulas and rigid boundaries, is very much in force.
What is true of groups across America is true of localities too. Conservatives the world over placed and place a strong emphasis on the importance of local variety and tradition—whether it be the small towns of the past, the ethnic communities in cities of the present, or whatever forms it may take in the future.
For the conservative supporter of diversity, “Let New York be New York and let the Midwest be the Midwest” is not just a slogan, but a real principle.
All this very much applies to universities and colleges. Especially in our time, when higher education is the lot of the average American rather than an exclusive place for the rich and privileged one (in the original sense), conservative supporters of diversity would celebrate the emergence of a whole range of approaches to teaching and learning of the human condition to fit the spectrum of Americans. The Ivy Leagues could teach one way, local colleges and universities another (or others). Much like we encourage variety in elementary and secondary education through school choice, we should do so in colleges—as William Buckley himself recommended in God and Man at Yale.
As a whole, liberals operate in the other direction. The national and liberal-dominated media either crushes or supplants local outlets. The liberal-dominated Ivy League often dictates agendas and gets most of the attention of elites at the expense of many fine schools elsewhere. Student groups get attention in direct proportion to their service to a very exacting and increasingly radical and rigid agenda. Anyone who doesn’t march to the tune gets marginalized or ignored.
Conservatives have a real opportunity here to pick up the slack and promote a vision of diversity within colleges which is more robust and less claustrophobic. They can cultivate friendly colleges and universities as healthy breeding grounds for their kind of thinking instead of constantly trying to beg for scraps from liberal-dominated institutions.
Conservative groups can seek out those minority students and student groups (and many exist throughout America’s campuses) who seek many of the same things conservatives care about—not just free markets and limited government, but virtue, tradition, and human enrichment, as well as the building or rebuilding of forgotten communities and associations. Rather than view Americans who are different as ipso facto hostile, a conservatism friendly to diversity would seek out and learn from the full richness of American life for its own purposes, in ways it does and does not understand.
Conservatives have a choice to make: Do they wish to be a group that appeals solely to one very specific group of Americans against everyone else, as the left often claims, or do they wish to show liberals and America as a whole that, when it comes to diversity, conservatives prize it no less and perhaps more than their opponents?
The answer starts on the great meeting ground of budding and curious human minds—the college campus.
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The Majors that Pay and the Degrees that Don’t for Graduates
The College Scorecard, a Department of Education initiative that publishes data on student debt and earnings after graduation for thousands of schools, just got a major update. Previously, the Scorecard’s major shortcoming was that it only reported data at the institution level—so we could see how much a typical graduate from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill earns, but not how much an engineering major earns relative to an education major.
Since the payoff of a college education varies wildly by field of study, the usefulness of this dataset to students was limited.
No longer. Last Wednesday, the Department unveiled a new edition of the Scorecard which allows prospective students to view these outcomes data by both institution and program. The updated Scorecard publishes a dashboard geared toward prospective students, as well as comprehensive files to help researchers and journalists analyze the data en masse. The data includes median student debt and median earnings after graduation for some 41,000 programs.
While the data have limitations—debt and earnings figures are suppressed for small programs due to privacy concerns, and the earnings data only reflects the first year of student income after graduation—the new Scorecard will do much to advance our knowledge of student debt and earnings across tens of thousands of educational programs.
For instance, in the average bachelor’s degree program, students leave school with a debt burden equal to about 80 percent of their salary in the first year after graduating college.
The debt burden for master’s degree programs is about 86 percent of earnings. But for first-professional degrees such as law and medicine, median debt is much worse: it is equal to about 257 percent of earnings after graduation.
Undergraduate Majors Have Different Earnings, But Similar Debt
Most undergraduates can expect to earn more than they owe after leaving school. Partially, this situation is thanks to the federal government capping its loans to undergraduates; a dependent student pursuing a bachelor’s degree can borrow no more than $31,000. For this reason, median student debt varies little across undergraduate programs. At UNC-Chapel Hill, for instance, the median student in almost all majors with data available has a debt burden below $20,000, and no major incurs debt above $23,000.
But debt-to-earnings ratios vary substantially across college majors because the median earnings by major are so different.
At UNC-Chapel Hill, the median graduate in computer science earns $71,000 after graduation, easily enough to repay a median loan balance of $14,691. At the other end of the spectrum, the median student who majors in one of the Romance languages earns just $19,800 after graduation. His outstanding debt of $16,558 is almost equal to his starting salary.
For students worried about their ability to pay back their loans, it is difficult to overstate the importance of choosing a major. At UNC-Chapel Hill, debt-to-earnings ratios vary from an easily manageable 21 percent in computer science to 84 percent in the Romance languages.
For those students without the technological chops to major in computer science, other majors still yield a respectable first-year salary relative to the debt incurred. These include economics (with a debt-to-earnings ratio of 30 percent), human resources management (37 percent), nursing (39 percent), and even political science (48 percent).
For Many Graduate Programs, Earnings Don’t Justify Cost
The story becomes more complicated at the graduate level, where there is no cap on federal student loans. Students can borrow up to the cost of attendance, as defined by the institution, which effectively means that federal loans to graduate students are unlimited. Such lax lending standards—coupled with income-based repayment programs that promise generous student loan forgiveness for high-balance borrowers—have caused some truly eye-popping prices for certain graduate programs.
Credentials such as law and medicine incur extremely high debt-to-earnings ratios; the average ratio for these degrees is 257 percent. In other words, the median doctor or lawyer has student debt equal to over two and a half times his starting salary. Medical residencies probably account for low earnings relative to debt burdens for newly minted doctors, but it’s harder to explain away such high debt-to-earnings ratios for law graduates.
A handful of law schools (mostly elite ones such as Harvard and Penn) have debt-to-earnings ratios below 100 percent. But most lawyers owe far more in student debt than they earn in the first year after graduating law school.
Graduates of some law programs, such as American University, Howard University, and a number of for-profit schools, owe three or more times what they earn. While it’s possible that their earnings will go up in future years, the first-year statistics don’t look pretty.
Even at the master’s level, debt-to-earnings ratios can be extremely high. As for undergraduates, field of study matters enormously.
For instance, the 30 master’s degree programs in general computer and information sciences in the Scorecard dataset have a median debt-to-earnings ratio of 49 percent. Those programs all have a respectable payoff: No master’s degree in computer and information sciences has median earnings below $50,000, and the most lucrative (the University of California-Los Angeles) returns median earnings of $122,000.
Contrast computer and information sciences with one of the worst master’s degrees for graduate earnings: film and photographic arts. Even the best master’s program in film yields median earnings of just $36,000. What’s more, there is little correlation between an institution’s brand name and the earning power of its film degrees. Even at the Ivy League’s Columbia University, median earnings for the master’s in film are just $25,400.
But the true scandal for master’s degrees in film is the debt that students take on. Every single film program in the Scorecard has a debt-to-earnings ratio of 150 percent or higher.
At New York City’s esteemed private universities, Columbia University and New York University, the median film student takes on over $150,000 in federal student loans. At Columbia, the debt-to-earnings ratio for the master’s degree in film is—and this is not a typo—690 percent. In other words, students graduating in that program can expect to owe nearly seven times what they earn in the first year after graduation.
What Happens Next?
Such egregious debt-to-earnings ratios ought to convince Congress that it’s time to place some commonsense caps on federal loans to graduate students. There is truly no excuse for taxpayers to continue to finance programs that cost so much, with such an abysmal earnings payoff.
While it’s wrong for the government to allow students to take on such astronomical debt burdens, taxpayers are also likely to take a hit, since the promise of loan forgiveness for high-balance borrowers will fall on the federal government’s shoulders.
Barring Congressional action, the release of the new Scorecard data will also allow the fourth branch of government to do its job. Journalists and policy analysts can use the data to “name and shame” programs with outrageous debt-to-earnings ratios, such as the master’s in film at Columbia.
A recent study found that the 2017 release of program-level data on for-profit colleges drove institutions to close hundreds of poorly performing programs. Perhaps now that the Department has aired nonprofit institutions’ dirty laundry, the embarrassment will lead some schools to scuttle their lowest-return degrees.
If nothing else, that will validate the countless hours the Department has invested in developing the updated Scorecard dataset. Transparency is a powerful tool to discipline the higher education marketplace and improve outcomes for students and taxpayers, so it’s heartening to see the Department deploy it. Let’s hope various stakeholders—students, institutions, journalists, and policymakers—will take advantage of this new information.
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Expert: 'I’m not so sure that I trust government' on student loans
Department of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos turned heads this week by suggesting that the $1.5 trillion federal student loan portfolio should be managed by a new federal agency.
Although this seems like a potential solution to the serious pushback for the large number of outstanding student loans, one expert argued that this isn’t the way to do it.
DeVos is “looking at it and saying this is a no-win situation for [her] department,” Geltrude & Company Founder Daniel Geltrude told Yahoo Finance’s On The Move. “So the best way for [her] to handle is to push it somewhere else. Now, that could be the right answer if they have the ability to do a better job, but I'm not so sure that I trust government to really be able to get this situation under control.”
Geltrude, who calls himself America’s Accountant, added: “I would actually like to see this become privatized and have a little bit more oversight.”
An ‘untamed beast’
Speaking earlier this week at a conference in Reno, Nevada, hosted by the department’s Federal Student Aid (FSA) — which manages the vast majority of outstanding student loans — DeVos laid out her argument to spin off that office into a new agency.
“Since the federal government inserted itself everywhere in student lending, everything has become more cumbersome and more confusing for everyone,” Devos said. “Congress might've created the first financial aid program, but it set in motion an untamed beast.”
To make the FSA provide better services for borrowers, and to act “like a world-class financial firm” since it is effectively “the country’s biggest consumer lender” because of its trillion-dollar portfolio, DeVos suggested making the FSA “a standalone government corporation, run by a professional, expert, and apolitical Board of Governors.”
“Congress never set up the U.S. Department of Education to be a bank, nor did it define the Secretary of Education as the nation's ‘top banker’,” she added. “But that's effectively what Congress expects based on its policies.”
DeVos’ underlying belief — that the FSA requires serious reform — was echoed earlier this year by A. Wayne Johnson, who resigned as COO of the organization. Johnson told Yahoo Finance that the system in place today is “an abomination that’s in plain sight.”
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