The freshmen are arriving at elite universities this weekend. Four years from now, they’ll come out ready to do “community organizing” for Ayatollah Mamdani’s Senate campaign. Given that students don’t listen to professors, how is it possible that four years at a university is a reliable path toward becoming what Americans call a “socialist” (nothing like the Soviet Socialism in which every able-bodied adult had to work, of course!)? The Wall Street Journal carries a brilliant explanation of the mechanism, which does not require any student to learn anything from any professor, by a teacher at a liberal arts college in Pennsylvania, Kimberlee Josephson (not in quote style for readability):
When your first brush with adulthood involves endless consumption and no cost, it gives you the wrong idea of how the world works.
Universities operate as a closed economy: centrally administered, collectively resourced, carefully controlled by administrators who hope their plans aid retention efforts.
Over the past several decades, the college campus has morphed into a comprehensive residential and lifestyle provider. Beginning in the 1990s, when colleges started competing more aggressively for larger enrollment numbers, investing in student life became a way to recruit students. Expanded student unions, more-comfortable residence halls, larger recreation centers, campus programming offices and improved dining choices became the norm.
By the early 2000s, colleges faced an “amenities arms race.” Rec centers were revamped with climbing walls and lazy rivers; dorms gave way to apartment lofts with expansive lounges; campus coffee bars were established with national brands.
At elite institutions, students enter a nearly self-contained community. They ride campus buses without paying a fare. They enter expansive recreation centers without a membership card. They attend concerts, meet career coaches, reserve study rooms, download software, join student organizations, and participate in countless campus activities without ever reaching for a wallet.
If transportation is universally available without fares on campus, it may seem natural to ask why urban transportation doesn’t function similarly. If counseling services and mindfulness programs are readily available in college, paid time off for mental health may seem like a reasonable expectation in the workplace. If fitness centers, technology services, entertainment options and countless other amenities appear to operate without cost, comprehensive public provision elsewhere may seem practical.
A cohort raised on all-you-can-eat meal plans, campus shuttles and bundled student services may be evaluating public policy through the only economic model they have ever personally experienced.
Given these arrangements, is it any wonder that many graduates experience sticker shock on entering adult life? Grocery bills, utility payments, security deposits, transportation, internet service, gym memberships and countless other expenses suddenly become explicit rather than bundled. What many describe as an “affordability crisis” may partly reflect the shock of moving from a bundled institutional economy for which someone else usually pays to an unbundled market economy in which one has to earn his own keep.
… we should spend less time scrutinizing classroom lectures and more time examining the economic environment students inhabit every day. The most influential economics lesson many students receive may come from the institutional design of the university. Before blaming the professors, consider the campus.
A reasonable take-away, in other words, from four years at a high-end college or university is that government-run everything works great so long as chumps can be found to pay all of the bills (parents in the college case; “the rich” in the overall U.S. society case).
Note that students also get seemingly “free” stuff beyond their immediate campus. At the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, for example, a long list of schools give the MFA money (from the students’ parents) so that when students show up they’re not confronted with the $30 price that most visitors see ($0 for SNAP/EBT card holders!). Don’t need to show ID to vote in Maskachusetts, of course, but everyone can agree that “presenting a valid ID on the day of their visit” is a reasonable demand for entering the museum at a $0 cost.
Fun fact for pilots: Prof. Josephson previously taught at Lycoming College! (The ultimate resume would include Lycoming College and Continental Florida University!)
The reality of commie housing, the kind where everyone works:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khrushchevka#/media/File:%D0%98%D0%BD%D1%82%D0%B5%D1%80%D1%8C%D0%B5%D1%80_1-438.png
Next is where I lived as a freshman in the 1980s. Hasn’t really changed much, cinderblock walls, tiny rooms, fancier locks. Used to have one payphone per floor for calls home. A new lounge and kitchen, wow. Girls are mid, one would be kinda cute with beer goggles. I hope I don’t have nightmares tonight after seeing this.
Of course, the “left washing” isn’t new. I think the Ivy League back then was a pilot project for today’s universities. They used to call me Alex P. Keaton because of my conservative, Republican views — so I wasn’t swayed into being a commie or a male feminazi. (They also called me Keith Partridge, because of my hair parted in the middle — and rock-star looks, joking.) It wasn’t too difficult to get an A in a non-STEM class, I just had to fake caring about my fellow man, er person in a believable way.
Most of the girl students (the ones in the video do seem a little sweeter) were left-leaning feminists, so finding one who wasn’t batshit crazy was difficult. A lot of early LGBTASDF+ pride too. I don’t know if I really agree with the thesis that the new amenities in colleges are socialist training, probably moreso “keeping up with the Jones’ University”. It really was the social environment and the faculty that pushed the “Progressive” agenda. The last college library I was in had a whole display on Queer Pride in 2016, in Laramie, Wyoming of all places.
Phil, so great to see you highlighting the Greatness of the Soviet Union, which as you note was built by Socialism into the Greatest Economic Machine that has ever existed: just look the economic statistics from 1988 to show how hard all the “able-bodied adults” were working (lower #s are of course “better”):
Soviet Union: ~$2,700.
U.S.: ~$21,400.
And Soviet Supermarkets preceded Whole Foods by decades with the Great Abundance and Plethora of Gourmet Foods of all types to provide all that Abundance to the highly paid customers!